PART 6 Blood Sugar + A secret of the Universe

Today I am going to be a little bit more specific about what I eat, but before I do I would like to make a point. This is what I do, what works for ME and how I feel. I am not saying this is what YOU should do.

In fact, if you start the day by snorting a few lines for breakfast, drop a couple of tabs of a acid for lunch and finish off the day by shooting up what ever, that's fine with me so long as you don't expect me to follow suit. It's your choice and I will try not to judge. After all, who says good health is a prerequisite for life on this planet. Now, if you beat up some old lady in order to feed your dietary needs, or subject your children to your drug habit, I will judge, like I do when I see the morbidly obese  ADHD children, filled with Ritalin and sugar in the supermarket; little people at the beginnings of their lives pushed into ill health and probably early deaths for the sake of a little "easy" parenting. I watch them clinging on to the pudgy fingers of their mum as she pushes a cart loaded with processed, easy to eat, sugar-filled crap, while at the same time drinking a bottle of diet coke. I will judge then!  And as you might guess, I do. Not only the parents but the food manufacturers, advertisers and "big pharma" who relentlessly promote this stuff as healthy and natural.  Not nice of me, but I get mad!  What you do to yourself is your business but kids need a good start in life and good food to develop their full and healthy potential. Did you spot the flaw in this rant...!? One hand for little Jimmy, one hand  for the cart and one for the coke...! But you get the point. What you eat is truly up to you and that is fine with me, because it is your life. Also please don't say to me "I can't do that"  then ask me over and over again what you should do instead. That pisses me off big time. If I could have one wish it would be that I could solve all the hunger and ill health in the world with one tap of my magic wand. Everyone happy and healthy. But that would be a wish wasted, because unless one stops doing that which is causing ill health, high blood sugar, wars, etc., all will return, only with greater strength.  Remember the 80 / 20 ratio... first stop doing, then do.


BREAKFAST

Breakfast is the hardest meal of the day to change as it is so set in our minds what constitutes a healthy and proper breakfast. All the things that are promoted as a healthy breakfast are so often  high in sugar.

Now I will let you into a secret that makes all the difference in stabilising my B/S.
Start off the day correctly balancing your blood sugar and the rest of the day will follow along nicely.

If you start off with your cereals, fruit juice, fruit, porridge, toast and marmalade you are starting off your day with sugar, sugar, sugar, sugar, sugar and sugar! Up swings the pendulum high on the sugar side, in comes the insulin to counter and as the previous meal seems to affect the body's response to the next meal, the apple and cheese at lunch time gets a hammering. Also, before you even get to that, come 11am you are ready to kill for a bun with your coffee...

So back to ME. I start the day before I do anything, with a glass of Sole (warm water and a half teaspoon of Himalayan salt) then after I have fiddled around for a bit I have a mug of buttered coffee that is freshly brewed, mould-free coffee (not your instant, toxic stuff). Into this I blend 25 grams of grass-fed butter and a couple of teaspoons of coconut oil. Zap it hard with a hand blender and off you go. And before you say ugh! Have you tried it? If not, have a go. It's amazing, but start gently and check out "Bulletproof coffee/disaster pants"!
On one of these I can go quite easily on 'til about 2pm or so. Sometimes I will have three eggs made into an omelette, scrambled eggs or some bacon and eggs, not the stuff that is full of sugar but bacon, proper!

In fact and here is the important thing, start the day with a Protein breakfast not a Carb one. You then don't get the swings in your blood sugar levels and it sets you up for the day.

Now before you also say..."all that fat, all those eggs, etc." please go with me for a bit.

Up to now we have been advised to eat according to the standard food pyramid. You've all seen the diagram. Base layer, Carbs, making up the main part of your diet. The next layer, fruit and veg.  Next small layer, lean protein and smallest top layer, fats and oils. This has been the norm we have all lived by, has been and still is, in some cases, promoted by the medical profession as a healthy diet. Fats are always seen as bad. Check out where this model comes from. Check out Ancel Keys. It gives you a food plan that is based on sugar, follower by more sugar in the form of fruit and root veg, followed by protein with most of the good stuff removed and topped off with truly toxic fats; the highly refined polyunsaturated!

Now take that pyramid and turn it on it's head and there you have my diet. Sort of high in good fats, a moderate amount of good quality protein, lots of above-the-ground vegetables  (root veg are very high in sugar), good amounts of nuts and seeds, but very little fruit. Check out fructose.

The important thing is to eat real food, the best you can afford, the highest quality you can get.

I have also cut out wheat but this deserves a blog of it's own as, for me, it has done so much and I feel it's of huge importance. In the meantime have a look at Tom O'bryan's  and  David Perlmutter's videos and stuff.

One thing folk keep telling me is, "I don't eat much sugar!"
Just check out this list of a few staples,

1 cup of milk = 2 teaspoons of sugar
1 bowl of breakfast cereal with milk = 8 teaspoons of sugar
1 cup of rice (cooked) = 9 teaspoons of sugar
1 banana = 5 teaspoons of sugar
1 baked potato (not including skin) = 7 teaspoons of sugar
2 slices of bread = 4 teaspoons of sugar
1 average soda/soft drink = 8 teaspoons of sugar
1 large soda/soft drink = up to 32 teaspoons of sugar

then add up your daily intake. They reckon the average American eats 150/160 lbs of sugar a year. In the UK... I don't know, but judging by the rise in diabetes and the general shape of folk, we must be getting on that way. 150 lbs of sugar is nigh on 75 bags!!!

