Got my results back

Hi berrylover,

Sorry to hear about your diagnosis but you are amongst friends here and we will help as much as we can.
Your health professionals are quite right to try and treat your diabetes with diet first - this can make an enormous difference very quickly, but it does rely very heavily on the correct dietary advice. Can you tell us what your diet sheet actually says?
I hope you feel better very soon.

All the best,

fergus

Hi again berrylover,

I suspected the advice might be along those lines. It's a lot to take in at first, but if you take a look around the forum you'll see a strong consensus among longstanding diabetics that this sort of advice is not only mistaken, it's bordering on medical negligence.
Your blood sugars will be high at the moment and the source of this elevated blood sugar is carbohydrate. These people are asking you to eat plenty more carbohydrate, not less. The only outcome will be higher blood sugars, not lower.
If you want our advice, you should avoid starchy carbohydrate as much as possible until your next appointment. If you do, your blood sugars will certainly be much better than they were at diagnosis.
You will then see for yourself how misguided the 'starchy carbs at every meal' nonsense really is.
It's important to do this now. You may very well still be producing lots of insulin, enough to be able to reduce your blood sugar very quickly by itself. But not if you eat the starchy carbs.
Does this make sense? Feel free to PM me if you'd like to talk in more detail.

All the best,

fergus

You can do a lot worse than reading the Success stories thread here.

I've been type 2 diabetic for 18 years with shocking lack of control.
To a certain extent I have suffered from my own negligence but am also lucky that I all I have suffered from is erectile dysfunction and I got a warning about my eyes.
Surprisingly enough it was the latter not the former that prompted me to seek help here.

However the low-carb advice seems to work and I just wish I'd done something about it earlier in my life.

Hi berrylover,

I know what you mean about the Janet and John literary standards!
See if you can pick up a copy of 'The Diabetes Revolution' by Dr. Charles and Maureen Clark, published by Vermillion. It's clear, concise and full of the sort of invaluable information Janet and John have never even thought of!

All the best,

fergus

Hi berrylover,

When you are first diagnosed it is quite natural to feel scared, angry and generally deeply ****ed off with the world. However, try not to - it really isn't so bad once you get used to it and there are even up sides! The immediate good news is that the symptoms (the thirst and tiredness etc.) are all caused by your high levels of blood glucose (BG). When you get this under control (which it is often possible to do quite quickly) these symptoms will go away almost immediately. If you make radical changes to your diet and start exercising more, then you might well find that within even a couple of weeks you will be feeling better than you have done for years. That is the big up side of diabetes - many people live really unhealthy lifestyles, and vaguely intend to do something about it "one of these days" (I know I did). However, that day never comes - you can always put the diet or the new exercise regime off until next week. Diabetes forces you to take this seriously, and the benefits of a healthier lifestyle go massively beyond keeping the diabetes under control.

An important thing that you should realize is that the standard of healthcare you will get from the NHS - as well as the quality of advice is wildly variable. The dietary advice that you have been given (low fat, low salt, eat complex carbohydrates with every meal) is very dated thinking. The reason that doctors, "diabetes nurses" and even many dietitians persist in handing out this advice, is that it is what is in the medical textbooks. Unfortunately the Diabetes UK publications that you have seen take this outdated advice and simplifies it. This "NHS standard" approach does help some people, but most people who follow it tend to end up on high doses of anti-diabetic drugs or insulin within a very few years. If you read research, or modern books on diabetes written by specialists, or even look around this forum, then you will get a very different picture. In short, as Fergus has already explained, carbohydrate restriction is the key to good BG control, and since everyone is different you need to learn what effect various foods have upon your body by getting a glucose monitor and learning how to interpret the results.

Fortunately, you have come to the right place for advice - there are a lot of very knowledgeable people here. Have a look around at past threads on this forum - initially concentrating on advice for the newly diagnosed (a good place to start is the Newly diagnosed and so confused thread). At some stage it is probably going to be worth investing in a book or two. There are some great ones out there - and also some highly dodgy ones, so take advice on this. Personally, I think that the most useful book is probably going to be Dr. Bernstein's Diabetes Solution. Richard Bernstein is both a diabetic and a diabetes specialist, who has done a lot of research in this area and is one of the great proponents of low carb diabetes management. He is very highly respected in the diabetes world, both amongst researchers and patients. His book (which is non-technical advice for diabetics, and very readable) is the bible of many on these forums.

Good luck, and keep posting

learn to love your proteins

if I can adapt to it in three weeks flat (being a long term veggie and total fussy wuss) I'm pretty sure that you can start to feel better rather quickly by adapting your diet to remove the bulk of carbs ... has to be your choice obviously, but my bg readings have improved very quickly from cutting bread, rice, pasta and potatoes. yeah I still have carby things and "nice" things too, like macadamia nuts but I found it made me feel lots better very quickly. in fact, probably the best I'v felt in a year good luck

alive-ness is defo the state of preference

until such time as my ears drop off - then I'm not so bothered

hun, I'm a "big lass" too so you're in good company

have a good day and if you feel really rank just tell the kids you're poorly, children give you enough emotional blackmail and guilt-trips in their little lives - so once going back the other way won't exactly hurt them ... say mommy's illness means she needs to be not hassled for ten minutes - or she might not be well enough to play later * take them to the park * swimming * have their mates round * delete as applicable!

best, J/xxx

what did you eat for your breakfast love? did you do bg pre and 2hrs post? hope you're feeling a bit better now.

ps - crackers ... hmmmmmm ... me too!

berrylover said:

I don't have a meter to test my BG with yet. I am seriously considering going back and DEMANDING one. Pushy, Geordie lass mode tends to work with most people, lol. :lol:

Click to expand...

Good move. Monitoring is the only way that you have of learning what does and doesn't work for you. Frankly I think that the only realistic chance that you have of controlling T2 diabetes by diet is to design a personal diet based upon this sort of testing. Meters generally aren't the problem. They are cheap (you can buy them from high street pharmacists for £10-15, and get them for less on eBay), they are often given away in clinics and surgeries and I believe that some of the manufacturers will send you one for free.

The problem is the consumable strips that BG meters use. These are expensive, and most GPs are extremely reluctant to prescribe them to any diabetic not on insulin (and even insulin users are often rationed). If you are extremely lucky, then your doctor will give you a repeat prescription for as many strips as you need. If you are moderately lucky then you will get a one-off prescription for a couple of boxes and you will have to press hard to get more. Most people (myself included) never manage to get any strips at all. The main reason for this is cost, but this is usually justified by the fact that there have been a study that purports to show that testing doesn't make diabetics any less likely to suffer complications. In fact this study was really badly designed - all that it really showed was that if you test and don't understand what to do with the results, then that doesn't help you. As one wit on the BMJ web site observed "These authors might get the Nobel prize for the bleeding obvious.".

I decided to fund my own testing (it is annoying, but the way I look at it - it is a small price to pay for my health). You can buy strips across the counter from all pharmacists, or you can generally get them much cheaper on eBay (the going rate is about half the high street price). Some manufacturers will sell them directly by mail order - again much cheaper than you will get in shops.

However, good luck in getting them on prescription. That will be a worthy test of pushiness! :wink:

Hi berrylover,

Your thirst and tiredness are symptoms of high blood sugars. Once your bs falls to a normal level, these symptoms should disappear. Just be careful about what you are told is a healthy diet. What the NHS believes is healthy and what we diabetics on the front line believe aren't the same thing at all.
In short, if you're asked to eat starchy carbs at each meal, just smile politely then run for home as if you've left the gas on!

All the best,

fergus