Day 22
August 30, 2011
Wt. 254
Blood Sugar (first thing in the morning) 156
Blood Sugar (post exercise)126 30 minute walk
Blood Pressure 152/98 65 bpm
Hanging in there
Last night, before I went to sleep I decided to test my blood sugar before going to bed. It was at 117. I went to sleep wondering what it would be in the morning. My first test was 156.
What? How could that happen. I didn’t eat anything. In fact, I ate early yesterday evening-along about 6 p.m. because I was running out of energy. So how is it I am 49 points higher first thing in the morning?
Two things. First: while I was sleeping my digestive system kept on working. No energy was being used to walk, or lift, or any of the thousand things I might be doing that need energy. Second: when I weighed myself this morning I was down a little over two pounds. The weight loss has been very slow after an initial and very exciting drop that looked like quick progress. I started at about 260 and then seemed to hold at 257 for a really long time. There I was, eating less, avoiding the bad stuff, doing what I was supposed to with a few slips off the righteous path and while blood sugar seemed to be improving, the weight was not coming down. Then I added in the exercise about a week ago. Good drops in the morning levels and good numbers after the morning walk but not much in the way of weight loss. Is there something wrong with the plan? Am I wasting my time? Should I just go back to doing what I was doing and eating all the potato chips and salsa and sodas? Should I go back to the 7-11 diet?
These are the kind of questions that come up when progress seems slow or non existent. We live in a FedEx world. We want our stuff from Amazon tomorrow or sooner. We want our team to score winning touchdowns on the first down and no later than the fourth. We want instant gratification.
Instant gratification.
Isn’t that exactly what caused the problem in the first place? We wanted cake and didn’t want to wait until our birthday party so we popped into 7-11 and got a snack cake, and a soda, but as it seemed wrong to have desert without lunch or dinner we got ourselves a nice Spicy Bite with half a ton of sauerkraut and a quart of mustard-all for less than five dollars-and got just what we wanted when we wanted it and a bit more to boot.
To go back to the football game analogy for a moment. Even the best of teams don’t win every game or score a touchdown every time they get the ball. Sometimes the QB gets nailed and they end up further back than where they started. Sometimes they screw up. Somebody jumps the gun and the ref sends the whole team back five yards or there is a flag for some other infraction and they go back ten yards. But there they are, still on the field and getting ready to try again for that next touchdown. FedEx doesn’t show up to deliver it to them any more than FedEx is going to come and deliver good numbers and lower weight to us. It takes getting back down on the line, focusing on the goal and despite setbacks, frustrations, lack of progress, days when you get so far off course you have to wonder if you are even in the same county any more. What it takes is to keep on keeping on.
Remember, all those men and women with the hard bodies advertising Ab Smashers on TV have been in great shape for most of their lives. They work hard at staying that way and do special diets in the weeks that lead up to a photo shoot so they look fantastic as they demonstrate a product they swear will give you a fantastic body in just seven days of five minute workouts.
The path we are on here is not fast. There are gains and setbacks. Some days it seems nothing is happening and some days it seems like our goal was achieved overnight. Then there are the days when Bob wins-big time. None of that really matters. What matters is staying with it and making progress bit by bit, week by week or month by month. Today is day one of the fourth week I have been doing this. Today is also the first day. It is the first day I will do better than yesterday, the first day I will meet some goal, stick to the plan, make myself a little healthier. It is a new start. If I screwed up yesterday, then today is the day that I have a chance to fix that and get back on track. A screw up is only permanent if I quit and decide that I failed and there is no point in trying to do better today and again tomorrow. A screw up is only permanent if it is viewed as a failure and not as a lesson.
So-that said-Today is going to be a fantastic day. I am going to go do my very best and tomorrow’s morning numbers will be better than today’s numbers.
I wrote this blog yesterday and this morning my blood sugar was at 134. Yesterday was a mixed bag when it came to eating. I ended up having to go to a fast food place for lunch and having a burger. I also walked to and from work-two miles each way. When I got home my blood sugar was 68 and I was feeling it. A bit of honey, a banana and an apple and then dinner bumped it to 156. I should have stopped with just the banana or just the apple but usually when low blood sugar happens all I can think of is getting it up to the point where I feel normal. It just takes a small amount of food to get there but it takes about half an hour to 45 minutes. The tendency is to want to eat until I feel normal.
Today is going to be another fantastic day. I am going to do my very best and tomorrow’s morning numbers will be better than today’s numbers.