It has been said that genetics is the important factor in T2D. Genetics might supply the gun, but lifestyle pulls the trigger! Also, I would recommend reading some of the latest studies and reports about genetics and epigenetics. It's turning out to be not quite what we thought it was.

And that's it for today... but before I go, one of the "secrets of the universe" explained.

What is a Pufflet?
A Pufflet is one of my inventions for breakfast. It consists of 2 to 3 eggs, 1 teaspoon of turmeric, a  good grind of himalayan salt and a good grind of black pepper.

Put into a jug and blend hard with a wand blender.
Heat a frying pan with a good knob of butter, until butter is melted.
Pour in the mixture.
Put on the lid - and a lid is important for this to work, you could use an upturned plate.
Turn down the heat to about half.
Go make the coffee.
Wait until Pufflett puffs up as in the photo.
Then take off lid and watch in disappointment as it sinks.
Eat and fill your internal cavity - not your wall cavity!
This is not an omelette as the turmeric seems to change the texture a lot. I find it more filling and turmeric is, itself, amazing stuff. As an aside, have a look at the research on turmeric.

See you soon, love and light and all good stuff.

THE REAL PART 5...THE SILENT KILLER AND YOU.

Hi di Ho! And off we go!

A little while back I wrote about how it seems that everyone is getting a belly, that the weight people put on seems to be concentrated around the middle. Accumulation of fat in this area has been linked to insulin resistance and T2D. It is not a good place to have extra fat as it also indicates that you might have visceral fat deposits. Visceral fat does you no good and like T2D can happen in folk who are quite slim. I have always carried most of my blubber around the waist. It was one of the things that led me to thinking about insulin resistance.

Now, there has been some really interesting research done on body fat and it blows the pants off our ideas of what fat is. I apologise if you already know this but to me it was news and I found it exciting. I will not go into it in any great detail but will point you in the right direction so that you can get more accurate and detailed information. How I viewed my spare tyre was that the fat was laid down because I had eaten excess and that it was just a store ready for a time of famine or the like. Fat was just that... fat! Like a few packs of lard kept for a rainy day. Not actually doing anything other than getting in the way when you tried to do up you shoelaces. I did believed that a certain amount of rubbish was tied up in it as a way to protect the body from toxic junk. I saw it rather like the tub of dripping that was one of the staples in every household when I was a kid and was deemed one of the major causes of heart problems when margarine was launched onto the market.

Well, it seems I was wrong on both counts. Far from being just an inert storage system, fat is a part of the endocrine system. We are talking hormones here! Production of hormones such as oestrogen, leptin and well...  go and read it for yourself, you will be amazed!  So rather than do nothing it plays an important part in our health and in sorting out T2D.
I also found out that eating fat does not make you fat and is, in fact, an absolute " must" for good health. Check out what the brain is made up of? However, all fats are not created equal. "Good" fats are needed while "bad" fats are definitely not.

Some folk say everything in moderation. This, I believe, is total rubbish and if you read the up-to-date research, so do others.

Taking responsibility for your health is a choice. There is no right or wrong in how you make this choice but it should be based on reliable facts, not down right lies and miss-information. Then armed with these facts you can choose to smoke 40 a day, do drugs or whatever turns your crank.

At this time I would just like to point you to a couple of web sites that have helped me. The first is Tom O'Bryan's.    www.thedr.com
The second is  David  Pulmutter's    www.drperlmutter.com
Then Dave Asprey's   www.bulletproofexec.com  which had some interesting stuff including Bulletproof coffee which is how I start my day. Poke around on these sites. These guys are not "lightweights" and their personal stories are very interesting.

William Davis    www.wheatbellyblog.com  He has a really easy to read book with lots of info.
And sign up for the blogs.

That's enough for now. Next blog will be a step by step log of what I do now, including such wonders as my own creation... "The Pufflet".
Last blood test 77 mg/dl just 1and a half hours after my main meal and a 10 minute walk....

PART 4 Blood Sugar and me

In the last three rambles I told you a little about the trip I made getting my blood sugar down from 260-ish to where it is now - in the low 80s/upper 70s.  I have not been academic about this as I am not an academic, though in the past 2 years I have read so much stuff, not because I needed to but because I found the whole way our bodies work amazing.

What I have also found is that there is amazing ignorance and indifference amongst many doctors and health care workers. A great deal of this has to do with the lack of time they have to spare with their patients, a lot more has to do with the system and some has to do with just not keeping up with current research and a heavy reliance on the pharmaceutical companies to supply the answers. Some, on the other hand, are amazing.

What I would like you to do is accept that the answer is in your hands. You know your body better than anyone. Please, if you have found out that your blood sugar is high, or you have been diagnosed with pre-diabetes, STOP and look around you.

When I was a lad (that was just after the great flood and while Noah's grandson was still head boy at our school), there were hardly any pupils with diabetes. T2D was something that came on with age (late onset diabetes). There was even only a token number of overweight pupils.

Go into the high street now and look around.  A vast number of folk are over weight, even the kids. All seem to carry weight around the middle; even the slim ones have a belly. Maybe you have heard the predictions for T2D are beyond belief with some quoting 1in3 in the near future. One question. WHY?

If it is dark in your house you have two solutions. If it is day time, open the curtains. If it is night time, switch on the light. Neither is complicated, neither needs years of training to perform, but what both solutions have in common is that they both require you to do something. You do not need to know about weaving material or how electricity is generated.  All you need is the knowledge of how something operates; how to depress a switch. But you need to know that there is something you can do to solve the problem. Ugg, the cave man, would have no idea about the light switch. He would be breaking up your sideboard to make a fire.

