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Newly Diagnosed

M

Mollycoll711

Member
Messages
15
Location
Littlehampton
Type of diabetes
Treatment type
Diet only
Dislikes
Child and Animal cruelty
Ive been told I have Type 2 and the nurse wanted to put me straight on medication but said I could try for three months by diet only but I am confused as there are conflicting things on what I should eat carbs with every meal or low carbs fruit or not fruit is the most confusing help. Is if worth monitoring my levels?

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First, yes you should monitor your levels. Ref diet you can either follow general NHS advice, stuff yourself with carbs and make the diabetes worse or you can follow the advice from most posters on this forum and reduce the carbs as they relate to high blood sugar when you have diabetes; simples. I may sound a bit cynical but sadly there is a lot of bad advice around. Eat to your meter, as they say, and you will find carbs are the issue. With regard to fruit try to avoid bananas, tropical fruits, grapes, melons etc. Stick to berries, apples and pears.
 
"Is if worth monitoring my levels?" - Definitely. On waking. Before meals and two hours after if you can manage it.

Diet:

This is actually very simple. Many people here eat low-carb as part of controlling their diabetes. All you need to remember is that your body's ability to process:
  1. Sugar.
  2. Starch
Is compromised.

From this it follows that if you sharply reduce your intake of those chemicals your system won't be under the strain that eating "normally" is putting it under.

So you need to reduce or best of all eliminate sugary and starchy foods. The sugar because your body can't handle it and it's poisoning you. The Various form of starch (because they turn into sugar when you're digesting them).

So:

No sugar, no products with sugar in them. That's the absolute minimum.
You don't have to give up fruit but you do have to drastically reduce it. As a starting measure to get it down I'd eliminate all fruit and that especially includes fruit juice for a fortnight. Then reintroduce small amounts - and measure your blood sugars to see what the effect is.

Your body can't properly process:
  • Potatoes
  • Rice
  • Pasta
  • Anything containing flour.
because as I said above they all contain starch and starch gets turned into sugar by the body once you've eaten them. So you need to at the very least DRASTICALLY reduce your intake of those foods or better yet eliminate them.

Mild exercise - a brisk walk after eating to help your body make efficient use of whatever amount of insulin it's still producing.

If all that sounds drastic and difficult it is - at first but trust me it gets easier and easier to the point where it's just how you live your life. If I were in your shoes I'd go for being very strict with yourself for the first few weeks. Just to get your levels down. You'll be absolutely amazed at how much better you'll feel once they come down. Then it's a question of finding out how much you can eat and of what so that you enjoy your meals AND keep your blood sugar under control.

It can be done. I know because I did it not easy to get started but it gets easier and easier until you don't even notice that your doing it. Come back and ask lots of questions. There are some very experienced and well-informed people here who'll be happy to help.
 
Totally agree with gorillamark the importance of testing and monitoring can not be under estimated it also acts as an early warning system when things start to go off track, good luck

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Final point. Your progress will be uneven. That's normal. Don't let it worry you. If you feel like an occasional treat - have it. if you sometimes fall off the wagon just shrug and hop back on again. But get those blood sugar levels down - a tough first few weeks (and mine were hellish) will pay you massive dividends in the not too distant future.
 
@gorillamark thank you for this info, it is hard I have got over the inital depression bit and pulled myself together and my husband is being very good and not getting any treats for himself so I'm not tempted and I have decided not to have any treats so when I go back in three months my levels will be low so I'm being strict with myself. For the first time ever today I wasn't even tempted to have any of the cakes that someone bought into work was quite proud of myself, I used to have two and sometimes 3 cakes.

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Believe me I know what you mean, The thing is that the drastic action to get blood sugar (and weight) down is very short term. You do it to kickstart the process. Once the numbers start to come down you can start living ALMOST as you did before, I'm back on a drastic diet for a few weeks not because my blood sugars are up but because I'm p*ss*d off with lugging around the extra weight in this heat.

