This is going to be a bit long, so get yourself some tea...
There are 3 macro-nutrients. Fats, carbs and protein. If you cut one, you up the others, to avoid becoming malnourished and to still get all the micro-nutrients. (vitamines, minerals). Carbs turn to glucose once ingested and will make you spike. Protein can cause a raise in bloodsugars, but nothing near as dramatic as carbs... And fats are a glucose-flatline. They will not spike you, at all. Better yet, they'll mitigate the effects of any carbs you do have, slowing down their uptake.
Quite a few decades ago there was a rather biased research done in the USA (funded, I seem to remember, by the food industry), that claimed fats were bad and we should up the carbs. (sugar and starches are not only a cheap additive, they're literally addictive too. To quote pringles: Once you pop, you can't stop. And the high crabs are responsible for that.) The research wasn't done well, but it got picked up practically all over . We dutifully cut fats, upped the carb intake and... 40, Maybe 50 years later on there's a diabetes pandemic in the Western world. Long ago, T2 was a condition that only hit the elderly. Now it's hitting people in their thirties, sometimes even 20's. (I was 38). That says a lot, no?
So... All those light products, the ones that are low to no fat? They have to have some flavour, have to be bulked up somehow, right? Enter the carbs. If you check packaging of low fat products, you'll usually find they're high in carbs. Exactly what you don't want.
I'm assuming you have weight to lose, as 90% of T2's are more or less overweight? Some slightly, some morbidly. Carbs, as I mentioned before, usually turn to glucose once ingested. A T2 makes a LOAD of insulin, but has become insensitive to it. So rather than helping us turn that glucose into fuel, it just plain doesn't... And that glucose in our bloodstream is initially stored in fat cells, as it doesn't have anyplace else to be, and certainly isn't burned off. It's the carbs that make us big, as a symptom of prediabetes! After a while those fat cells are full, and the glucose overflows into our system. Hello, full blown T2! It's in our blood, our eyeballs, tears, saliva, urine, it's spilling out all over the place because it can't be stored anymore, and we can't burn it for fuel efficiently either. See the problem?
So... To feel full, and get all the macro-nutrients we need, we up the fats when we cu the carbs. Protein remains moderate as too much of that will raise our bloodsugars too, but all in all... We have a metabolic contidion... And we need to change out diet to cater to what our body can handle.
I changed my diet, and usually have one or two portions of bacon on my plate a day... (Usually when I have eggs with bacon and cheese, and in the evening I bulk up my cauliflower rice with bacon and cheese too. I never go hungry.
). My cholesterol came down in three months and I could stop the statins I'd just barely started. Ditched the medication too (Metformin didn't agree with me, and while the gliclazide was fine, it gave me hypo's on the new regime: just didn't need it as I was learning how to eat as a T2!). My non-alcoholic fatty liver disease is a lot better, energy levels are up, my HbA1c is solidly in the non-diabetic range....
I say, everything truly is beter with bacon.
(And my thyroid is underactive too... So if I can lose weight in spite of that... Then you can too. The porblem was just that you didn't know where the problem was, and now you do! Yay!)
If you want, check dietdoctor.com for meal ideas and more information, and maybe pick up Dr. Jason Fung's the Diabetes Code. It explains it all a lot better than I can. And Fung's not a dry, boring read, believe it or not.
