How You Might Embrace The Challenge Of Type 2 Diabetes
Will, a low-carb diet work for you?
We can’t control everything that happens in our lives, but we can control how we choose to live and eat.
Exercise, good food, and positive thinking can affect a happy, healthy lifestyle.
I remember when my brother-in-law was diagnosed with type2 diabetes. At the time he spent long periods of time away from home, on business, and subsequently ate out a lot. No doubt he was consuming many less-than-optimal foods as he can’t, read won’t cook!
And it was purely through infection and subsequent health check, that he was found to be diabetic.
As is the general practice, post-diagnosis, he subsequently met with and was advised by a dietician as to what he should eat, and that is when he was introduced to carbohydrate counting, to concentrating on and keeping track of his complex carbohydrates, and to split them evenly between meals.
Being the kind of person he is, he followed the set guidelines to the letter of the law.
The generic advice was to eat a low-fat, high-carbohydrate diet. He knew little about the effects of good or bad eating, and so, was prepared to follow the set guidelines.
This is a man who has spent a considerable amount of his working life researching (anything but health), but now the heat was on.
It didn’t take him long to determine that there was something amiss with the advice he was receiving, (high sugar readings), and he was determined to find out what it was.
The other thing that bothered him was that, with no discussion about his lifestyle habits, his practitioner immediately put him on insulin medication, cholesterol-reducing medication, (this was just an ‘in-case-be’ prescribing), and high blood pressure pills.
He asked to do 24-hour monitoring of his blood pressure BEFORE agreeing to go on the last medication, and though he experienced a couple of spikes, one in the morning and one at night, overall his BP was sound.
And in subsequent researching he discovered The Diet Doctor where he learned that:
- Type 2 diabetes is characterized by high blood glucose.
- Refined carbohydrates raise blood glucose the most.
See you have to ask questions. Sure, doctors are there to guide you, but they’re also overworked people. Conduct your own research, even if it’s only to concur with the advice you are receiving. Take charge of your health.
What he found out was that although diabetes medications can temporarily slow the blood sugar rise, they cannot reverse the underlying problem.
As he has spent almost all of his adult life in research, he decided to apply his skills to his worrying condition. He realized that his lifestyle had not been optimal, too much travelling, not enough exercise, alcohol (the antidote for loneliness!), and eating out.
He decided it was time to take his health seriously, to stop eating out, and get into the kitchen.
The first thing he did was to eliminate all processed foods. That was a given, not something he found easy, as a busy life had led to his eating convenience food in the first place.
Anything that had labels, especially those tiny ones that even a microscope has difficulty reading (no prizes for guessing why!), had no place in his kitchen.
That left him with pure food — fish, meat, eggs, fruit, nuts, and seed. And in choosing simple recipes, he found that cooking wasn’t the daunting scientific exercise he’d deemed it to be. Essentially he had embraced a ketogenic way of living.
We can subsequently debate the quality of these foods and common sense calls us to do so, but for the time being they, organic or otherwise, were to become the staples, the starting point of his journey.
It took no more than a few weeks for his sugar readings to stabilize, and his hunger to abate. He was super-excited. And why not? He’d been told that diabetes is an incurable disease, one that in time would invite all sorts of other ills along the way, a journey whose horizon was bleak to say the least of it.
Type 2 diabetes can be a terrifying disease, but like any other illness, you have two choices.
Either you give in and accept the consequences, or, you find the causal relationship for your health and fix it.
Religiously he stuck to his new eating protocol, and to his surprise, easily offloaded an impressive amount of weight, especially around his middle. His thinking became clearer, and he was once more back into an exercise routine.
Interestingly, at his next medical appointment, and after a series of tests, his doctor was beside himself with elation. All his tests, a whole gamut of them, were perfect.
His doctor’s advice was to keep doing whatever he was doing. Yet he asked no questions as to WHAT he was doing, or changes he had made to his lifestyle!
That seeming lack of interest from his doctor was what catapulted him into his conducting endless research on food and chemicals, and into the role, additives play in health.
Today his weight and blood pressure are impressive. He looks years younger, and there’s a spark in his living. Not for a moment does he believe that he is no longer diabetic because the truth is this. On the odd occasion when he has wandered from his dietary protocol, he sees a spike in his sugar readings.
He views his condition as an unwelcome friend, standing on the horizon, a blight on the landscape, a once-toxic intrusion, waiting to be re-introduced into his friendship group. Omnipresent as it may be, he will never find a place in my brother-in-law’s life.
This story is not medical advice, but it seeks to show that lifestyle changes can at least alleviate the progression of some diseases.