Lessons, tests and a result!

In order to find out what each type of food is doing to my blood glucose (BG) levels I've been testing immediately before eating, then 2hrs post eating.  The idea being that your BG level should return to the pre eating level after two hours.

 

The latest 2010 NICE guidelines for Type 2 BG levels are

• Fasting (waking).......between 4 - 7 mmol/l
• 2 hrs after meals......no more than 8.5 mmol/l

For all you non-diabetics out there you might want to know what normal BG levels should be so here you are:

• The normal blood glucose level in humans is about 4 mM (4 mmol/L or 72 mg/dL)
• The body, when operating normally, restores the blood sugar level to a range of about 4.4 to 6.1 mmol/L (82 to 110 mg/dL).
• Shortly after eating the blood glucose level may rise temporarily up to 7.8 mmol/L (140 mg/dL) or a bit more in non-diabetics.

The result of all this testing is very sore finger tips and that high carbohydrate foods send my BG levels soaring. Even the good carbs that the medical profession insist that you fill your plate with are very bad for me.

In the bad books go
Bread (White and wholemeal both give me over 12 mmol/l )
Tortillas (gave me my highest reading of 15 mmol/l!!!)
Potatoes (sweet and regular)
Rice (white and wholemeal)
Flour (white and wholemeal)
Pasta (white and wholemeal)

Porridge (even the few oats in Haggis set my BG skywards)

Good books
Everything else!

Swaps
Unfortunately 'bad' foods are the stuff that had made up the bulk of my diet so just excluding them is not really an option for me. However I have managed to swap some of them for better alternatives and maintain a steady BG level.

Potatoes have been the easiest as I love my root vegetables. I made Cottage Pie with a celeriac and swede mash the other night and both Andrew and myself agreed it was far better than the regular mashed potato topping. I've also heard that celeriac makes great chips and roasties ... mmmm.

Cauliflower rice was something I thought I would struggle with but it was very quick and easy to make and not as strong tasting as I would have thought. However the effects the next day were explosive ... it'll be a while until I can go back to that supermarket again!

Chinese leaves make a great alternative to bread on a sandwhich. I filled three up with chopped celery, red onion, cheese and tomato. It was delish and kept me full for hours. However I do accept that Chinese leaves have their limitations as bread substitute .. I'm not going to be able to toast it and cover it with Marmite!

I've heard that cabbage makes a good pasta substitute but I haven't tried it yet. I will let you know.

Result
After the 8 mile walk in The Wyre Forest on Sunday my BG level was at a record low of 5.6 which is in the non-diabetic range! Huge thanks to Lisa and Jack for helping to make that happen.

Eyes wide open

Over the last week or so I've been reading up as much as I can about diabetes. I thought I understood the basics but I've really had my eyes opened. Hypos aside I never really understood why diabetes was such a bad thing.

The consequences of untreated diabetes are hard core ... cardiovascular disease, kidney disease, blindness and amputation of lower limbs.

I've come to realise that my Pa, who passed away back in the '80's, died of a heart attack brought on by diabetes. I had previously thought that he just happened to be diagosned with the disease at the same time.

Apparently it's very common, more so in men than women as men are generally worse at looking after their health, for your diabetes to be diagnosed when it has already wreaked havoc on your heart and you end up in hospital with a heart attack. That is why it is called the silent killer.

I am one of the lucky ones in that respect.

Who said a little knowledge is a dangerous thing?

Before starting out on any diet and exercise routine what are you always told? Talk to your doctor first. So being a girly swot I went to see my GP last night.
Primarily I went get my blood glucose (BG) test strips on prescription as they are seriously pricey and secondly to run my master plan by him. I must admit that I had expected to get a pat on the back for even considering tackling my diabetes by diet and exercise. But he was writing out the prescription he told me there was no need to test my BG as I was on Metformin and I shouldn't get hypos (very low BG levels).  This suprised me as most Type 2's don't really suffer from hypos but they do suffer from hypers (yip you guessed it, high BG levels).

I told him I wasn't particularly concerned about hypos but wanted to see what each food I ate did to my BG levels i.e. check for hypers. My barely post pubescent GP then said with great resignation ... 'you're 47, the cells in your pancreas are dying off'. He went on to describe in great detail how my diabetes was going to progress in the future and what drugs I would have to move on to. It's fair to say that it didn't paint a pretty picture.

I responded by saying I didn't want my diabetes to progress at all and in fact I want to regress it by exercising more and losing weight. He said very dismissively that I would have to lose a lot of weight and handed me my prescription. Despite his well rehearsed method of signifying that the appointment was at an end I settled into my seat, crossed my legs and placed my glasses on his desk.

