Overweight, now diabetes

I feel really stupid I didn't see it coming. I haven't officially been diagnosed and possibly I won't be for a while, but my own private blood sugar testing has shown some spikes up into the Definitely Diabetes range. If it EVER gets that high, if it EVER takes three or more hours to come down to a reasonably normal range, most sources say that is diabetes, no longer "pre-diabetes" but there's still some doubt about it and I'm still hoping I'm not really over the line yet. The one time it spiked up to 204 and took three hours to come down to 118 (Normal is 70-100) I was testing myself on a very high carb meal of chips (Spicy Nacho Doritos) and lemonade (Simply Lemonade brand). I measured both very carefully, tallied the calories and the carbs and I have to say that that was a very modest indulgence for me -- a SMALL bag of chips, not the usual 3/4 or more of a large one, a measured cup of lemonade, not the usual guzzling of what must have amounted to over 20 ounces. I shudder to think what I was doing to myself on those periodic binges.

A couple years ago I got worried about my blood sugar and got a blood monitor. My readings were pretty low as I recall. I lost the monitor, wish I could find it and whatever notes I took at the time. I concluded I was hypoglycemic, I remember that much, and was relieved I wasn't diabetic but also felt a little foolish for being worried about it. Not foolish at all as it turns out, I was on the way to diabetes even then but didn't put two and two together. You'd think I'd have seen it coming but I didn't.

I didn't change my eating at that time but it might have saved me what I'm going through now with HAVING to change my eating or ELSE. For one thing I never thought of my eating pattern as being bad for me. I go for fresh natural foods, I eat lots of vegetables, I don't drink sodas, I very rarely even eat a hamburger. BUT I WAS eating too many potatoes, fried, hash browned, baked, boiled and mashed, whatever, I was really into potatoes, and if I had spaghetti I always had seconds, and any other pasta as well. I would make the occasional sugary dessert and usually ate too much of that too. A local bakery has a great raspberry cream cheese croissant. That and a cafe latte were an occasional indulgence. Not very often but still, now I think of it as death by carbohydrates. One thing that's been hard to get into my head is how much carbohydrate there is in milk. That latte packs a powerful carb punch of its own on top of the lovely flaky fruity creamy pastry.

Never had soda pop but lemonade has just as much sugar in it and has exactly the same effect on blood sugar. Not that I drank a lot of lemonade either but it's SO good on hot days. I'd also get that great juice mix of banana, pineapple and orange from time to time and drink it over ice cubes. Same thing carbohydrates-wise. You can't just have a little bit of such tasty thirst-quenchers either, at least I can't, has to be a couple of large glasses at a time. Again I shudder at the thought of all that sugar bombarding my system and overwhelming my poor pancreas. If I weren't overweight and had been more active -- hard to do with painful arthritis of the hips -- perhaps it wouldn't have been such a dangerous thing to have such periodic indulgences, but the overweight and the inactivity are all part of the syndrome on the way to diabetes.

Why DIDN'T I see it coming? Isn't the national obesity problem in the news enough these days, and the rising incidence of diabetes too, for that matter?

I didn't even register that hypoglycemia is one of the steps to diabetes, when it seemed that was my problem a few years ago. Well, that's probably understandable. How often do you hear that connection made?

A year ago I went to the doctor about worries about taking NSAIDs for my hip pain. He put me through some general testing. My renal function was OK, which is the main worry with NSAIDs, but I was told my fasting blood sugar was a little high. I had no idea what that meant and the doctor didn't explain. Maybe he expected me to know, but I didn't. It doesm't sound good but it doesn't necessarily sound bad either -- a LITTLE high. We discussed diet and the necessity of losing weight, but I've also known for a long time I needed to lose weight and didn't put it together with the slightly high blood sugar reading. It's not easy losing weight, I've tried for years off and on, make some headway and then regress, so unless I'm told something flat-out like You are on the way to getting diabetes UNLESS you lose weight I just sort of figure OK I can try again, but I don't really have much hope for it. I did try again. I lost five pounds. But I wasn't very motivated. I wasn't putting two and two together yet.

I started putting on weight when I quit smoking in 1989. At times in the previous twenty-five-plus years I'd smoked as much as three packs a day. I did quit for a while in my thirties but went back, never again got as high as three packs after that, but still over time I accumulated an awful lot of pack-years. After I became a Christian in the mid-80s I was able to quit finally by giving it all to God, in 1989.

Then I started gaining weight. Do you eat more when you quit smoking or is it just that your metabolism changes?