All I have written in the blogs are simply my ideas and those are simple!  But what I have done is something and so must you. You can't rely on other folk to sort it out for you before you sort out what needs sorting. For example even if the doctor tells you that your bloods are ok - a little on the high side, but ok - you probably have a problem. Recent ideas and research show that blood sugars even in the currently accepted "OK" range are reducing your chances of a long and healthy life. Never forget that illness is big business!

If you find your waking blood sugar reading is 100 or over you need to start to do something now. Now it will be easy. Later... well, just check up what can happen if you develop T2D and secondly look at the folk who are on medication and how healthy they are.

So take responsibility into your own hands, trust no one and don't believe for one moment that the food industry or big pharma has your interests at heart.

Remember you can reverse/cure HBS. YOU can! T2D is a symptom. It is not the same as T1D.

So after all this patronising waffle, what have I done and what do I do now?

Firstly what I have stopped doing. Here come those bullets marks again!
Cut out all "bad" fats/oils.
Cut out all processed foods.
Cut out/down carbs.

Now for what to do.

Eat for nutrition, not pleasure (get your pleasure elsewhere - it's just marketing that makes eating the centre of all pleasure).
Eat Real Food.
Eat lots of good fat - the omega 3s.
Check out the up-to-date research. Don't rely on the stuff that is churned out by charities and doctors using the drug companies research.
Sleep. Contrary to what has been banded around, that you should wear your under pants over your trousers, multi task and keep the world safe, you are not superhuman! You are human and you are super, but you do need sleep and good sleep, at that. Insufficient or poor sleep can destabilise your BS and how you get good steep is something you need to work at. More later.
Keep hydrated.. This does not mean mindlessly glugging down 8pints a day, come what may. It means watching how you feel. If you are thirsty, drink. Your body has a lot of fluid in it, fluid that contains electrolytes. It needs to be kept topped up!
Then look at the food you eat. Make sure it's as fresh and as natural as you can get. If you eat meat eat happy meat not the stuff that is fed on crap and kept in boxes without seeing the light of day.

And while we are talking about sunlight... you need it. There are only two things that have receptor sights on every cell in the body. One is thyroid hormone, the other is vitamin D (which is not actually a vitamin, but is in fact a hormone, doing a wonderful balancing act with vitamin F) Yes, every single cell needs D. Why then do we not go out in the sun without plastering ourselves with sun screen? Cutting off all that good exposure to those life giving rays... "Skin Cancer!" I hear you shout. Maybe, but maybe not, if very recent research is to be believed. If the balance of Vit D and Vit F is right... and if there is not a whole load of free radicals charging around the body... and if the cells of the body are built correctly with the omega 3s allowing normal, healthy cell division, then maybe sunlight is in fact much needed. Just a thought. Check out the recent research. The skin is the largest organ of the body and is capable of absorbing what is put on it (think of nicotine patches and HRT patches).

I really rate and take cinnamon and turmeric every day. I take both of these along with a couple of pieces of chocolate (now re-named in our household as medicine ). Before you shout me down, NOT stuff that calls itself chocolate. The proper stuff. 85% coco solids!
"UGH!" You shout,  "I don't like that, it's bitter. I like real chocolate."
Now I am going to take a break, sigh loudly and give you a lecture on how not to be a chocolate philistine and how to eat REAL chocolate 'cos not only is it nice but it's pretty good for you and a bit of a treat. First make yourself a cup of tea or coffee, then give yourself some time. This simply can't be rushed and needs your full attention. Take a bar of 85%+ good chocolate and break off one piece. Now break that piece into 4s. Take a sip of tea and put one piece in your mouth... NO, don't chew it or swallow. Instead clamp it to the roof of your mouth while you take another sip of tea. Leave it there. Let it just dissolve in your mouth. Don't  swallow or chew, just be aware of the wonders of a universe that brought you the wonders of chocolate! Repeat 3 more times...  Now, tell me... am I right or am I right?!!!

And I try to keep moving. As I have said before, just a little walk after meals. Sometimes I forget, sometimes I don't. But I feel better when I do.

A couple of fish oil "bombs" and an extra Vit D capsule and that is about it. Not very exciting and all pretty simple, but for me it works.

Next time I will give you my rough eating habits with a couple of things I have found makes a huge difference.  But for now, it's "Medicine Time".

Look after yourselves and lots of love.

PART 3 of how I got my bloodsugar down without Medication

PART 3.

When I was a kid there used to be a song that would be sung at pantomimes and kids parties. As so often happens with things like this, the parents thought it hilarious while the kids thought it boring and stupid. It's the sort of song that scares you for life, lodges in your brain and comes back to you in long sleepless nights to repeat and repeat in your ear, to paraphrase another song albeit a true classic.

The song I first referred to is, "There's a hole in my bucket, dear Liza". Now if you don't know it and you have a masochistic streak, do your research and look it up on You Tube. You will regret it, I assure you.

But if you are familiar with this song or would rather take my word for it, it is a question and answer sort of thing, sung between two peoples, that drones on and on until you arrive right back where you started with no answers, just suggestions to various related problems.

This is the same sort of thing that happens when you find you have high blood sugar.

You might have noticed that I keep saying "high blood sugar". A pause here while I deviate a little: I am not the world's fastest typist, so from now on I will do something that really annoys me. I will use initials instead of words. I have hated acronyms ever since I found out that one of the acronyms for ROG was Reactive Organic Gas! Too near the mark!! Please forgive me.