Now comfy, I asked him what support he could offer me in losing weight and he responded by surfing the NHS website but found nothing, he said someone would call me with some information. When I mentioned that I heard about the DESMOND course (a diabetes patient education course for Type 2 diabetics) he said that it would be very good for me to attend but another search on the NHS website proved useless and another follow up phone call was promised.

I walked out of there feeling pretty frustrated, clearly my GP was more interested in diabetes than me! I now realise that as far as my diabetes management is concerned I am on my own.

It's really sharpened my resolve however, I really want to teach him a lesson by walking in there one day with normal BG levels. It's a bit like when the school careers advice tells you to go for a job in the corner shop and you end up an astronaut!

In his defence when I got home I did have a voicemail from the surgery giving me the number for Lighten Up but I'm still waiting for the DESMOND information.

Ode to tuthy

If you want to remove a hangover instantly then my advice is to have a tuth* removed.

I walked into the dentists with a headache that Nurofen refused to tackle, a sick stomach and a flat lined brain. I walked out shaking like a shitting dog, my headache replaced by post agony euphoria and saucer sized eyes. I went straight to the chemist and manically demanded the strongest pain killers they had. Despite my mouth being numb from my hairline to my nipple I knew once the 17 injections of anesthetic I had demanded with menace had worn off I would be in agony.

I was not to be dissapointed.

Over the last 30 years or so me and toothy had been aquainted he had grown his roots right down to my knees and these roots themselves had grown barbs. And there was I thinking tuthy was a friend of mine, perhaps the old adage of familiarity breeds contempt is true but I really thought we had a friendship. Of course we've had our ups and downs. Clearly tuthy thought I was taking things a step too far when chomping on that bag of scratchings outside The Triangle in Rhayader when he split in two. I tried to patch things up at the Dental hospital and things were good between us again for a good couple of years afterwards. But to dump me three days before Christmas was going to far ... I'm glad you're gone tuthy ... there, I've said it.

Anyways the dentist gave me a printed post extraction information sheet that said ... "Don't exercise and only eat ice cream"  I could have kissed her there and then but the moustache put me right off.

As you might have guessed, my healthy living has taken a bit of a kicking in the last few days. However the Tall Bird had signed me up for a Race For Life in July. That means I shall have to give some serious thought to getting fit very, very soon indeed.

Oh and I may have lost a couple of pounds!

*For those non Brummie Blog readers firstly you should know firstly that it's a shame that you don't live in Birmingham and secondly, a tooth is called a tuth here.

Starting off bright but clouding over later in the week

I was going to wait a full week before posting this but the way this week is going I think it's best to call it a day.


Monday: Result! Went to Aquafit and really pushed myself, gentle aches all next day. Tried to learn Backgammon. Ate really well and stuck to all my post-its rules.

Tuesday Signed up for Work Fit, a scheme at work designed to encourage fatties to get more active. There is a promise of free tickets to the olympics for the most improved. In an attempt to control my portions I printed off an Eatwell Plate image and stuck it to the fridge door with my post-its.
As it was Burns Night, I treated myself to some delish haggies but still ensures that 50% of my plate was covered in veg but beers and whiskey slipped onto the menu as well. More backgammon. I think I know most of the rules now. Watched 44'' chest, loved it, gotta be Ray Winstones best performance I've seen and John Hurt was amazing as ever.

Wednesday Late in to work so no aquafit, had a very productive day at work. Egg and cress sarnie for lunch and nibbled on a Graze box. Went to the pub before tea and had two delish pints of Tribute, god I love that beer. We had leftover Haggis, chips 'n' 5 peas, Andrew still hasn't got the hang off all this veg and seems to think that's the only part of my meal that should be rationed. Still a tiny bit achey from aquatfit. No fruit whatsoever but managed 3 portions of veg (if 5 peas count as a portion that is!)

Thursday Working from home and Andrew off as well means only one breakfast and thats bacon and egg sandwich. We were supposed to go to a fencing club after work but when we turned up (after hiding from someone Andrew knew for 20 mins, the reasons why never became clear) we found we were the oldest by approx 30 years and the fattest by approx 4 foot. So we did what any normal person would have in that situation and went down the pub again. We only had two pints but when we got home it all went wrong and neither of us remember what happened. Oh we had Courgette carbonara for tea mmmmm.

Friday
Eeek ... feel as rough as a rough thing from Roughville on their annual roughest person contest. Andrew is late for work and I've got a really important project to get completed today. Normally I would say to myself that things can only get better but I'm going to have a tooth extracted and two others filled later today.


Saturday
Cancelled
Sunday
Cancelled

Swings and roundabouts

I didn't get to go skating last Saturday but went for a three mile walk around the Lickeys in the rain instead. We saw two Roe deer on our walk but that was the only highlight on what was a miserable day. The walk did spur me on to attend a couple of aquafit sessions during the week which I'm delighted at.

