Re: Success stories
I only recently discovered this place, from the title I'd sort of assumed it was a DUK Eat More Starch! site. Glad to see I was wrong!
I put my story about because it's important that us oddballs are heard from.
In retrospect I've had glucose metabolism problems all my life, reactive hypoglycemia and impaired glucose tolerance going back to childhood, but probably because I am not and almost never have been overweight I have been assured on numerous occasions that I "am not diabetic". What makes it worse is that my FBG is still normal, and my 2 hour postprandials not far off, which conceals the fact of high 1 hour numbers and reactive lows at 3 - 4 hours out. Living in an area where they do not use GTTs and where the pharmacist refused to sell me a meter because "if I needed one it would be prescribed for me" didn't help much either.
Way back in my twenties I had numerous symptoms which I was similarly assured were not gallstones. This went on for five years before the gallstones were finally removed. By then I was well underweight.
In my thirties my blood pressure started to go up. My lipids were not done again until I was in my forties, my GP described them as "weird"
total 6.8 HDL 0.63 LDL 4.22 trigs 4.29 trigs/HDL ratio 6.8
Naturally the dietician accused me of "eating too much fat" and put me on the Healthy High Carb Low Fat diet (she also mentioned that I should cut down on my sugar).
As an elderly ex-hippie <G> I was brought up to believe in Healthy Whole Grains as the basis of every meal and made sure I ate plenty of muesli, brown rice and whoelmeal bread and washed it down with healthy orange and cranberry juice. I did also eat a fair bit of fat. And masses of vegetables and salad. Not much sugar though.
Disaster! Cutting out the fat and replacing it with more carbs caused my LDL to rocket without affecting the other lipids much. So I was accused of "not being compliant".
At least I got a statin, the result was
total 3.7 HDL 0.85 LDL 1.9 trigs 2.09 ratio 2.46
Around this point I started gaining weight for the first time in my life. Also my BP rocketed up to around 150/95 and my medication was doubled. I would run out of energy at every opportunity. My feet and hands started to go numb and tingle and I would find it impossible to stay awake after eating. I had chronic skin infections from spots and boils to thrush and crotch rot.
This was all blamed on "depression", then "side effects of antidepressants" and later "personality disorder". The psychiatrist also noted my "strange blinking behaviour"
All came to a head after we moved, after a day of hardly eating (I blinked and the removal guys packed all the cutlery) then stuffing myself with an indian meal, I was up half the night pissing.
Fortunately we'd bought the new house off a pharmacist
"You sound like you're diabetic, come in and I'll sell you a meter!"
Searching the internet I had an ongoing series of AHA! moments, and I found this
http://www.alt-support-diabetes.org/NewlyDiagnosed.htm
and put it into effect, so by the time I'd sorted out a new doctor I had a bunch of numbers neatly graphed for her.
She gave me a GTT, and strangely despite all the symptoms I aced it, scored only 10.7 instead of 11.1, so technically I was still "not diabetic".
But I treated myself as if I was, and binned the Eat More Starch! leaflet.
The results were little short of astonishing.
I discovered that by limiting my carbs to around 15g at breakfast and 30g in the evening and a sliding scale in between, with a total daily input of around 60 - 100g, nearly all my symptoms resolved (although some took a while). My BG dropped into a normal range, my BP came back down to around 120/80, the skin infections and sleep attacks cleared up, my eyes stopped itching probably because they were no longer brimful of sorbitol, and I was able to sleep for 6 - 8 hours without needing to ****. I regained most of the missing energy and my lipids turned round from being a heart attack on legs to little short of spectacular
total 4 HDL 1.4 LDL 2.4 trigs 0.7 ratio 0.5
Since then I've done a lot of tinkering with my diet and balancing carbs against exertion and trialled various dietary supplements, I discovered that alpha-lipoic acid has beneficial effects on my BG probably through improving insulin resistance, and has reduced my tendency to morning liver dumps (I still have to be a bit careful about exerting myself in the morning, and I can drop into non-reactive hypoglycemia in the afternoons if I over-exert myself without using small boluses of carbs and that deadly FAT to keep my BG level.)