Anyway I slowly put on weight. In the early 90s I put myself on a drastic self-invented diet and lost a lot, in fact too much. I'd cut out nearly all fat and my daily calorie count was ridiculously low, something like 700-800 a day. My hair and nails got dry and brittle. That was the clue that fat is necessary. It wasn't exactly a healthy diet for those reasons although I did stick to basic natural foods, lots of fresh vegetables, and it certainly worked. I also do have to say I felt good on it: aches and pains went away, stomach problems went away, had a big boost in energy.

Of course after that I started gaining it all back bit by bit. An artificial diet aimed strictly at losing weight is just impossible to live on indefinitely. Took, oh, another ten years to reach my maximum weight, just a bit short of 200 pounds -- on a frame that carries about 130 comfortably and 125 ideally. By that time I was sitting in front of a computer almost all the time, hardly ever got any exercise, had developed severe arthritis in both hips that made even walking difficult, and I was more or less resigned to the situation.

I'd still diet occasionally, usually Atkins style. It does work but I was never able to do it strictly and never stayed on it long enough to give it a real test -- I'd lose a few pounds, even up to ten or more, but then abandon it.

Partly I was just never sure about its claims: is this a good way to eat or not?

Then a few months ago I noticed I had this sweet smell about me. Very odd. Also a yeasty sort of smell. It was in my clothes, in my bedding even. I didn't think much of it for quite a while but then it hit me. Uh oh. Yeast thrives on sugar, my skin smells sweet. Is sugar coming out of my pores or what? What does that make you think of? Yeah, diabetes. So I looked it up on line but the usual diabetes sites never mention a sweet smell as a symptom. Then I finally found a message board where one person said she had that symptom and wondered what it was. She said she smelled "like cookie dough." Exactly! At last! The other contributors to the board had never heard of it either but most of them immediately thought *diabetes* -- better go get it checked out.

So I bought another blood glucose monitor, cut down my calories and carb intake, started reading up on diabetes, and eventually made an appointment with the doctor.

So abruptly, startlingly, I finally put two and two together. NOW I'm motivated. Fear is a wonderful motivator. I am losing weight. I've lost over thirty pounds and am still losing. It's slowed down but as long as the trend is still downward I'm content. I know I'm doing something right and it's going to keep going even if there are some lengthy plateaus on the way. My blood sugar readings are rarely down into the normal range, but they aren't really high either as long as I watch what I eat, and I'm hoping to learn how to master the situation until they ARE normal.

And that first of all means keeping carbs to an absolute minimum.

It's the carbs that raise your blood sugar, nothing else, just carbs. It doesn't matter if it's "good" carbs or "bad" carbs, they ALL raise your blood sugar. The only difference is that the good carbs often come with enough fiber to slow down the effect, and if you eat them along with protein and low-carb vegetables that also helps keep them from spiking your blood sugar level. But still, they have to be kept to a minimum. They DO raise your blood sugar, there is no getting around that, and it's high blood sugar you want to avoid because it's the high blood sugar that does all the damage to your body in diabetes. The bad carbs have to go out just about absolutely.

NO MORE SUGAR
NO MORE RECIPES THAT REQUIRE FLOUR
NO CEREALS OF ANY KIND
NO POTATOES, RICE, PASTA AT ALL UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE
HARDLY ANY BREAD.
NO FRUIT EITHER.
JUST LOW CARB VEGETABLES, AND MEAT AND OTHER PROTEINS

For Entertainment

Here's an online toy, the Tone Matrix. Turn up your sound and play around creating tone patterns.

5/17 added: Here's another online musical toy: Virtual Keyboard.

Shouldn't you just LOOK UP a word you're not familiar with?

Just to explain: I do have some people in mind to whom I'm addressing these corrections of grammar and pronunciation and definition, who I hope will get something out of them.

Some people have a big problem with reading and pronunciation because they were never taught phonics and had to learn to read words by wild guesses from the only thing they were taught phonetically -- the first letter and maybe a few others. They never learned the structure of a word but were encouraged to read the whole word instead of sounding it out. It's sad. I wish that the many adults who have this sort of problem -- it's a form of illiteracy -- would take a phonics course.

I was so blessed to have been taught solid phonics in first grade. I'm SO grateful as I see the errors others have to struggle through, very intelligent people who have trouble reading simply because they weren't given this clear and necessary foundation. People who can't spell have also usually been deprived of phonics and encouraged to just wing it as if they were born knowing these things.