The first aquafit session saw me in the water some 15 mins before the session doing those crappy head held high breaststroke lengths on account that I'd forgotten my goggles. As we got into position for the class I had a silly grin on my face thinking 'well done you, you're actually here'. This joy rapidly disappeared when the music started. Grease Lightning, WMCA and the Birdy Song got me exercising with psychotic anger. How these women (there were 20 women and one man) tolerate this noise as music is beyond belief! I can't even move to that unadulterated crap when I've 10 pints inside me. At one point I thought all was not lost as I heard the opening bars of Racy's classic Some Girls Do. How foolish I felt when I turned out to be Making Your Mind Up by Bucks Fizz. That's a lesson to everyone ... don't be tricked like I was.

The fruit and veg intake is still good and I'm being very cunning at hiding veg in meals so Andrew doesn't winge too much. I've slipped peas into his rice and roasted all manner of veg he wouldn't normally eat. I even hid a punnet of raspberries in some jelly. All of these foods have been consumed with great gusto! I'm not sure that covering all your veg in oil and salt and all your fruit in sugar and cream is what the goverments 5 a day scheme has in mind. Oh well.

I'm still sticking to the No Drinking In The House Unless Guests but plan to break this tomorrow night as it's Burns night. The haggis is being fattened as I type and there's no way it could be consumed without a whiskey tipple.

On the down side not one but two previously undiscovered Christmas chocolate streams have been unearthed. A whole tub of celebrations and the most addictive substance in the world ... mini Diam bars, (curses to Kim for leaving them behind!) were found in the kitchen during the last week. We have risen to the challenge however by being absolute troppers and force feeding ourselves these choccies in order to get them cleared out of the house! Well done us ;)

Another downer is that when you stop drinking regularly and then go out for a drink you don't half put it away. We pretty much wiped out last Saturday as a result of the previous Friday night out and we only just salvaged Sunday by the skin of our teeth.

On the post-it note front there are a couple of losses and one gain. Small Plate Small Portion just isn't working as I when I do remember to use the small plate I can't 'arf pile it high. Easily getting as much or possibly even more on than a regular plate. One of the problems being that when you are trying to increase your veg intake you need to put a lot more veg on the plate. I'm going to regard this post-it as a failure and have another think on how to tackle portion size. Maybe it's just too early to take this one on.

The other loss is a continuation from last week and that's the -1 Hour Of TV Time A Night. In an attempt to combat this I have bought a backgammon set. I used to play when I worked nights some 10-12 years ago but I can't remember how it is played now. I hope it will be a good activity for me and Andrew to learn. Also I have discovered a fencing club that runs on a Thursday night. Andrew is a big fan of fencing so the plan is to pop down there for an hour once a week, ticking not only this post-it but increasing our physical activity too.

The gain hasn't made it onto a post-it yet and I'm not sure that it will as it's firmly stuck in my head. This is going to sound weird but here goes. No More Than 24 Hours Spent In The House. The reason for this is I work from home 3 days a week only needing to go into the office two days. So it is possible for me to not go outside for up to 5 days. It hardly ever happened 'onest guv but it's not rare for me to spend 2 or 3 days in the house without venturing outside. This has got to stop. So far since my last blog I have managed to stick to this one. In the back of my mind I wan't to up this to Go Outside Everyday but let's see how it pans out. Small sustainable steps remember.

Todays outside trip is aquafit and if  the Birdy Song is played again again I'm going to use the scrawny, perky titted, aurally defective, braindead bint as a towel!

Wish me luck.

So far so good

It's been about a week since my first entry so I thought it was time for an update.

As expected the post-its have become invisible to me as I see them every day but they are stuck in my subconscious however.

Sticking to the no drinking in the house unless we have guests and fruit and veg with every meal has been quite easy for me. Taking 1 hour from TV time hasn't been completely successful as I've started back at work this week and despite me sitting down at work it has exhausted me! A poor excuse I know.

I have learnt more about my camera functions and I'm delighted with that. My alcohol consumption has dropped through the floor and I'm hitting my 5 day almost every day. All good positive steps.

On the negative side I am still munching my way through Christmas chocolates and my meals are still huge. But a new post-it on the plate cupboard stating "Small plate, small portion" should help towards portion size. Most of the Christmas choccies have now gone so that's not too much of a temptation.

Lack of exercise is still a major issue for me. The thing I don't fully understand is that I enjoy exercising but I have built up a massive dread for doing anything that might break me out in a sweat. Why is this?

Andrew has this whole weekend and one of the activites we've planned is going to see Coventry Blaze vs Sheffield Steelers ice hockey match. The plan is to get a skating session in beforehand  ...

Wish me luck.