Just to keep this vaguley relevant to breakfast, I did experiement with the Fabuous Frapuccino this morning and made it a bit thicker, but my blood sugar shot up, I suspect from a major liver dump and my very poor morning eating habits at weekends
Didn't eat until gone 10.30 again
so I don't know if the rise was due to swapping soya cream for double cream and soya isolate powder for whey isolate powder, as I doubt adding slightly more tofu made much of a difference to the overall carb content. However, my 12-year-old had a glass of the mixture this morning and pronounced it delicious
red, you need to educate and inform yourself. You also need to be very clear about what you want from the medical team supporting you and stick to your agenda. You need to develop skills in not being distracted by patronising comments about your ability to understand them :evil: It takes a lot of courage to reject the advice of your doctors. You have made a really good start judging by your numbers so far
I had gestational diabetes in 1997, I was being tested and monitored in a clinic run by the diabetic consultant and my obstetrician. I eventually said "do I have gestaional diabetes", I didn't get an answer :evil: The diabetic conutlant simply said "Ooh! You are a sharp one, aren't you?" :evil: :evil: :evil: I missed the clinic where I would have got the diagnosis beacuse I was giving birth at the time :roll: I eventually got my diagnosis of gestational diabetes when my son was 8 and I was invited to my GPs regular diabetic clinic - this was 4 years pre-diagnosis :|
I know medicine saves peoples lives, but it isn't always right and it isn't the precise science we'd like to believe it is :? Doctors get things wrong and they have off days - even the excellent ones, like my GP. And some of them feel very threatened by informed patients :roll: My relationship with the doctors that treat me is based on then diagnosing what is wrong. Then they can present me with the treatment options and I can make an infomed decision about what I will do about it, and this includes not following the advice they give.
I do not accept the standard advice the NHS gives diabetics is helpful to me. This is that I should follow a diet based on glucose (which is what starchy carbohydrate turns in to) and take medication to counteract the effects :? For me to be able to manage my condition and maximise my potential for good health I need to understand the chemistry and what else can be done to deal with the problem.
I also tend to work on the principle that if I don't have a choice the medics will be saying things like - you will die if you don't do this within the next few minutes :? Diabetes isn't like that, if we get diagnosed fairly early we get a few years to educate ourselves and make some changes :mrgreen: I have been working in units of 3-6 months and would become much more compliant if I was concerned about the results I was getting.
For example, when I called my GP at the end of January complaining of chest pain I followed the advice to the letter. I turned up at the surgery the same day and he checked me over, I took the asprin he prescribed and he refered me very promptly to the cardiac clinic. The outcome is that the chest pain tuned out to be muscular pain combined with anxiety (there is no evidence of heart disease) and the blood work picked up unacceptably high blood sugars. I have taken his advice to lose weght, but not to take metformin.
Since then we have established that I don't have retinopathy, other tests done by my podiatrist show that I probably don't have neuropathy, and the regular blood tests show my numbers are improving. Regular contact with my GP also shows he is the one now plagued with anxiety about my rapidly improving health :roll:
I went in to a bit of a tailspin about the diagnosis to start with and read around. I accidentally stumbled upon
http://www.bloodsugar101.comat a very early stage and it directed me towards all kinds of alternative and much more positive ways of managing diabetes that gave me hope that it didn't have to be progressive. Then I found this website and have used the info I have acquired from other diabetics who post here (and who have the kind of control I aspire to) to manage my diabetes by reducing the carbs.
If you are looking for online information to educate yourself I'd suggest looking at bloodsugar101 and also David Mendosa's website
http://www.mendosa.com and
http://www.dsolve.com and Alan (who posts here occasionally)
http://loraldiabetes.blogspot.com/2006/10/d-day.html
This is all good sound information that will help you to understand the information present in your numbers and will help you to ask questions.
You will also need to develop a few assertiveness skills including not getting angry when they patronise you and use of the broken record technique to keep it simple and persist. Also, asking for a double appointment when you need time to discuss something is a technique that works for me.
We do the best we can, as often as we can with what we have got. We base the decsions we make on the information we have at the time we make them. Taking medication to treat your diabetes isn't a failure, but developing avoidable complications because of poor advice or not knowing how to interpret the advice is.
PS, I'd start with bloodsugar101 even if it is American and the numbers are in differnt units - just divide the American numbers by 18