So I keep saying HBS and not T2D. Why? Well, this is something I want to  offer you. Something which for me has a lot of power to it and which I have observed over the years. Once you say I have T2D (or any other illness, for that matter) and then say it over and over again,  you start to identify with the problem and it becomes "I am T2D. This is what I am!"  No, YOU  are not a T2D ! Your body might have an ailment, a problem handling BS, but YOU are not that problem.  YOU are just the same wonderful person you always have been. Words have more power than you can imagine over your body.
Now before you think I have lost the plot, please think of something that really frightens you. Something that pushes all your buttons. Or think of something really sad, something that upsets you. I could say think of something nice, like eating a really juicy piece of fruit or something that you really like, but it seems we are more easily persuaded when it's something that is not nice.. Medicine must taste bad to be any good??? Anyway while you are thinking nasty thoughts check out your body. There will be a reaction, albeit a small one. Why? Because your body is responding to your thoughts with some sort chemical release. Every time you say or think I am T2D  you get a little shot of chemicals. And guess what? That helps push up BS.

Now back to the song... It goes round and round and comes back to the  beginning and this is what happened when I found I had HBS. Round and round it would go, my head was working overtime. It started to take me over. All the main-stream stuff I read and people I spoke to, pointed to a bleak future of gentle/rapid decline, of horrendous side effects from the medication and all the time there seemed to be this despair..."well that's how it is, you will just have to manage it!" On and on. Doom and Gloom. "You need to take some drugs, but that's fine"... Or worse still, "Oh it's,only T2D, everyone gets it at your age! You just have to take a pill!"
I can still remember the impact those words had. Little shots of chemicals all the time.

And it was then that things really started to change for me. I started to look outside rather than concentrate on me. Yes, it seemed that a huge percentage of folk I knew were in the same state as me, but why? I could not remember this being the case only a few short years ago. It's not contagious or infectious so what is happening? What has changed and this is like the song about the bucket, we come right back to the beginning; it must be something we are doing now that we were not doing a few years back. How many kids had T2D? It was called Late Onset Diabetes then. It's the 80/20 ratio. What have we got to stop doing?

Let's backtrack a bit and have some bullet points, then I am going to use a dirty word and put another piece of MY puzzle into pace.


First thing I did was keep testing to check how and when my B/S  went up.
2.   I then took the load of my pancreas by cutting out all carbs that were of no   nutritional use.
3.    I removed all fats and oils that were not the Omega 3s (this is not a life long thing, but a thing that needs to be done in order to re-balance).
4.    I added stuff to my diet that is known to help improve insulin sensitivity.
I recognised that this was a long-term project, as I wanted to get to the cause, not just put on that crash helmet. My time scale was 18 months.
5.     After a while I bought new jeans, then some more!!!
6.     And this is where I will use a dirty word so sorry if it offends! Ready?
 EXERCISE. There, I said it!!
7.       I will stop putting bullets now (if only I can find out how) and explain what I mean by exercise. Pervious to all this I would, if I felt the need to exercise, lie down in a darkened room until the feeling passed. But I found that exercise helps regulate BS. The muscles use it up; it's fuel. Checking my BS sugar after a meal I found that about one hour after my BS was really in my blood stream, also eating a carb free diet did no stop me from wanting more food. You know once you start... just a little more?  So at one hour I went for a walk around the block. It took me about 10 mins. That's it. No running, just a brisk walk. Now do this three times a day and it's 30mins...
I kept at it, did not do any more than the 10 minutes, but what I did do was push myself to walk a little harder and faster as time went on. The result in general fitness was amazing.  What's more, if my BS was high I could see it bring it down. Once when I was out with friends and went off track with my eating, I came home to "brown-trouser-high" BS levels. I walked around my block twice and down it came. Also I find,  after I have had my walk I no longer want to eat more ...  So win win.
9.    Still got those bloody bullets...!! I took a spoonful of cinnamon a day. Now  I also take a few other things which I will go into at a later date. Supplementing your diet is expensive and you have to pick and choose to see what works for you. Again I will list what I use and what I found worked for me later. But for now I just want to tell you my journey.

Quite quickly I found my BS slipped out of the "BT" range, but it was still unstable and unpredictable. What I found is that it goes along for some time, then improves, then plateaus, then improves again.  I found I could control this to some degree.  But best of all it was not getting worse and I was getting slimmer. A little later I will let you know some truly amazing things about weight loss, your gut and the part fat plays in your health. But if I keep going  off at a tangent you will loose the will to live. I have had healing of all types, Acupuncture, Reiki, and so on and still I suffer from run away brain and verbal diarrhoea. No C word for that, sorry!

One last thing before I do hang up for today. I want to tell you about a couple of miracles that have happened through all of this. Might be a little more information than you want, but here goes.

All my life I have suffered with my stomach. I suppose you could call it IBS. But I called it the shits! If anyone suffers this way you will know what a debilitating thing it can be. It did not stop me doing things but it made certain situations a huge worry. For no apparent reason my stomach would turn and I would need a loo post haste, if not before. I won't tell you the number of hedges I have climbed or strange places I have crawled into when the need arose. A 4 hour coach journey was hell, not because I always needed a loo but because I might and of course stress made it worse. Since I have changed my diet (which I will share with you later) all is well and as never before. Cured! Yes I now have used the C word... But even more amazing Anne has suffered from Migraine for most of her adult life. When at it's worst it would put her to bed with a day wiped out and the next day she would feel like a bit of chewed string. Both of us had tried many things, some had helped but none got to the real cause.

