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.
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