If on top of that they were deprived of some basic teaching in history and culture as well, they don't even recognize words and names that such teaching would have given them by ear, so they struggle through in trying to read them and mispronounce names that are familiar to others, to the extent that it's sometimes impossible to figure out when they are referring to something you'd recognize if it were pronounced properly.

Anyway. Today's word is DERISION and in this case it was pronounced correctly but the definition was not looked up, and a wrong definition was given apparently off the top of the head, without bothering to check it. Why I wonder? Was the same attitude taught about looking up definitions as about taking a wild guess at a word in a text?

Education in this country is pathetic since about the 60s thanks to anti-traditional attitudes that got big about that time, but even in my generation there were "progressive" schools that committed this crime against their students. Yep, "progressive" -- systems that were supposedly better than traditional education. Sometimes "gifted" programs taught reading that way, apparently thinking the brighter children were born knowing the English language. I have to assume that most of them intuited enough phonics to be able to learn to read at all.

I got the traditional treatment. I'm SO glad I did.

Anyway: DERISION means contemptuous ridicule or mockery. It does not mean confusion, which is what it was wrongly said to mean.

This came off a discussion of Psalm 2:4:

He that sitteth in the heavens shall laugh: the Lord shall have them in derision.

...referring to people who refuse to accept God's rule, meaning that eventually God is going to ridicule and mock them for their attitude toward him.

This is also probably related to the Bible versions problem. I haven't checked the other versions but I know this quotation as I've given it comes from the King James, and it is often the case that even people who hold to the King James don't know what many of its words mean. They might have the same problem with other versions, hard to know, but since there are some words in the King James that are archaic they SHOULD be making a special effort to master them rather than taking wild guesses. "Derision" of course isn't even archaic.

Hoping to find a diet that really can become a lifestyle.

Still losing weight, but more slowly now because I'm not keeping to the lowest calorie count any more, aiming to find the calorie level I could possibly go on living with after I've lost the weight.

Keep seeing ads and articles about this or that diet plan, the latest being the 17-day diet. Read some reviews at Amazon. Really, there's no point in trying a specific diet plan. I can get some ideas from some of them but I don't do well with prescribed detailed recipes. The reason you -- or at least I -- gain back the weight lost on a diet plan is because you can't live with the foods required on the plan. I have to eat what I like. Many diet plans claim you can do this on their scheme, but when you really get into it, no, you can't.

I know I have to cut carbs and I know I have to cut calories. Within those requirements I want food I enjoy eating. I took a Metabolism Type Test on one of these diet plans recently (turns out there are many different versions of this test out there but they all get at the same basic concept) and found out I'm a Protein Type rather than a Carb Type and according to them we are to gear our eating to our type. This makes sense to me up to a point. The "Power Cookie" that is breakfast on the 17-day Diet, for instance, does not appeal to me AT ALL. I love carbs of course but I think we're all different in WHAT carbs we favor and the Metabolic Test seems to recognize that. Carbs are not my first choice for breakfast, I'd much rather have bacon and eggs. Of course I don't mind the hash browns with that, but I've realized that part has to go or at least be cut back to a minimum. Anyway I don't particularly like pancakes or cereal or muffins or cake -- much prefer fruity and creamy pastries but I don't need to eat them very often -- and the Power Cookie sounds too much like a muffin, just a crumbly dry sweet thing. A Carb Type could probably do very well with that sort of breakfast, but it won't work for me.

What DOES make some sense on the 17-day Diet to my mind is the idea of sticking fairly closely to the same foods for a while -- 17 days according to that particular plan -- and then switching to different foods in an effort to stave off the famous Plateau effect which is understood to be caused by your body's adapting to a particular style of eating. It seems worth a try anyway.

I hope that means a simple switch from beef to chicken or fish, or from one kind of veggie to another, so I could do steak and salad for a couple of weeks and then chicken or fish and a different vegie for another two weeks. And I WILL eat the crispy chicken skin, sorry, that's not going away. I'm convinced that high cholesterol is not caused by fat, and some diet plans agree with me about that. My cholesterol has never been very high and I love fat. If there were a Fat Type I'm sure I'd be in that type rather than the Protein Type. Well, maybe that's an exaggeration (but not a big exaggeration -- Bacon, oh yes tons of it I COULD eat, eggs too -- all that yummy fatty yolk, butter of course -- and Hollandaise sauce which is nothing but yolks and butter and lemon has always been a favorite of mine -- heavy cream in coffee for sure, sour cream by the tub -- tangy sour cream dips for instance, the fattiest nuts -- cashews and macadamias -- also avocadoes, and of course the spicy crispy chicken skin etc. etc. etc. I also like the sweet versions of fat, the Haagen Dazs, the cream puffs, the rich chocolatey things etc, but since those raise blood sugars I'm now sticking with the spicy versions instead).

