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Managing bGs

  • Thread starter Thread starter Anonymous
  • Start Date Start Date

Agree. Making allegations about people being "not diabetic" or "misdiagnosed" as per the other thread wasn't helping anyone. That's why I have chosen to stop posting my own readings here because I won't be drawn into online spats over how many carbs someone may or may not consume in a daily basis, and whether those readings are typically "diabetic". That type of discourse is rather ugly and won't encourage anyone to take part in any sort of "adult debate". That sort of behaviour is more akin to the playground. I'm very much a "live-and-let-live" sort of person and I think people get on a lot better in life when they are prepared to listen to and tolerate experiences and opinions other than their own.




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And some can become diabetes resolved by doing what is right for them. I am so pleased that my strategy worked for me.

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Unfortunately people like us with no weight to lose are kind of stuck.

I still have enough basal insulin to stay below 7 fasting most of the time but I'm 20 and 110lbs. Where does it go from here. I wonder how much time low Carbing will buy me.

Has anyone else tried /alternating/ periods of low Carbing and normal eating to stay even? If some people's overall numbers creep up after too long/much low carb and normal eating produces large PPs but low carb is supposed to reduce glucose sensitivity then.. Does it stand to reason things would balance out eventually?


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Janeecee, I got the info. At diagnosis in 2008 my HbA1C was 58 (7.5%).

PS ... no "low blood sugar" episodes this week thanks to carb increase during the day.
 
LW, it's very tough for you. I guess you need to work out how many carbs you can tolerate without spiking, and what kind of carbs. I can tolerate a few rye crackers and a small portion brown rice, and apples and berries. At the moment, I'm aiming to eat sufficient carbs to avoid ketosis AND avoid spiking over 7.8 at 2 hours. I can't say whether it's working out yet, I've only tested negative for ketones for two days so it's too soon to tell.

A lot of people are happy to be in permanent ketosis achieved with low carb diets. The body switches into fat burning mode and will break down body fat (as in losing weight) or use fats from the diet (hence the high fat part of the LCHF diet) which presumably would mitigate any weight loss. However, as I am living with another long term illness, I have decided that do not want to be in ketosis. This is an informed choice based on my own research. I am not going to get into any futile online debates over this one—as we know, people can get very emotional about their dietary regimes ;-)

Anyway…I recommend the MyFitnessPal app for logging your carbs, proteins, fats, kcal, etc, if you haven't got it already. There's also the website but I just stick with the app. That way you can see at a glance how many carbs a day you are consuming, but some are more "spiky" than others as you have already discovered!


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Going from 7.5% to 5.7% is very good. There are other people on this forum who have posted similar results and were told their condition was "reversed" at follow up. Amazingly some people have done it within months. What I have noticed is that there is often considerable weight loss in those cases—3 stone, 5 stone, that sort of amount. Not forgetting that some people admit to eating really bad diets, with coco pops for breakfast, Danish pastries at coffee break, pizzas, burgers, beer, chocolate biscuits, etc etc. Just cutting all that out from the get go would improve things no end.


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Intermittent fasting has been used as an alternative to low carb so you might want to read up about that. Both effectively work by reducing the average insulin response required over time. My GP recently suggested I might try a modified standard IF regime by combining low carb days with some higher carb days and some fasting days and see what happens. The downside is the BG profile that may be produced. There is research to show that those diabetics that keep their BG's unspikey have better long term outcomes than those with spikey profiles even if the spikey person has a lower hba1c than the unspikey person, within sensible limits of course. I'd also say that the majority of T2 people who I've known (hundreds) do not find that their levels rise if they low carb for a long time or low carb at vlc levels. Where low carb has not been effective it was because the person had been misdiagnosed T2 when in fact after they had additional tests done they were found to be LADA or one of the other rarer variations. That's not to say it can't happen though.
 

I was 18.5 stone at diagnosis (HbA1C 7.5%), now 14st (HbA1C 5.6%). Whether this shows that weight is a factor in causing diabetes or whether weight loss is a side-product of other steps to improve it, I've no idea.
 