More to come,
Jim
Wednesday, August 31, 2011
Friday, August 26, 2011
98 98 98 98
Day 20
August 26, 2011
Wt. 257??
Blood sugar(first thing in the morning) 136
Blood sugar(following 30 minute brisk walk) 98
Blood pressure 138/93 59bpm
98 98 98 98
YeeeeeHaw
98 is the glucose number I had when I got back from my walk. 38 points down from when I woke up and took my first numbers.
What really makes this an outstanding number is that last night I had a calzone at a pizza place. It had a white flour crust, tomato sauce that probably had sugar in it, lots of cheese, anchovies and it was WONDERFUL!!!!!! There was also a little basket of crusty white bread and a tray of olive oil and a glass of unsweetened ice tea.
The night before was dinner out with friends and I decided to make that my free day. I ate a lunch of vegetables with olive oil and cider vinegar and then ate more than I had intended to eat for dinner-the dinner was steak and steamed vegies-not too bad there and I only ate half and took the rest home for lunch the next day. But before dinner there were wonderful appetizers. All high in oil and white flour. I also had a cup of tea with sugar before dinner as I was having a bit of an energy crash that took me right to the edge of the prickles–I hate the prickles.
Yesterday morning I woke up to 152 and then after an hour walk it dropped to 128. All of which is still better than where I started 20 days ago but not close to my target of waking up at 100 or less. Not only did I put a bigger load on my body but all of that food was still in my gut to be processed. That is why I only dropped to 128 after a brisk walk of an hour when the day before I got a 30 point drop after just 30 minutes. Got to remember that whatever goes in has to get processed and there is no getting away from that-ever. That fact is locked in stone.
While I was talking to my friend, James, we got on to the subject of getting up several times a night to pee which really messes with your sleep rhythms. I have a take on this that is based on the long fast I did and seems to be born out in my own experience over the last three weeks.
Before the fast I was getting up three or four times a night and one day when I was cleaning the rim of the toilet with a dry paper towel I noticed that the collateral splash was very sticky where it had dried on the rim. One of the old time tests for diabetes was for doctors to taste the urine-a job they probably gave to their apprentices- and if it was sweet then they knew the patient had Sugar Diabetes. Sugar Diabetes was the old name for diabetes before they came up with T1 and T2. I had also read an article about poisons and who the body works very hard to get them out of the system. One of the quickest ways is to piss them out. Another is sweating. Some, like alcohol can be expelled through the breath.
When blood glucose is high the body is doing everything it can to get rid of the excess. It has already stored as much as it can as fat and there is still more. Dump it, dump it, dump it. Over the side, gotta lighten the load. Wake the idiot up and make him/her pee 40 times a night. Well, you get the idea.
Last night I went to sleep at 11–as you may recall from an earlier post, I am trying to get my 8 hours. I did not wake up until 7:40. Not only did I get the eight hours and then some, did not get up once. I have not tried the taste test myself, but the dried collateral splash isn’t sticky any more.
YeeeeeeHaw, indeed.
More to come
Jim
August 26, 2011
Wt. 257??
Blood sugar(first thing in the morning) 136
Blood sugar(following 30 minute brisk walk) 98
Blood pressure 138/93 59bpm
98 98 98 98
YeeeeeHaw
98 is the glucose number I had when I got back from my walk. 38 points down from when I woke up and took my first numbers.
What really makes this an outstanding number is that last night I had a calzone at a pizza place. It had a white flour crust, tomato sauce that probably had sugar in it, lots of cheese, anchovies and it was WONDERFUL!!!!!! There was also a little basket of crusty white bread and a tray of olive oil and a glass of unsweetened ice tea.
The night before was dinner out with friends and I decided to make that my free day. I ate a lunch of vegetables with olive oil and cider vinegar and then ate more than I had intended to eat for dinner-the dinner was steak and steamed vegies-not too bad there and I only ate half and took the rest home for lunch the next day. But before dinner there were wonderful appetizers. All high in oil and white flour. I also had a cup of tea with sugar before dinner as I was having a bit of an energy crash that took me right to the edge of the prickles–I hate the prickles.
Yesterday morning I woke up to 152 and then after an hour walk it dropped to 128. All of which is still better than where I started 20 days ago but not close to my target of waking up at 100 or less. Not only did I put a bigger load on my body but all of that food was still in my gut to be processed. That is why I only dropped to 128 after a brisk walk of an hour when the day before I got a 30 point drop after just 30 minutes. Got to remember that whatever goes in has to get processed and there is no getting away from that-ever. That fact is locked in stone.