Anne started to change her diet, along with me, out of ease and here is the nub... for 2 years now she has been migraine free, except for once when we were taken out for a meal! So there is something very good that has come out of the hassle.

All will be explained as time goes by, but for now I think you have enough to play around with.
Remember all this is just a very rough outline and is only what I have done. Constructive feed-back is always good, as are the nice words I have received already.



Lot more stuff to come. I have just remembered something else, but that can wait until next time.
Love to you all.

PART 2 Blood Sugar.

So off we go again. Once again, I am not telling you what to do. If you are happy with your health that's fine with me, BUT and this is a big but, if you ask please allow me to tell you what I think. If you think what I say is crap that is very OK. All I know is what is working for me and I really hope that somewhere in this ramble you will find something that helps to improve you life. We all have the right to be 100%+ healthy. After all, someone has to help me keep this world running!!!!

As I said last time, the first thing I did was panic. Luckily we live in an age when we can get information quickly and aplenty and delivered directly into our living rooms via the internet. Unluckily a lot of this information is contradictory and confusing, none more so than what constitutes normal blood sugar levels. What's more, is seems that the goal posts keep moving. One would hope that this is because, as knowledge increases and improves we have a more accurate idea of what normal is, but this appears not to be the case. Politics and profits feature large here!

The trouble with high B/S seemed to me to be twofold. Firstly, the end result is that all systems in the body suffer; potential blindness, amputations, kidney and heart failure are but a few and very real. Secondly, the concentrations of sugar in the blood stream make the pancreas over work as it tries to compensate until, at last, it says bugger this and either closes down or collapses altogether. When you are unable to produce insulin because the beta cells have gone out for lunch, the only course open to you is to inject insulin, this is artificial insulin in most cases. But you know all this!

So, what I decided to do was to keep testing how my body was handling the sugar it was getting and to reduce the amount of sugar I put into it in the first place. To my way of thinking less sugar meant less insulin needed. I would keep on testing to see if I could reduce my numbers until they got into a more reasonable range. I knew I did not want to do drugs unless I really had to. The reason for this is that drug intervention affects only a small aspect of the wonderful balancing circle our bodies perform every micro second of every day. Affecting just one small part can put disproportionate strain on another area causing yet another area to malfunction and setting into motion a cycle of ill health. I looked at the people I knew who were on diabetic drugs and saw a great deal of side-effects and suffering.

So, I tested my blood over and over again and logged it along side the food I was eating. What I found was that my blood was quite high in the morning, then when I ate my "heathy breakfast" of whole meal bread and fruit, it would shoot up into the range where I had read permanent damage was happening. It would come down, then after a little more time, down it would come again. So my reasoning was; (1) I was still producing insulin, but not enough or (2) maybe my body was becoming resistant to that insulin. If so there was probably too much in my system which was  unable to work. High insulin levels are not good! As insulin is known as the "fat storage hormone" it was more than likely that this was contributing to my "personal inflation".

It was at that stage I rediscovered Tom Smith and his "take" on insulin resistance and fats. I will not go into the details of this... go get it from the organ grinder not his monkey!  Visit his web site and  buy his book but roughly what he said was this.

The cell membranes of the body are made up of lipids (fat)! The "right" fat is needed to make a healthy cell membrane. When healthy,  fuel  (ie, sugar/glucose) can be transported optimally into those cells. The fats needed to optimise the transit of fuel into the cells are the omega 3 fatty acids. These essential building blocks cannot be synthesised within the body from other things and so must be taken in on a regular basis for repair and renewal of the cells. Unfortunately omega3 oils are fragile and difficult to store so there has been a huge swing to more stable, cheaper oils with long shelf lives - the omega 6 and 9 oils. More on this later. The poor old body can't get the building blocks it needs so it grabs what it can and uses those instead.

Then, as the percentage swings in favour of the "bad stuff", the cell membranes become more sticky, less flexible and, therefore more difficult to cross. Add to this the greater and greater amounts of sugar being pumped into the blood stream and very soon those poor old beta cells are going hell for leather, 24/7, with no time off for good behaviour!

So the first part of my plan relied heavenly on Tom's protocol. Cut out all fats and oils (fats and oils are the same stuff, only oil is fat that melts at room temperature) except for the omega 3 in the form of flax seed oil. What this seems to do is allow the cells to rebuild themselves using the right stuff thus restoring their ability to work as they should. When this is sorted "good fats and oils" are re-introduced with Omega  3, 6 and 9s  kept in the right ratio.

Anyone who is interested in the technical details surrounding good/bad fats might like a read of Tom Smith's website - www.healingmatters.com - and Udo Erasmus's work - www.udoerasmus.com

Now a quick note on flax seed oil. This is linseed oil but not the stuff that has been boiled, buggered and bewitched! Not what you oil your old cricket bat with! To retain all the good stuff oils have to be treated with respect and care. In the first case it must be cold pressed. Heating oils to extract maximum yield changes the molecular structure of the oil and in most cases makes it toxic.
If you heat it enough it will not go rancid and will last for ever. Check out that old bottle of sunflower oil hidden in the back of the cupboard; still good as the day it was bought and still as toxic! Cold pressed flax seed goes rancid very quickly, so it must be kept in a fridge once opened. Because it is so fragile it must be bottled in glass darkly! It should also have a short "sell by" date. See the problem for the supermarkets!!