The latest experiment suggests that in the absence of high BG and the ensuing trigs I convert even saturated fat into HDL rather than LDL.
I do best keeping my BG in the 4 - 5 range and try to limit postprandials to 6, which I manage to do most but not all of the time. Curiously my energy seems to drop off rapidly at BG around 3.5 but returns rapidly. OK that's not the curious bit, it also starts to drop off on a curve from around 7, and 8 is the number I try to avoid at all costs, that's when my feet and hands wake up and start to smart again (it feels like wearing velcro socks and marigold gloves) and I get to do an extra noctural pee. Much above that and the symptoms come back in spades, by 10 I get pins and needles and "feet going to sleep", I itch especially my eyeballs, I become pole-axed and have to get up every couple of hours through the night: these symptoms continue for several hours after a single postprandial spike.
I saw a lot of my late aunt who lived near here and had done a lot of genealogical research, and learned there is some weird genetics in the family: over the years there have been several actual diabetics, all male, mostly skinny and poorly controlled, losing body parts even on insulin.
Most everyone else dies of cardiovascular stuff though often at a great age. Everyone gets some but not all symptoms of "metabolic syndrome"/syndrome X/insulin resistance, and curiously some of the fatter people have better BP and lipids than some of the skinny active ones. At 80 one plump aunt was told she had "the blood pressure of a 30 year old" (whereas I was the exact opposite!) My skinny walking running swimming cousin in his sixties now has BG, lipids and BP going south and the latter are being medicated. One of his daughters is an actual real athlete and is starting to show BG issues in her thirties - and like me she seems to have a serious overglycemic reaction to wheat. I suspect we mostly all have the "thrifty" gene set which converts excess carbs to lipids, but some of us miss out on the genes which stash the lipids as body fat, so they rattle around in the blood causing mayhem.
On a couple of occasions I've actually exceeded the 11.1 on spot readings (do NOT panic-eat on top of a liver dump!) but because of my generally excellent control and improvements my GP has decided not to rediagnose me with actual diabetes yet. The doctors and nurses here are an order of magnitude better than the eejits where I used to live, the only downside is that my GP has told me she is "not permitted" to prescribe strips, and "not supposed" to recommend other than the Healthy High Carb Low Fat Disaster Diet. But I'm trying to educate her <G>
Strangely the nurses don't seem to have the same constraints on what they are and are not permitted to say, I've had some pretty good chats about things like the Glycemic Index, and I always push the concept of testing to find your OWN responses to diet and exercise. The local diabetics vary hugely from the proactive to the don't want to know.
I have been put onto annual monitoring only, as I can provide graphs of my BG and BP on demand. The accountants are fond of pulling stuff like denying me an A1c and only permitting total lipids rather than the crucial full lipid panel but I've educated the vampire into writing them back in! I've asked about CRP and homocysteine but been refused. They do thyroid here - and would treat it if I had problems, another thing which is problematic in other places. NICE and the PCTs have a lot to answer for in terms of causing themselves (let alone the patients) major problems in the future by saving pennies today.
Living here it's easy to see why the emphasis on carbs all the time: looking out my back window I see a sea of carbs (wheat, barley, sugar beet) and rape and peas. These are all buy cheap and sell expensive stocks for the Food Industry (and in bad years the farmers may even make a loss, unlike Tescos or any of the companies who donate to DUK and the ADA).
Fortunately, there are also good local sources of fish, proper meat which runs around in the open air eating grass, vegetables and fruit (I have to be extra careful with fruit, like grains, though berries are usually OK) if anything dropping the carbs has given me the opportunity to expand what was actually not a bad diet originally by swapping them out for things which have more nutritional content - and FLAVOUR!
Over time I've read in no end of diabetes newsgroups and forums, though I mainly only post in one or two. There's so much material out there I could really do with someone to read it all for me!
But one thing stands out everywhere and that's the fundamental split between what people actually DO to gain control over "this thing of ours" and what the Authorities proclaim. You'd almost think they wre deliberately trying to kill us off . . .
