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Welcome to the forum ,Lynda.Yes it's very confusing !About diet,have a good read of the Carbs threads and you will find some good tips there.Do you test your blood at all? The complex carbs such as bread,pasta ,rice,potatoes put your blood sugars up quite a lot and are best kept to a minimum.Have a good read round the forum and then...ask questions,there's always some one to answer them.

Hi Lynda,

It's good to have you on the forum. You're by no means the first diabetic to have tried hard to manage the condition by following the advice commonly given to all. Your difficulties are far more likely a result of the poor standard of advice than any lack of effort on your part.

There are lots of great contributors on here who have figured things out for themselves. The hard way. We'd be delighted if we could spare you some of the grief we've all had to face.

All the best,

fergus

It is really quite shocking how little advice and support is given to many newly diagnosed T2s. I know that some people get really good support - I guess that the NHS postcode lottery strikes again! I was only diagnosed a few weeks ago, and all I was given was an initial 10 minutes with a GP and two appointments with a nurse - I have been promised a review appointment with a specialist in about 3 months time. Pretty much the only advise that I was given was: don't test; eat lots of complex carbohydrate with each meal; exercise and loose weight. I very quickly realised that the first two of the four are really terrible advice :x Fortunately, I am better off than most people, because I have a background in biomedical sciences and used to do research in another area of nutritional pathology. That means that I am in a much better position than most people to find, read and understand medical textbooks and the research literature. I really sympathize with people who don't have this sort of background who are abandoned with as little advice as I was given.

Anyway, my suggestion to you is to learn as much as you can about the condition. Type 2 diabetes can be managed very successfully, and it doesn't have to have horrible consequences. However, it is a complex condition and it effects everyone differently. Therefore, by far the best way to work out how to manage it is to understand what is going on. Read, read, read... This forum will offer you lots of advice, but I also suggest that you invest in some books - there are lots of good ones around, I can certainly recommend those by Gretchen Becker and Richard Bernstein.

I find it worrying that you feel you were frightened into taking statins. It is important to keep your LDL cholesterol levels down, and statins might be necessary - however many people manage to do this by diet and exercise. On the subject of supplements, have you tried Benecol yogurt drinks? These contain stanol ester, which prevents cholesterol from being absorbed by the gut and has been shown that it can reduce LDL cholesterol levels by about 10%. For diabetics, I would definitely get the "diet" version, though, I think the others all contain significant quantities of sugar.

Well controlled diabetes doesn't have to be a degenerative disease! Ask your doctor/nurse what your blood sugar levels are.The test they do is called a Hba1c and it comes in percentages.Under 7% is good.The reason we all test our blood sugars daily is to find out which foods make our blood sugars go up too much.Once you find this out you can keep much better control of your levels and lessen the risk of the degeneration your dietician told you about.

sugarless sue said:

Well controlled diabetes doesn't have to be a degenerative disease!

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Absolutely! The way that I look at it like this. The human body is a massively complex and intricate machine, that in almost all respects drives us through life on an autopilot - continually making tiny adjustments to the situations that we find ourselves in. Metabolic diseases, such as diabetes, happen when one of the cogs comes loose. This human machine is sophisticated enough that it can often make a few adjustments and work around the failure, but sometimes the failure can have dire consequences when parts of the machinery clog up or get out of synchronization. Diabetes is a failure of one of these automated processes - one of the ones that controls how we digest our food. Fortunately for all of us, this is a process that it is quite possible to control - you need to learn to live without the autopilot and drive digestion manually.

A diabetic is simply someone who has to control their digestion manually rather than relying on the automation that we are all born with. The tools to do this are diet, exercise, drugs and insulin. Since everyone is different, which combination of these are likely to be most effective varies, but the principle is the same. If you take over manual control of your body effectively, then other than the lack of automation you should be no different to anyone else - and in this respects it is not a degenerative disease. If you don't get it under control then the works will clog up, and you will end up with all sorts of different failures in different parts of the system. This is when it becomes an extremely unpleasant degenerative disease - as the failures accumulate you will get sicker and sicker in many ways.

Therefore, pretty much the most important thing that you can do to improve your life is to learn how to take manual control of your body. This isn't easy, because there is quite a lot of complex stuff to understand. However, it is really worthwhile the investment of time and effort - because understanding is what will prevent it from being a degenerative disease.

Hi all,
I'm newly diagnosed type 2 diabetes (last week). I've been put onto medication (Metformin and statins) and I'm now waiting for my appointment to see the 'diabetes nurse'.
I've had no information on diet, excercise etc yet, and I don't really know what to expect from my visit with the nurse.
So I'm looking for 'everything' advice wise, prescription costs, side effects etc. All advice will be well recieved.

Hi,SWMHO, Best advice just now is to have a good read of this forum ,then ask questions! There's lots of info on diet,medications,tests etc here.In Diabetes discussion menu you will find 'general links to diabetes' and 'links for type 2' some of these can answer a lot of your questions.Happy browsing and look forward to your questions.