Anyway, this Atkins type of eating I can do quite easily and I don't get bored with it either. I can do a meat-and-veggies dinner almost indefinitely - it's food I love, but it does create carb cravings after a while so I have to be sure I'm getting enough carbs when I do this. So far so good. A piece of toast here, a quarter cup of pasta there, or half a small potato with butter - and not with every meal either. It works, it really does. Just add up the calories and stay close to the allotted number.

Another thing I love is Mexican Salad -- just spicy browned hamburger meat over a pile of lettuce, tomato, cucumber, green pepper, onion etc., and sometimes grated cheese and/or sour cream --carefully measured of course. But I can't cut the salad dressing down to a couple of teaspoons, sorry just can't. It's GOOD salad dressing too, EV olive oil with wine vinegar, minced garlic and herbs, sometimes a dollop of dijon mustard, good stuff. Three tablespoons on a very big raw vegie salad is about the minimum. Again, just add the calories into the total for the day.

I LOVE bacon and eggs but I've found that only one egg and one strip of bacon is surprisingly satisfying. Add a sliced half tomato with salad dressing and a spoonful of cottage cheese OR a piece of buttered toast and that makes a good breakfast for me and only about 250 calories. Just add up the calories and the carbs and check the blood sugar monitor an hour or so later if toast is on the menu. Some days it may be two eggs and two strips of bacon. Way it goes. Just add up the calories.

Of course I'm getting into a routine, even a rut, with these things, and if switching foods is the thing to do to keep up the weight loss I'm going to have to come up with a new routine soon.

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April 12: Gotta report that I'm continuing to lose even though I haven't yet switched my routine. Counting calories is the way to go, eating what I LIKE to eat -- that's crucial. You HAVE to eat what you like or you'll never make this a lifetime habit, and it does keep down the hunger pangs when you do. Now it seems I might even be losing too fast and need to up my daily calorie intake a bit. But it's only about a pound a week on average. OK, that's probably not too fast.

It's Suppos-ed-ly, not Suppos-ab-ly

Just have to say in case anyone who needs to know it is tuning in, sorry, just have to say it:

The word is not SUPPOSABLY

There may be such a word but I don't think I've ever heard it used properly. I'm talking about the habit of using it when supposedly is what is meant. It is an error, a mishearing.

The word is SUPPOSEDLY.

Losing Weight to avoid diabetes

A few months ago I got seriously worried that I might have diabetes, and there's nothing like fear for motivation. I've already lost fifteen pounds which has already reduced my blood sugar levels, but I'm going to keep going (yes, I have a lot to lose).

I got a blood glucose monitor so I can keep track of the effect of foods on my blood sugar, and am hoping I can eventually get myself out of the "prediabetic" range back to normal. If not, I'm at least happy to find out I'm not outright diabetic, which for a while there I thought might be the case, and glad to know that I have so much control over it with diet. No fad diets, just emphasizing good nutrition and counting calories. Counting calories is the only thing that ever worked for me and it's working now.

Thought I'd post some helpful information I've found on the internet for anyone who needs the information who stumbles on this post:

So You Wanna Lose Weight: The basics about losing weight very convincingly presented.

Here's a very helpful Calorie Calculator site -- to figure daily calorie intake for weight goals. They have a calculator for men and a calculator for women.

I'm a bit surprised to find myself including this ad for a diet program but I watched the video and thought they did a very good job. This is called The Diet Solution -- good advice about what kinds of foods are best. I learned a lot about which carbs to avoid and which to choose. The video alone gives helpful advice. I didn't get the program but it looks like a good one. They emphasize natural foods, avoid processed foods, which I do anyway.

They also put down calorie counting and I haven't read enough to find out how good or bad their reasoning may be about that, but I'm certainly not giving that up for now as it is the ONLY thing that works for me to lose weight. Whatever I eat I measure and I write it down, I look up its calorie count if I don't already know it, also its carb count, and keep a running tally for the day.

I also ran across some independent recommendations for that diet plan. Here's one.

Sierra Snow

It's been a long heavy winter all over the country, and even though it's supposedly Spring now we're still getting snow. And so are they up in the Sierras: That's in the area of Donner. I can see the mountains from my window but I'm glad I don't live there.

Here's the whole Weather.com gallery.