So I started by taking 2 to 3 tablespoons a day. I have no trouble just taking it on a spoon but I know a lot of folk can't hack this so mix it with your yogurt or what ever. But take it every day.
Over 2 years later I still take 1 to 2 tablespoons a day along with other good oils and fats.

Next I had a look at what was putting sugar into my blood stream and this is where I am going to upset some folk. In fact it upset me.

As I said earlier, carbs = sugar. So all those "health foods" we have been told to eat pushed up my blood sugar like hell! The porridge and muesli I ate for breakfast and that whole meal bread,  the pasta (whole wheat, of course) shoved up the number and all this stuff about "slow release carbs just kept it up there. If you don't believe me just test it for yourself.

That was the first thing then there was the amount of sugar in just about everything from ham and bacon, to sauces and pickles and every other thing in between! Those two objects on either side of, and just above, my nose earned their keep. I read every label. So boring but such an insight.

To reduce the stress on my pancreas I removed as many carbs as I could. So no bread, no pasta, no grains of any sort and that included rice. Obviously no sweets, biscuits or fizzy drinks, just plenty of fresh veggies, cooked and uncooked protein, seeds and nuts. I still had dairy in the form of milk, cheese and natural yogurt and fresh free range eggs.

Everything I ate I tried to get as fresh as possible. Breakfast would consist of a pile of seeds, ground so I would be able to digest them, mixed with a yogurt and my flax seed oil. I drank a coffee or two and low and behold after a bit, I found I could go through to lunchtime without feeling hungry. Previously, on my muesli  and fruit I was in need of a bun at about 11am and ready to kill if lunch was delayed for an hour! I kid you not!! It's all to do with the spikes that sugar creates. In goes the sugar,  whoosh, send in the insulin  De Da! Big pinch up and sugar is stripped out of the system. More sugar needed, bring on the croissants! Up and down, cause and effect, seesaw, roller coaster and a grumpy Roger!!
So by reducing the carbs/sugar I reduced the need for so much insulin. Because of this the peaks and troughs evened out and I was truly, and I will write this in big letters to make a point, NOT HUNGRY. There was a side effect because there was not as much insulin and sugar charging around - I started to stink... sorry, that was a typo... that should read shrink, slow and regular. Now as the fat went away other forces came into play... But more of that next time.

Recommendations.

Keep testing, but now cut down dramatically on carbs/ sugar.

Check out the glycemic Loading for foods (not the glycemic index) so you can really know how many grams of carbs you are eating.

Buy a set of scales and be anal about the amounts of food you eat. 10 grams of nuts is 10grams but a "little bit more" is 20 or 30 grams. It's all in a shake of the packet!

Read all the labels. Anything ending "ose" is sugar,  so lactose, glucose, fructose, dextrose,  etc,. etc. It all adds up. Cut them down or better still, cut them out. I know milk in my coffee has lactose in it but we will come to that late.

Keep up with the Omega 3 Oils.

Keep checking your blood and,  this is important, log the results because you need to know what food pushes the glucose.

Here is a BIG thinks from me which I would like you to play around with. There are two aspects to regaining your health. One is "what you do", the other is "what you stop doing". The ratio is something like  80/20. That is 80 to stop doing, 20 to do.

More as I have time and I will start to be more specific.

Just out of interest,  1and a half hours after a fairly large chicken meal with veggies and nuts and cheese yesterday evening! and with only a 10 minute walk with the dog - a reading of 79 mg/dl...!Yippee! Still getting better!

Last thought for today: If you have a high performance racing car and you put bog standard fuel in it or you have a little old car like mine and you fill it up with super high octane race fuel, will you get optimum results with longevity? Just a thought. I know what I think.

Part 1 LOWERING BLOOD SUGAR...LIKE WOT I DID!!

Before I start let me say again why I am writing this.

On April 16th 2012, which was and still is my birthday, Anne said I was grumpy. Now I know it's hard for anyone who knows me to believe, but you will just have to go with me on this point (in fact this is the only thing I want you to believe, but more on that later). So, as I always do what Anne says!!! off I went to check my blood sugar.

I have for many years checked my blood sugar as my mother had Diabetes at the end of her life, so every now and again I would check my pee just to be sure. It was always ok and never a hint, but that morning it showed mega positive. Pee sticks are, as I found out later, really naff as they are not very accurate and only show up as positive when it really is so or when something has bumped things up.

To cut this part of the story short, I rushed out and got a prick meter and started checking the real state of my blood sugar and it was shit, not to put too fine a point on it. Now, there are two major scales to indicate blood sugar. The one used in the UK uses low numbers (mmol/L) and the scale I use, which is mg/dl, are numbered from around 60 upward with 100 classed by some as normal. This I also found to be a bit confusing, so at that stage in my journey I took 100 as ok. My readings were in the 200s and, at one time, 260!!

Two years later I have got my blood sugar readings down to the mid 80s without using medication and have, in the process, lost nearly 5 stone in weight and truthfully it was relatively easy. Because of this quite a few folk have asked me how I have done it, especially the weight loss. When the other day I saw on the news that it is expected that in the not so distant future 1 in 3 people will be pre-diabetic, I thought I would pass on what I have done. So being lazy by nature I am writing this blog so that I can just redirect folk to it rather than keep writing the same stuff over and over again in emails.

It is a work in progress and as such will be added to and changed as things happen, but  before I start I would just like to make a couple of points and add a couple of caveats.

