• Guest - w'd love to know what you think about the forum! Take the 2025 Survey »

Mediterranean diet disaster

B

Beechnut

Active Member
Messages
26
Type of diabetes
Prediabetes
Treatment type
Diet only
Hi all

I was diagnosed prediabetic last year and my GP said to eat a Mediterranean diet lots of veg, fruit, fish, beans and lentils with wholemeal bread, pasta and brown rice. This was very similar to what I had been eating and I was overweight and sluggish. Research on prediabetes brought me to this forum where I learnt about low carb.

I started low carb and almost from my first meal I felt better. At my next review with GP I told him what I was doing and he told me it was dangerous and couldn't be sustained long term. He insisted that the Mediterranean diet had been proven to prevent diabetes. (I now know the difference between prevention and treatment). So, scared out of my wits by stories of heart attacks strokes and more I complied and what a disaster it's been!

I found that lots of beans and lentils, oats and brown rice and entire meals based on wholemeal pasta really spiked my blood sugar unsurprisingly. Anyway the consequences of this have been disastrous- weight gain, over a stone, extreme fatigue, dizziness, sickness after eating and drenching night sweats.

I feel a total mess, overweight and too tired to do anything. So it's back to low carving for me and I'm trusting my own experience this time as well as the experience of so many on this forum

Thank you all for your inspiration. I think it's sad that there is so much bad advice from some medics out there on a diet that if of such benefit to so many people.
 
Sorry you have met such resistance from your GP, @Beechnut .
Perhaps you could consider educating him /her with some info from other GPs? The suggestion I made to mine was that these more progressive doctors have reduced the amount of diabetes meds for patients with T2 , and saved money. There are plenty of resources they could read.
Here are a few:

Freshwell Low Carb Project - Home

lowcarbfreshwell.com

Commission the NHS-approved Low Carb Program

Benefit from cost savings in medication and improved patient health in as little as 3 months.
www.lowcarbprogram.com
 
Hi @Beechnut , I follow a Mediterranean diet. That for me means lots of seafood, meats, fresh salads, nuts , beans, olives and olive oils, soups and fruits etc. I do like Italian food , I just can’t have the pasta. I do like true Italian pizzas , which means very thin crusts and then piled high with fresh produce, not those dreadful pizzas we often see at these chain pizza restaurants.
For me, my Mediterranean diet is more Turkish, Middle Eastern , North African foods. I cannot tolerate very low carb diets , I feel rotten and depressed, my body cannot tolerate the high fats, so I lose too much weight. It’s not for everyone, but if you feel great on it, fantastic.
My own Dr, who is young and progressive recommends the Mediterranean diet, he says it’s nutritionally balanced. That said, he is not opposed to very low carb diets.
I do cut down the carbs, such as the rice. I rarely eat bread as I have coeliac and the gluten free breads just don’t do it for me. I simply cut down the foods high in carbs , but still maintain the fundamentals of the Mediterranean diet, that is: fresh vegetables, fruits, fish , nuts, seafood and olive oil and absolutely no highly processed foods.
 
I had the same thing for almost half a century - between leaving home and being diagnosed type 2.
I told the HCPs it didn't work, but I was always told I was the one in the wrong - a couple of years after diagnosis I saw one of the older GPs and I think he'd have been happier if I'd taken up satanic rituals than getting my HbA1c below diabetes range by diet alone - though the morris dancing might have had a bit to do with it.
 
Congratulations, and well done on persistence. I have been living on around 20g carb/day since 2019, so I guess the "can't be sustained" argument falls.

I do think one of the issues is that some people hear "mediterranean diet" and assume they know what it means. I spend a fair amount of time in Italy and what people there actually eat is a lot different to what the standard UK idea of a mediterranean diet is. It's definitely not all carbs. Food is very fresh and unprocessed, and there's often alcohol (a glass or two of red is typical) at every meal, including breakfast. I'd really like to know why Italian bread (baked that day) doesn't shift my BG while UK bread is rocket fuel.

I got talking to the cook in a restaurant in Tuscany and asked him what he fried meats in - "Lard, like normal people" was the reply. Olive oil gets used for vegetables and added, but for flavour mainly.

Best of luck. Stick at it.
 
Thank you all. I know the Mediterranean diet is healthy for most people. I lived in Greece for a while and where I was they ate a lot of beans, rice and veg cooked in lots of olive oil, along with cheese and sourdough with most meals. All delicious and at the time it suited me totally I never had a problem but as KennyA says it is not a low fat diet which is what my GP advised saying eat a teaspoon of olive oil a day and no other fat.

Everyone is different and I know now that I can't eat too many beans or too much rice and bread but I'm interested in what Melgar says that it is perfectly possible to do a low carb Mediterranean diet. I will look into that further.

I suppose what my GP was suggesting was more like the old low fat high carb diet still recommended for diabetics but he called it Mediterranean perhaps because of the teaspoon of olive oil!

Thanks for your suggestion Pip I found a template letter to GPs in a low carb recipe book which explained the benefits for diabetes quite well. My GP is not one who takes patient's suggestions too kindly but I'm seeing the nurse for my next review so I'll discuss it with her. There is another GP in the practice that I will try and see for future reviews. The practice is very much into prescribing medication and then more medication to alleviate side effects unfortunately.
 
Beechnut said:
which is what my GP advised saying eat a teaspoon of olive oil a day and no other fat.
Click to expand...
I’d be seriously questioning any advice at all from a GP who told me that - that’s only 5g fat per day, we need far more than that to get essential vitamins only found in fat

From the British Heart Foundation website, whilst I don’t agree with everything on the site, show this to your GP and let him try to argue his point. I think he probably needs a refresher course back at med school

Fat is an important part of a healthy diet and getting the right balance of different fats in your diet will help keep your blood cholesterol levels, weight and heart healthy.

You need fat in your diet to:

  • give you energy
  • help absorb the fat-soluble vitamins A, D, E and K from food
  • make hormones
  • provide essential fatty acids which the body cannot make itself.
About one third (no more than 35 per cent) of the calories you eat should come from fat, according to recommendations from the UK’s Scientific Advisory Committee on Nutrition.

For women who are eating 2,000 calories per day and for men eating 2,500 calories per day, this is equivalent to a maximum of about:

  • Women: 70g fat per day
  • Men: 95g fat per day

Fats explained: saturated, unsaturated and trans fats

BHF Senior Dietitian, Dell Standford, explains how much fat you should eat, the difference between saturated and unsaturated fats, and which fatty foods and oils are healthy.
www.bhf.org.uk
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Menu
Log in
Register
Cookies are required to use this site. You must accept them to continue using the site. Learn More.…