When not on a diet i eat pretty much what I like. Last week I was walking by the local baker.. It went something like this:
"Oh my they have raspberry cream pastry puffs" (I live in Denmark everything you've ever heard about Danish baking being delicious is true)
I'm going to buy one
Into shop:
Two raspberry cream puffs please.

I really enjoyed them too - yes my blood sugar went up. But it dropped right back down again after a bit.
 
@gorillamark did tell me to have treats if I wanted them but I know once I statf eating something I wont stop I gave up sweets, crisps, cakes, chocolate and biscuits for 18 months and once I started eating choclate again that was it had to have more, then sweets and cake followes although I never went back to eating crisps again because I used to buy a multi pack and eat all six packets, that was three years ago so no way am I going back there, all that fat!

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All that starch and fat. For you (and me) it's the starch in the crisps that's the kicker.

It can be very difficult not to eat the whole box of/packet of whatever. But if you stop and think about it. What you're gorging on is very low quality stuff. Kick up the quality a bit. You know those really good quality chocolates that you buy singly? Put one in your mouth and let it dissolve sloooooooooooowly - if it was a piece of music it'd be a rhapsody on a theme of chocolate.

You've been conditioned over the years to eat all sorts of stuff like oh I don't know cadbury's creme eggs? We all have been conditioned we're bombarded day in day out with advertising urging us to eat more and more ever more and all of it has had the bejesus processed out it and God only knows what added into it. But it's quick fix low quality stuff. Get fussy and go gourmet. You'll enjoy it way more and you can be smug in the knowledge that not only are you enjoying life an awful lot more but you're also no longer subsidising people whose only interest in you is how much money they can entice you into spending.
 
@gorillamark I really don't think you should be encouraging a newbie to eat chocolate, especially when she has just told you that once she starts she can't stop. It is difficult enough for her at the moment. You may be able to eat like that and keep your BS down, but most can't. Very few of us can "eat pretty much what I like" This is poor advice for a newbie, in my opinion. Type 2's cannot eat pretty much what they like at any time, whether trying to lose weight or not. That is possibly how they became diabetic in the first place.
 
One of the things I miss most is sweet toffee like haribou wine gums etc. I tried the sugar free ones and they don't work except the ones made with stavia
I wish more manufactures would develop this. Coca Cola is going to introduce a range of drinks partially sweetened with stavia

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i suggest you re-read what I've written. Starting with:

From this it follows that if you sharply reduce your intake of those chemicals your system won't be under the strain that eating "normally" is putting it under.

So you need to reduce or best of all eliminate sugary and starchy foods. The sugar because your body can't handle it and it's poisoning you. The Various form of starch (because they turn into sugar when you're digesting them).​

And going on from there. There is absolutely no point in somebody putting themselves through a hellishly difficult regime getting discouraged falling off the wagon and winding up back to where they started from or worse. Once she's got to the point where her diabetes is under control she can then experiment with what works for her.
 
I know what you mean mch1966 for me it was boiled sweets. I still miss some of those.
 

Nothing wrong with your initial post at all. I liked it. It was your subsequent posts that worried me. Yes of course she can experiment once her BS is well controlled, but not before. I'm off.
 
Bluetit1802 said:
Nothing wrong with your initial post at all. I liked it. It was your subsequent posts that worried me. Yes of course she can experiment once her BS is well controlled, but not before. I'm off.
Click to expand...
Food is a pleasure - nature has designed us to take pleasure in eating. If we turn it into a chore we make life unnecessarily difficult for ourselves with the result that many people in our situation wind up either not improving or even getting worse. If somebody finds it difficult or impossible to moderate how much of something they eat - which is something I'm all too familiar with, they can forgo the pleasure entirely but that is very very difficult. OR they can work around it. I've outlined one workaround. I'll repeat what I said and indeed emphasised earlier:

Once the numbers start to come down you can start living ALMOST as you did before​
 
Hi Molly and welcome to the forum In addition to the information you have already received from Jack and gorillamark, here is the information we give to new members and I hope you find it helpful.