While I was talking to my friend, James, we got on to the subject of getting up several times a night to pee which really messes with your sleep rhythms. I have a take on this that is based on the long fast I did and seems to be born out in my own experience over the last three weeks.
Before the fast I was getting up three or four times a night and one day when I was cleaning the rim of the toilet with a dry paper towel I noticed that the collateral splash was very sticky where it had dried on the rim. One of the old time tests for diabetes was for doctors to taste the urine-a job they probably gave to their apprentices- and if it was sweet then they knew the patient had Sugar Diabetes. Sugar Diabetes was the old name for diabetes before they came up with T1 and T2. I had also read an article about poisons and who the body works very hard to get them out of the system. One of the quickest ways is to piss them out. Another is sweating. Some, like alcohol can be expelled through the breath.
When blood glucose is high the body is doing everything it can to get rid of the excess. It has already stored as much as it can as fat and there is still more. Dump it, dump it, dump it. Over the side, gotta lighten the load. Wake the idiot up and make him/her pee 40 times a night. Well, you get the idea.
Last night I went to sleep at 11–as you may recall from an earlier post, I am trying to get my 8 hours. I did not wake up until 7:40. Not only did I get the eight hours and then some, did not get up once. I have not tried the taste test myself, but the dried collateral splash isn’t sticky any more.
YeeeeeeHaw, indeed.
More to come
Jim
Wednesday, August 24, 2011
A Wee Walk Into Healthy Territory
Day 18
August 24, 2011
Wt. 257
Blood sugar(first thing in the morning) 147
Blood sugar(following 30 minute brisk walk) 107
Blood pressure 154/96 66bpm
A Wee Walk Into Healthy Territory
It’s been a few days since my last blog. Just amazing how work can take over your life but I also took a day off from doing numbers and not focusing my attention of our old friends, Bob and T2. Not that I lessened my resolve to make them go away or went back to the evil ways that opened the door to them. They are bad roommates and I never stop wanting them to get the hell out.
This morning I added in a bit of exercise to the program. With just the diet and schedule alone I had dropped the blood sugar to 147. If you recall from the first blog, my morning blood sugar was 285 and the next day it was down to 185. Generally it has come down a little bit every day with just a couple of spikes. Yesterday it was holding at about 163, as it had been for several days and I decided it was time to add in a morning workout to eat up some of that sugar.
I am visiting a friend who also has T2 and tells me he and Bob are real good buddies. We went for a walk this morning. Before we started we agreed that he would walk as far as he was comfortable with and then turn back. As I am more used to walking I continued for another 20 minutes. When I returned I immediately checked my blood sugar and it was down to.......(drum roll please) .....................
..........................................................107!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
That is inside the range of healthy people who don’t have T2. Think about it-just a half an hour–30 minutes of walking took me down 30 points. Just by making my muscles hungry for the glucose did the trick. How exciting is that?
But as the Sham Wow guy likes to say-But wait-there’s more.
There is very strong evidence that working out first thing in the morning is more effective at burning fat than a workout later in the day. The reason seems to be related to the fact that the body has limited resources to draw on. There is no food in the stomach or at the upper end of the digestive track and what remains in the gut is somewhat depleted and harder to draw energy from. The body has to first draw off the glucose in the blood for the energy it needs and then go looking for the next available resource. This would be fat in the muscle tissues and in the larder–larder is what I am calling the fat stores around the torso. It seems an appropriate name because in homes that were built in the days before refrigerators became common the larder was a place for food storage. They were adjacent to the kitchen where the food would be needed. I also like the pun. However, our goal is to empty out the larder and keep our bodies just a little hungry so that it continues to make the best possible use of the food we put into it but never has so much extra that it can put the excess into storage and raise our blood sugar levels back to where it will eventually kill us.
Speaking of killing us. Last night I did a short walk-about 10 minutes- and was talking to my friend’s partner. Her husband–I’m calling him, Humpty- died of complications of T2 and her story was the verbal equivalent of a George Romero horror movie. Humpty’s demise visibly began with neuropathy- nerve death caused by damage to the capillaries that feed the nerves. First it was burning pain in the bottoms of his feet. He said it was like walking on hot coals-then it spread to other parts of his body. His vision failed, his organs failed, his legs swelled to twice their original size with skin as tight as a drum. His flesh began to smell as if it was rotting and all the drugs the doctors gave him couldn’t put Humpty Dumpty back together again. And that was just the PG version side of his dying. By the end she said it was much, much worse.
