Soooo hungry

Why are you frightened to eat more calories?

My readings were all in the 4's and 5's yesterday and I had to leave some of my lunch since I couldn't eat any more.

Having been working with my meter for some months I have replaced some of the meals with others that give me lower readings. Yesterday it was the turn of the beef stir fry. I overdid it and there was a small mountain of it but I can eat that all day without ill effect. If a stir fry just has the meat and vegetables in it then you can eat your fill.

I eat more conventional meals on other days and many of the meals have some carbohydrates of a reduced quantity in them.

There is no need to go hungry. If you do that then your diet will not be sustainable and you will slip back into bad habits.

I eat meat providing it is identifiable as having come from an animal. e.g. steak, wing, fillet, breast etc. You must not eat processed foods. Things like goujon, dipper, kiev and some sausages should be avoided since they may contain large amounts of flour. There is at least one GI list which says they have to include such foods due to them not actually being meat.

I eat vegetables. I have a vegetable garden and I buy stir fry components. I do not include potato as a vegetable in this exercise.

Things to ration carefully are foods which contain sugar (obviously), flour, rice or potato. These are the main source of carbohydrates but strangely one of them may affect you more than the others. For example I cannot be in the same room as flour without high blood sugar readings but can eat a fair portion of potatoes.

There may be no need to totally give up flour, rice and potato but if you have a meter find out how each of them affects you and reduce the amount until you stay within whatever limit you have set for yourself. Also, it's not unpleasant to occasionally have a meal with just the meat and veg with the knowledge that it will not raise your blood sugar by much.

My meat and veg meals these days are often stir fry type meals. It is important to add a sauce for flavour and this makes them a very nice meal indeed. I had beef and broccoli stir fry yesterday with a sauce made from soy sauce, ground ginger and garlic.

I still drink wine but not with the meal. If you wish to eat/ drink more then pace yourself. Having the whole day's supply at one sitting is not wise. Smaller and spaced out gluttony is still possible within reason. e.g. wait for two hours after your meal, take your blood sugar level and if it is low there might be room for a glass of wine or a square of chocolate etc.

The whole idea is to change your eating habits to nice foods that you enjoy because you should be eating like that for the rest of your life. Starving yourself and suffering foods that you don't really like just means that you will give up and go back to the start again.

I make the soy sauce one but it is from a recipe published on Netmums. I buy Blue Dragon sauces from Tesco and my favourite one is Oyster and Spring onion.

If you are having a lump of chicken then putting coleslaw on top improves it dramatically. Slicing spring onions are not half bad with chicken but if you use onion gravy instead of the usual stuff then it can also be nice. Marinating the chicken in onion gravy is even nicer and not expensive.

Enjoy the melon and apples. Use them as snacks between meals. Test your sugar and you just may find you can buy some more next week.

I did try the soy and linseed bread and I didn't like it. Some people do and I am jealous. It has been a quest of mine to find a bread that I can eat but I have not yet succeeded. Actually there is an experimental loaf in the oven right now but I don't hold out much hope.

Er, what was the other question.

Coconut sugar is fine if you enjoy it. If you don't enjoy it then you will find that you don't persist with it.

I am not a sugar person anyway so that is one bullet I dodged.

I would avoid the melon like the plague. Most diabetics can't tolerate melon, banana and grapes. Try the apple, have a small amount and test.

Take it from me, and believe me I know what I am talking about, you need to up your calories. Try to eat a minimum of 1,200 a day, if you eat lower than that, you are unlikely to be giving your body all the vitamins, minerals and nutrition it needs and you could end up very ill. When I was diagnosed as a T2 the Metformin had one hell of an appetite suppressant effect on me, and my calorie intake was tiny. If you are diagnosed as a T2 then it's for life, so you need to be looking for a diet that you can maintain, and that it will maintain you - for life!!

I am fine now and eat around 1,500 calories a day, often more, but I make sure I eat as wide a variety of foods as possible. I read up on vitamins to see which foods are rich in them. I eat nuts, seeds, oily fish, as well as a minimum of five fruits and veg a day, but most days I have 7-8+ a day. Restricting your calories will help you lose weight, but reduce them to low intentionally and you will be ill.

There you go, Defren is also tellling you to eat more. There is no point in starving. Some people who practice low/no carbing say that they lose weight naturally as a result. I also lost a little weight (7Kg) but if I eat and drink well then I can put on weight. What I am saying is that I did not try to lose/gain weight, it just happened.

The experimental loaf results bear repeating to see if the numbers stay the same. 7 before eating two slices of bread and butter and 8.6 two hours later. This was an SD meter so you can probably knock one point off of both those readings if you wish to compare them to the reading from any other meter.

The history of this is that I often notice anomalies in the readings and I like to experiment until I can explain them. This is how I found out that garlic kievs are 60% carbohydrate.