BASIC INFORMATION FOR NEWLY DIAGNOSED DIABETICS

Diabetes is the general term to describe people who have blood that is sweeter than normal. A number of different types of diabetes exist.

A diagnosis of diabetes tends to be a big shock for most of us. It’s far from the end of the world though and on this forum you’ll find over 100,000 people who are demonstrating this.

On the forum we have found that with the number of new people being diagnosed with diabetes each day, sometimes the NHS is not being able to give all the advice it would perhaps like to deliver - particularly with regards to people with type 2 diabetes.

The role of carbohydrate

Carbohydrates are a factor in diabetes because they ultimately break down into sugar (glucose) within our blood. We then need enough insulin to either convert the blood sugar into energy for our body, or to store the blood sugar as body fat.

If the amount of carbohydrate we take in is more than our body’s own (or injected) insulin can cope with, then our blood sugar will rise.

The bad news

Research indicates that raised blood sugar levels over a period of years can lead to organ damage, commonly referred to as diabetic complications.

The good news

People on the forum here have shown that there is plenty of opportunity to keep blood sugar levels from going too high. It’s a daily task but it’s within our reach and it’s well worth the effort.

Controlling your carbs

The info below is primarily aimed at people with type 2 diabetes, however, it may also be of benefit for other types of diabetes as well.
There are two approaches to controlling your carbs:

  • Reduce your carbohydrate intake
  • Choose ‘better’ carbohydrates

Reduce your carbohydrates

A large number of people on this forum have chosen to reduce the amount of carbohydrates they eat as they have found this to be an effective way of improving (lowering) their blood sugar levels.

The carbohydrates which tend to have the most pronounced effect on blood sugar levels tend to be starchy carbohydrates such as rice, pasta, bread, potatoes and similar root vegetables, flour based products (pastry, cakes, biscuits, battered food etc) and certain fruits.

Choosing better carbohydrates

Another option is to replace ‘white carbohydrates’ (such as white bread, white rice, white flour etc) with whole grain varieties. The idea behind having whole grain varieties is that the carbohydrates get broken down slower than the white varieties –and these are said to have a lower glycaemic index.
http://www.diabetes.co.uk/food/diabetes-and-whole-grains.html

The low glycaemic index diet is often favoured by healthcare professionals but some people with diabetes find that low GI does not help their blood sugar enough and may wish to cut out these foods altogether.

Read more on carbohydrates and diabetes

Eating what works for you

Different people respond differently to different types of food. What works for one person may not work so well for another. The best way to see which foods are working for you is to test your blood sugar with a glucose meter.

To be able to see what effect a particular type of food or meal has on your blood sugar is to do a test before the meal and then test after the meal. A test 2 hours after the meal gives a good idea of how your body has reacted to the meal.

The blood sugar ranges recommended by NICE are as follows:

Blood glucose ranges for type 2 diabetes
  • Before meals: 4 to 7 mmol/l
  • 2 hours after meals: under 8.5 mmol/l
Blood glucose ranges for type 1 diabetes (adults)
  • Before meals: 4 to 7 mmol/l
  • 2 hours after meals: under 9 mmol/l
Blood glucose ranges for type 1 diabetes (children)
  • Before meals: 4 to 8 mmol/l
  • 2 hours after meals: under 10 mmol/l
However, those that are able to, may wish to keep blood sugar levels below the NICE after meal targets.

Access to blood glucose test strips

The NICE guidelines suggest that people newly diagnosed with type 2 diabetes should be offered:

  • structured education to every person and/or their carer at and around the time of diagnosis, with annual reinforcement and review
  • self-monitoring of plasma glucose to a person newly diagnosed with type 2 diabetes only as an integral part of his or her self-management education

Therefore both structured education and self-monitoring of blood glucose should be offered to people with type 2 diabetes. Read more on getting access to bloodglucose testing supplies.

You may also be interested to read questions to ask at a diabetic clinic

Note: This post has been edited from Sue/Ken's post to include up to date information.
 
@daisy1 thank you for this good explanations I appreciate it
 
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