I don’t think my program would have helped him once the neuropathy set in because by the time T2 has taken such a ferociously powerful hold on the body that the nerves are dying off it is pretty late in the game to start trying to fix things. The foundation is gone, the walls are rotting and have termites, the roof is gone so it is too late for a new coat of paint in the living room. The time to start is well before then. If your doctor has just told you that you have T2 and your blood sugar is a bit high when you went in for your physical-that would be a good time. Back when my first doctor told me I was getting into dangerous territory and my glucose level was 124–that would have been a pots and pans banging great time to start. Then when the second doctor told me I definitely had T2-that would have been a fine time to start making the changes I am now making. But even if you are well beyond where I was a couple of weeks ago when I started this blog-right now is as good a time as you’re ever going to get. Everyday you sit on the wall not doing anything is one day closer to the BIG SPLAT!!! T2 will bring you as a parting gift.
Be sure to get your doctor’s advice and approval but don’t delay. T2 is a tenacious bastard and evicting him is going to take some time, but the longer you sit and think about it-or even worse-sit and don’t think about it- the more likely you are to end up like poor old Humpty and nothing anybody can do will fix it. There you’ll be-a nasty mess all spread out on the sidewalk with good old Bob and T2 standing there looking down at you with big grins on their faces.
You may be wondering why I’ve made Bob and T2 and even the recently added Humpty into the villains of my blog. It has to do with the Mad as Hell theme here. We are responsible for opening the door and inviting them to come live with us, but to be fair to ourselves, we had no idea what we were letting ourselves in for. Giving them personas makes them real and not medical abstractions. They are identifiable, we can see them, feel them. If we think of them as really bad house guests and not as permanent residents we can do nothing about, then we can make them go away. We might have to bar the door and windows to keep them from ever coming back but as you can see from what I’ve done in just three weeks it is very possible.
More to come
Jim
August 24, 2011
Wt. 257
Blood sugar(first thing in the morning) 147
Blood sugar(following 30 minute brisk walk) 107
Blood pressure 154/96 66bpm
A Wee Walk Into Healthy Territory
It’s been a few days since my last blog. Just amazing how work can take over your life but I also took a day off from doing numbers and not focusing my attention of our old friends, Bob and T2. Not that I lessened my resolve to make them go away or went back to the evil ways that opened the door to them. They are bad roommates and I never stop wanting them to get the hell out.
This morning I added in a bit of exercise to the program. With just the diet and schedule alone I had dropped the blood sugar to 147. If you recall from the first blog, my morning blood sugar was 285 and the next day it was down to 185. Generally it has come down a little bit every day with just a couple of spikes. Yesterday it was holding at about 163, as it had been for several days and I decided it was time to add in a morning workout to eat up some of that sugar.
I am visiting a friend who also has T2 and tells me he and Bob are real good buddies. We went for a walk this morning. Before we started we agreed that he would walk as far as he was comfortable with and then turn back. As I am more used to walking I continued for another 20 minutes. When I returned I immediately checked my blood sugar and it was down to.......(drum roll please) .....................
..........................................................107!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
That is inside the range of healthy people who don’t have T2. Think about it-just a half an hour–30 minutes of walking took me down 30 points. Just by making my muscles hungry for the glucose did the trick. How exciting is that?
But as the Sham Wow guy likes to say-But wait-there’s more.
There is very strong evidence that working out first thing in the morning is more effective at burning fat than a workout later in the day. The reason seems to be related to the fact that the body has limited resources to draw on. There is no food in the stomach or at the upper end of the digestive track and what remains in the gut is somewhat depleted and harder to draw energy from. The body has to first draw off the glucose in the blood for the energy it needs and then go looking for the next available resource. This would be fat in the muscle tissues and in the larder–larder is what I am calling the fat stores around the torso. It seems an appropriate name because in homes that were built in the days before refrigerators became common the larder was a place for food storage. They were adjacent to the kitchen where the food would be needed. I also like the pun. However, our goal is to empty out the larder and keep our bodies just a little hungry so that it continues to make the best possible use of the food we put into it but never has so much extra that it can put the excess into storage and raise our blood sugar levels back to where it will eventually kill us.