Anyway, back to the subject. A couple of months ago I had the workers in so I cooked a stew with the idea that they could dip in when they wanted. I took a risk and had two small dumplings with mine since I couldn't resist. My +2 hour reading was surprisingly low. The rate at which carbohydrates are absorbed into the body can be slowed if they are eaten with fat so I assumed that the suet was being helpful. I made a note to bake a loaf with suet in it to see if it was possible/edible.

My first attempt could not be sliced since it was crumbly. In fact it could barely stand up on its own. The local crows were grateful and ate it for me. I made a note to reduce the fat slowly in future attempts until I got a result.

Yesterday I baked a 400g loaf. I ran out of suet. I intended to put 100g in but there was less than 50g in the box so I included a couple of slivers of butter. I will have to do this experiment several more times to find out just how little fat I need to put in.

It tasted lovely and the rest of it is now in the freezer. The crows can wait.

Squire Fulwood said:

There you go, Defren is also tellling you to eat more. There is no point in starving. Some people who practice low/no carbing say that they lose weight naturally as a result. I also lost a little weight (7Kg) but if I eat and drink well then I can put on weight. What I am saying is that I did not try to lose/gain weight, it just happened.

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I did lose a lot of weight, then I did the Newcastle diet and the weight poured from me then as well. I am now eating a much healthier amount of calories and the weight is still coming off. I should be at my ideal weight by the end of the summer.

Maddie, please don't think starving yourself is the answer. I know from personal experience it really isn't, even though I didn't do it intentionally. My story is all on the forum somewhere. Get your calories up, eat healthy amounts and varied foods, and you will feel great and the weight will drop. I eat all pure healthy unprocessed foods, and I look and feel like a different person. I am 47 years old, and I looked it and then some, not now though. I look healthier than I have in years and will be back to my pre baby size and shape really soon. That is with a low carb diet, but I promise, even with healthy amounts of calories the weight is still coming off. I read an article recently that said woman my age found weight loss hard. I almost emailed them and told them they were nuts, but then realised that many woman will be on calorie counting low fat diets, the ones that have been prescribed for years, and people get nowhere. I just grinned and looked at the pile of "far too big, must go to the charity shop" clothes.

You will do it, but do it the right way.

Cholesterol and diabetes are not good bedfellows. This sort of thing drives your nurse nuts.

The best advice I can give you is to be your own person. Eat what you like but test two hours later and make a decision as to whether you should eat that same thing again or whether you should reduce the quantity you eat or cut it out altogether.

Every person has a personal journey in this. You know what you would like to eat. The meter will tell you what you should not eat. It is up to you to find something that you both like and can eat.

The advice I have had from my surgery is confusing since they say that I should have bread and scrape and use a margerine that is approved.

Eating real bread and putting a scrape of margerine on it is not the best possible advice since I cannot eat bread at all at the moment.

Maddiemo1 said:

Thanks for advice. I really don't want to loose weight I would like to stay the same. But the problem is its so hard to fine what to eat. I'm sure I will get used to it, I do worry about my cholesterol as its six. Should I be eating things like fry ups cheese etc? Do you think cholesterol goes up on low carb diet?

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Fry ups and cheese are fine, as are eggs and meat. Safe healthy calories, that are good for you, while your carbs will remain exceptionally low.

My cholesterol was high, I changed to a low carb high fat diet and my cholesterol is now normal, but I am careful and only eat healthy natural fats, no sunflower oil, veg oil or margarine/spreads. I use real butter, fry in avocado oil, coconut oil, virgin olive oil, and I love cheese, full fat Greek yogurt, and eggs. All that "fat" and a low healthy cholesterol. You can only eat high fat if you eat low carb, have a high carb high fat diet and your weight will rocket.

When I was first formally diagnosed in 2009 I was given some diet sheets and some pills. For two years I tried to follow the diet sheets and the blood sugar got higher. I was given a meter

I thought I noticed some discrepancies between the diet sheets and sat down to highlight where they disagreed with each other. Within seconds I noticed that one was written by the British Hypertension Society and the other was entitled A Diet to Reduce Your Cholesterol. Neither of them had anything to do with diabetes.

I realised that I was on my own with my meter and that I had to write a new diet sheet with a strong bias towards my own likes and dislikes and it had to be one I could live with. It was a bit of a surprise when I got into it since it showed that the two diet sheets issued to me originally were just about worse than useless where diabetes is concerned.

This is what I meant when I wrote that cholesterol and diabetes are not good bedfellows. A published diet to improve your cholesterol may/may not succeed but it could make your diabetes worse. It normally asks you to eat wholemeal bread and avoid fat at all costs. Worse was to come since I was sent to see a dietician and in my personal action plan she wrote.

“3. Have sources of starchy carbohydrates at each meal.”

Even my diabetic nurse raised her eyebrows at that one.

So the purpose of this post is to say that with the aid of your meter you should pick and choose the advice you take. Even the NHS advice is doubtful on occasions.

From what I have learned so far Defren’s advice is pure gold and has given me one or two more ideas to try. (possibly three or four).

Whatever you were trying to do by going hungry just cannot be right.