Whoopsie, new and ketotic!

Hi there!

Not sure where to start!

So about 3-4 years ago was diagnosed as type 2 diabetic (with all the symptoms). Big shock and a massive lifestyle change, completely changed diet. Had an initial response with my BM's falling to 'normal' target range. However it was becoming increasingly hard to control my BM with diet alone. I'd lost weight (lost 60+kg) and worked hard at the diet. Met a new diabetic consultant who ran a battery of new tests and what not. I was found to be GAD+ve and most likely LADA but we're still not sure. Consultant was happy to keep me off insulin for a little while so long as my HBa1c didn't rise (which it didn't!)

Had a bad couple of weeks, lower will power, higher stress levels and the introduction of gliclazide, which was all enough to push me over the edge and have sugars sufficient enough to throw my ketones way up! 26 hours in A+E / hospital was sufficient to get me started on a new insulin regime. Still don't have a formal diagnosis, guessing I might never get a straight answer but after a lot of reading around LADA and the deteroriation following gliclazide I'm happy enough to consider myself 1.5 but going to call myself type 1 for the sake of ease with family and friends!!

After 4 years of a very controlled diet it feels odd to be a little more liberated and trying what a 'normal' diet is like. Now a week into the new regime, learning the hard way what my daily hypo feels like as well as learning that hypo's don't give me the free pass to eat all the cake I want!

For the past 2 years my HBa1c has been around 60mmol/mol or 7.6%.
Current med regime is 15u levemir and 5u of novarapid with my meals, not adjusting dosage dependent on each meal (yet, assuming I will be clever enough at some point to that!).

Just wanted to say hi and give a bit of background on me in case anyone else is going through similar...

Josh

Thanks everyone for your welcome!

Just bumping along, trying to normalise my BM. Getting there!!

@P17BULL I think that poorer compliance with my previous LCHF diet (though i didn't know that was an actual thing at the time) coupled with a rapidly droping functional pancreas helped give me the ketoacidosis. I believe, but cannot prove, that the gliclazide increased the rate of detoration of my islet cells as it would have made them work harder to produce more insulin. It certainly wasn't intentional!

Because you are low carbing etc I also wanted to say that I don't want what happened to me to be confused with ketoGENESIS which I believe is a relatively good thing / symptom for those trying to manage on a pure LCHF (Low Carbohydrate High Fat) diet, as opposed to someone like me as described above which is a ketoACIDOSIS which can be life threatening! I believe the ketoacidosis is caused by high sugar levels for a period of time, whereas the ketogenesis comes from the metabolising of fats due to an absence of carbohydrates from the LCHF diet but I'm really no expert on this issue (just attempting to answer your question).

Lots of users including @Kristin251 and others have given me information on the benefits that they've had from the LCHF diet and I'm sure they'll be able to better answer your questions.

If your interested in finding out more information about LCHF have a look on the diet forum as I'm currently reading and learning alot there about it because my sister @CEM2 is posting on her experiences with LCHF and her T2 diabetes. There is a thing called carb flu (perhaps low carb flu?!). I'm certainly not educated enough to have any opinions or real facts on the matter of LCHF diet.

Thanks

Josh

Ah yes, I re-read my original post and it never states what my BS was before. I was 16+mmol/L with a high I think of around 22mmol/L when my ketones started rising. Very high!

I must say I'm only logging the carb content into MySugr simply because I want all my information in one place! I wish there was a better app that had weight graphs, HbA1c charts etc etc. I guess I can export from MySugr into excel and make them all... MySugr certainly was recommened to me and is much better than what I was using before for entering more data and managing insulin etc. Although, my previous software did overlay on the sugar graph Todays (bright white) with yesterdays (slightly pale) and the day befores (very pale) which was very good at spotting larger trends!