Firstly, don’t believe any of what I say until you have checked it out for yourself. It’s your body and as such your responsibility.

Secondly, I am going to upset some people. I am sorry if I do but to be truthful I can’t say things in any other way. It's how I see them and in this case I must call a spade a spade.

Thirdly, when asked and I have told people what I do one of the things that is often said is

"I can’t give up that, or do this."

The answer to this again is that it’s your body and your health. Your choice. I know what works for me.

And lastly, I am going to write what I have done and how it affects me. There is no magic formula. It takes commitment from you, time and effort, but you can cure Diabetes, contrary to what other folk say!

Now, I have used the word Cure and this is a "no-no". You can use words like reverse, but never cure….  So here is my take on that word before I start and... if you have not died of old age by then!!

You are well with no headache. You then start banging your head against a wall and you find you start getting headaches. You put on a crash helmet and this helps as you can continue to bang your head on the wall. You take an aspirin and the headache goes away. You continue to bang your head but all feels fine, because you have your crash helmet on, until one day you find you have ulcers from high doses of aspirin, pain in the neck from the shock of impact and your brain has become damaged. Is this a cure? On the other hand you stop banging your head on the wall, need nothing in the way of pain killers or crash helmets and gain all that extra time, rather than banging your head, to do nice things. Although you loose the pleasure of banging your head could you call this a better cure…? True it’s not cured because if you go back to head banging the pain will return. So I suppose it's all in your definition of cure.

Not lost the will to live yet? Well, let's get on with it, then.

Don’t panic!

I did when I started to read up about diabetes. The first site I found of any use was www.bloodsugar101.com  by Jenny Ruhl. This is a good place to start but also very scary. It is very rooted in allopathic medicine but full of information you need to know. A good place to start, but certainly not a place to stop.

One of the important things I discovered here was the importance of testing. 

Do it yourself testers are great. You can get them from eBay and they give you the reading for your blood in about 5 seconds. As recommended I started checking my blood first thing in the morning, then before meals and then one hour and two hours after each meal.

"Whoa!!!!" I hear you say, "that's a lot of pricks!"

At this stage I will refrain from making the obvious comment. Don’t worry, each meter comes with a little device that does the work for you and it is only a little drop of blood. That’s up to three times a meal to start with but you do need a good idea of what is happening to you before and after each meal.

Like printers, the machine is cheap, the strips are not, so check out ones with strips that are in a reasonable price range. So, most importantly, before you do anything, see what is going on with your blood glucose levels. All the details of how to do this are on this site bloodsugar101.com so I won't go into detail here.

It is at this stage I should be saying don’t do anything without your Doctor's advice. Bollocks to that!! If you want to sort this out without going down the drug route you'll have to do it for yourself. Make the choice. Diabetes is not something to be taken lightly. It’s frightening but so is the medication!!!! Worse case scenario is that you die! That's right, as in dead! So it’s not a game, but it is also not something to be frighted about. It’s also not something that can be sorted by just popping a pill. Just remember those headlines...  I in 3  people! Something is wrong, or to put it another way, right (if you are a drug company, that is!)

Also, in my mind there is not such a thing as pre-diabetes because if you have elevated blood sugar something is not working optimally. There is a great deal of confusion if not down right dis information as to what constitutes "normal" when it comes to blood sugar levels, again check out Jenny Ruhl on this then make up your mind. Just because your blood is 99 does not make it ok and just because it’s 101 does not make it bad. But you need to see what’s happening. 

Very roughly (and this, as Terry Pratchett would say, is "lies to children") is what happens. Your body at this moment needs energy and the fuel it uses to produce this energy, is sugar. It gets this from the food we eat, but it needs to get this sugar into the cells. To do this it uses a hormone produced in the pancreas called… you’ve got it, insulin. So we eat food…

Now here is a fact that you may, or may not know. Carbohydrate = sugar. In fact all foods (with the exception of fats) including protein can be converted into sugar… so heavy carb diet = lots of sugar in the blood stream. Our good old bodies switch into action and pump out insulin to help get this sugar into the cells where it is needed. I think it is within 15 mins of eating and this is called first phase insulin release. Then, after a bit it pumps in a bit more (second phase) to mop up the excess and we are back to normal blood sugar levels.

So what is normal? Well, about 1 teaspoon of sugar should be chugging around your tubes, that’s all! Bearing in mind that a can of coke has about 10 teaspoonfuls... and a 12 ounce glass of orange juice as much, if not more, than your coke... and two rounds of "healthy" whole meal bread have enough carbs/sugar to blow your socks off -might be a very good idea to check what you eat for breakfast !!!!!, You can now see how hard the insulin producing cells (Beta cells) have to work.

Now you see why I tested and tested. Despondent about the conventional prognoses regarding the progress of high blood sugar and seeing the effects of medication, my next port of call was a web site by Tom Smith (www.healingmatters.com) Here I learned about insulin resistance and the importance of fats. I will go into this in a later blog, but for now check out Tom’s stuff. It is how I started to reduce my blood sugar. His time scale is realistic but his breakfast suggestion is revolting! This still plays a large part in my health and I owe him a great deal of gratitude for all his works. His book is well used and valued in my home. Fats, no, I will rephrase that, good fats are so important to our health and we have been sold up the river for so long.

So my recommendations for now are - and remember we are taking about high blood sugar (called type2 Diabetes) not Diabetes (called type 1). Though the recommendations I think would help both - are:

Read all the bumph on the two web sites,

Get a meter and check what is going on,

Take the load off you insulin producing cells by cutting down on your sugar intake, including carbs.BECAUSE CARBS = SUGAR IN THE BLOOD.