Yes there are valid reasons for not doing a ketogenic regime. Even Lyle McDonald who wrote one of the definitive books on the subject http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=...nepage&q=lyle mcdonald ketogenic diet&f=false says be wary if you are say an athlete who are trying to recover from an injury because it can slow down the healing process. Effectively not only will ketosis put your body into fat burning mode but it will also switch your body into a "repair" mode where cells are repaired rather than simply replaced. The repair mode has been theorised to be advantageous as it has anti ageing effects. There has been some press coverage of this recently in fact there was a BBC2 program a while back that examined the issue but did it from the context of using calorie restriction and / or intermittent fasting to achieve the same result.

Just one other small point in my opinion it is calorific intake that determines weight loss not the ratio between carbs, protein a fat. People can simply calculate the amount of calories they need each day to maintain their current weight using the well known BMR formula. The usual recommendation for dieting is calculate your BMR then deduct 500 calories as that should give you a 2lb weight loss per week. A low carb high fat diet does not mean a high calorie diet. My lchf regime provides me around 2000 calories a day on average.
 
Anorexic here- fasting is NOT a good idea @_@ Ithink I am where I am because of starving then hypo-induced sugar-binges.. But thanks for suggestions. Or maybe I am just weak :/

Janeecee it's good to hear you seem to have found a balanced middle ground!I think most agree that locarbing is beneficial but ULTRA low carbing not so much? You're doing good middle-of-the-road?

And Gezza, nice to hear no nasty hypos! :3

Yup, I think it's going to be a long process of elimination finding out what are good foods and what are bad, what TYPE of sugar is in it etc. Like I can drink Lucozade but I can't drink grape juice, I can eat bread but I can't eat Weetabix, I can eat rice but I can't eat mashed potato. I can eat some cakes but I can't look at prawn crackers. Then again I was testing the can-eat foods a whole ago. Maybe I'm just worse :/ Still don't understand why a slice of toast with butter is tolerable (10s) yet a small amount of the crackers yields 19.4.

A crapload of investigation must be done -_- !

It was this one that did it to me!



Oh ****


Protein 6.3g
Carbs 69.8g
Fat 20.2g

But Farley's Rusks have even more sugar than that and only pushed me to 13 (I thought something intended of babies would be nutritionally sound. WRONG) Shouldn't the fat have slowed absorption?

Guess the problem here is the type of starch or something? *confusion*


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No, LW, you're not weak. Starving yourself to the point of being driven by hunger will cause anyone to eat indiscriminately. I've seen friends join WeightWatchers, lose too a lot of weight and when they reach their too low (IMO) goal, they go mental for chocolate and cake and all sorts—and on goes the weight and they go back to WW and do it all again. They end up worse off than when they started because the binging started after the months of feeling so hungry all the time. I suspected a friend of mine became bulimic after her post-WW sugar binges but she never admitted it and when I raised concern about how thin she was, she sort of fell out with me.

Anyway? What's my point? LOL! I guess you need to make sure you eat a nourishing healthy diet that you can sustain long term, and that keeps your BG stable, bearing in mind your history. Now the hard work begins! All that testing and trial and error…grrrrr!

I'm just trying to discover what works for me. I'm as much in a muddle as the next person, just trying to find my way. At the moment, I'm trying to stay out of ketosis by eating sufficient carbs, but not so much as to spike my BGs. If it works out, all well and good. I don't have any answers, only questions ;-)


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Hypoglycaemia and T2—some considerations i.e. it does happen, and appears to have associated risks, presumably more so when people are on meds. I'm posting this for information only.


SOURCE: Management of hyperglycaemia in type 2 diabetes: a patient-centered approach.
Position statement of the American Diabetes Association (ADA) and the European Association for the Study of Diabetes (EASD)
February 2012

REFERENCE: 129. Gerstein HC, Miller ME, Genuth S et al (2011) Long-term effects of intensive glucose lowering on cardiovascular outcomes. N Engl J Med 364:818–828


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