And sort out your fats.

I will be going into detail later regarding fats, but for now, that’s enough.

This is how I started NOT what I do now…

Remember that with a few exceptions this does not happen over night, so you will not put it right instantly - it takes time. What you want is to remove the causes (stop banging your head on the wall). I feel that the responsibility for your body is yours but it takes a lot of effort. It’s not hard, but you have to keep on at it.

Doctors are only one course of action open to you, as are crash helmet salesmen.

Knowledge will set you free, but at first it will probably piss you off!

This is not all the info needed but it is a start and information overload is a problem with a subject like this.

I will continue to write this blog with all the details I can. There is so much out there and I can and do go on and on.  It might not be something you ever wanted to happen to you but it is a fascinating journey and for me it has been one that has improved my life rather than limit it.

Much more to come... And in next post it will be about how diet affects your blood sugar and if there is one thing to piss folk off is to talk about what they eat...But this is the pivot of it all. I will not hold back...Check you blood pressure, change your underwear and wait in expectation!!!!He! He!....evil chuckle!!!

In the meantime, hang in there, don't rush into anything until you are fully armed.

Lots of love to you all.

Just a Little Bit of Forgotten Reiki Magic

Just a Little Bit of Forgotten Reiki Magic

I am writing this for you today on a laptop that two days ago was dead, bereft of life, an ex computer.

The previous night I had as usual closed it down, shut its lid and thought no more about it. I had owned my laptop for the last four years and it had served me well, quickly waking up when I asked it and uncomplainingly working away as I went about my life on the sunny island of Menorca. Not a day would pass when its key board, feeling the touch of my hand, would eagerly spring to life.

Then three day ago things happened, life changed. I went to switch on as usual and nothing happened, zilch, there were no twinkling little lights to tell me the day had started. My trusty old laptop refused to respond. It had stopped working!

Now I am not very computer savvy but I know enough to know that things looked bad, bad as in terminal. It was not that it refused to boot up, it was worse than that, it refused to do anything at all. The power light would come on. Fine! But nothing else would happen. It was as if my old friend had just gone to sleep and peacefully slipped away.

I tried everything I knew. I took the battery out and put it back in. I switched the power on and off. Nothing! Eventually when all this failed, I took it on a trip into town to the man who knows. It was Saturday but he was kind enough to take off the back, take out the RAM and test it. He prodded and poked and tested some more.

“Your computer… it’s a finished! It’s the mother board. New computer is needed. This one is not worth the work to fix. It’s too old!”

This was tragic in the extreme.

Now all jokes aside this was very bad news for me. I needed the computer to be working and I needed it immediately. For a start my airline tickets were deep inside it (I was flying back to the UK in five days time). It was also my life line to family and my work and as it was just after Christmas, funds were not in abundance or to put it bluntly, I was brassic.

Remarkably though, I was not as distraught as I would normally have been in a situation of such gravity. It could be worse. (1) Mr. Barclaycard would just have to do his thing. (2)It was just after the holiday and the sales would surely be on, and (3) we were flying back to the UK where computers seemed to be a little cheaper than here and better still would communicate with me in English. The only thing that was a real problem and I could not see how it could be sorted, was some work I had just finished and was needed before I left the Island. Not to mention all the data I was going to back up sometime soon.

The rest of that day we spent texting and phoning trying to sort out what would normally have taken minutes to email. In between times I tried pushing that button again and again in the vain hope that something different might happen. Insanity!

At last I remembered and did something that I have been telling people to do for years; use Reiki. At every workshop I hold I tell my students; “if it’s broken try Reiki on it. After all it can’t hurt and you have nothing to lose. Just give it a go. Lay your hands on, ask for the Reiki to flow and let what will be, be.”

So that evening I gave my laptop Reiki. I gave it Reiki as I watched the telly and when I wasn’t. I held onto that laptop for a long time. When I got tired of holding it Anne took over. You certainly could feel things happening, energy flowing and it seemed to get very hot. Then just before we went to bed we laid the laptop on the dining room table, opened its lid, and with bated breath and a trembling finger I depressed the start button once more. And… do you know what happened? Absolutely nothing, nothing at all! All that trying, all that holding and nothing had changed, not a blink, not a flash. It was just as dead as it was before. I depressed the button again, held it until the little power light flickered out and then without even closing the lid but muttering bugger, bugger , bugger, I went off to bed.

Next morning I awoke as usual and pottered down to make a pot of tea. Passing my laptop, abandoned on the table, I whispered “come on old girl” and without much hope pressed its On button and yesterday hadn’t happen! Lights flashed, screen flashed it’s do I know you message and before I knew it I was reading my emails, backing up what I should have backed up ages ago and printing out the work I should have printed out when I had finished it. And it has been working ever since.

I have taken the last couple of days as a wake-up call and when I am back in the UK I will look into buying a new something or the other. But for the present all is as it was.

So, if like me, you forget that Reiki works on all things and in all ways - things are just energy, after all - remember and use it.

One other thing I always tell folk and what I had forgotten to do myself is just offer it up and trust. Let the universe sort things out in its own time, give it the space. It’s when we try to push things along, trying to make them work when and in the way we want, that they don’t happen and we get disappointed.

So….Do it….Trust it ….Accept it… and then be grateful and say thanks.

Miracles can and do happen, all the time. Enjoy them!