Speaking of killing us. Last night I did a short walk-about 10 minutes- and was talking to my friend’s partner. Her husband–I’m calling him, Humpty- died of complications of T2 and her story was the verbal equivalent of a George Romero horror movie. Humpty’s demise visibly began with neuropathy- nerve death caused by damage to the capillaries that feed the nerves. First it was burning pain in the bottoms of his feet. He said it was like walking on hot coals-then it spread to other parts of his body. His vision failed, his organs failed, his legs swelled to twice their original size with skin as tight as a drum. His flesh began to smell as if it was rotting and all the drugs the doctors gave him couldn’t put Humpty Dumpty back together again. And that was just the PG version side of his dying. By the end she said it was much, much worse.
I don’t think my program would have helped him once the neuropathy set in because by the time T2 has taken such a ferociously powerful hold on the body that the nerves are dying off it is pretty late in the game to start trying to fix things. The foundation is gone, the walls are rotting and have termites, the roof is gone so it is too late for a new coat of paint in the living room. The time to start is well before then. If your doctor has just told you that you have T2 and your blood sugar is a bit high when you went in for your physical-that would be a good time. Back when my first doctor told me I was getting into dangerous territory and my glucose level was 124–that would have been a pots and pans banging great time to start. Then when the second doctor told me I definitely had T2-that would have been a fine time to start making the changes I am now making. But even if you are well beyond where I was a couple of weeks ago when I started this blog-right now is as good a time as you’re ever going to get. Everyday you sit on the wall not doing anything is one day closer to the BIG SPLAT!!! T2 will bring you as a parting gift.
Be sure to get your doctor’s advice and approval but don’t delay. T2 is a tenacious bastard and evicting him is going to take some time, but the longer you sit and think about it-or even worse-sit and don’t think about it- the more likely you are to end up like poor old Humpty and nothing anybody can do will fix it. There you’ll be-a nasty mess all spread out on the sidewalk with good old Bob and T2 standing there looking down at you with big grins on their faces.
You may be wondering why I’ve made Bob and T2 and even the recently added Humpty into the villains of my blog. It has to do with the Mad as Hell theme here. We are responsible for opening the door and inviting them to come live with us, but to be fair to ourselves, we had no idea what we were letting ourselves in for. Giving them personas makes them real and not medical abstractions. They are identifiable, we can see them, feel them. If we think of them as really bad house guests and not as permanent residents we can do nothing about, then we can make them go away. We might have to bar the door and windows to keep them from ever coming back but as you can see from what I’ve done in just three weeks it is very possible.
More to come
Jim
Thursday, August 18, 2011
Time to become an Elk
Day11
August 16, 2011
Wt. 257.6
Blood Sugar (first thing in the morning) 163
Blood Pressure 142/94 61 bpm.
Elk or Corn-Fed Angus Beef
That’s more like it. Still too high but more in line with the numbers from previous days, but, as I was saying yesterday-it needs to be a lot lower. I would like my first test of the day to be somewhere between 90 and 105. 80 to 90 would be even better, but for now I’m keeping it to the slightly higher target. Your doctor would be thrilled at these numbers after seeing lots of 140 to 300s. He or she might be a little miffed that you did it without drugs because if you don’t need drugs to fix this then the entire paradigm of modern western medicine begins to look like it’s on shaky ground.
What if you didn’t need drugs for depression or high blood pressure, or insomnia or even drugs to mask the side effects of the drugs you took for other things? Oops-I digress, I was going to talk about making our muscles hungry.
The reasoning, besides 90 to 105 being healthy people numbers, is that when you start out low at the beginning of the day it is easier to keep your glucose in check the rest of the day, but because our bodies are no longer working as well we need to help that along a bit.
Surprisingly it doesn’t take much. Half an hour to an hour of brisk walking can do it and the more in shape your body gets the better it works. Odd about that.
Walking works well because it uses the largest muscle groups in the body, gets the heart rate up and gets blood moving all through the system at a good rate. That means the glucose is getting delivered right to those muscles that are needing fuel to keep on trucking and when the body needs energy it goes looking for what is in the blood first. After that it goes looking for fat stores. That’s a good thing because those of us with T2 in residence usually have more than a bit of it hanging around. Some of it is pretty easy to identify when we stand in front of a mirror. We can even grab hold of nice chunks of it but there’s more, and it is pretty well hidden.
Just like the infomercial guy says, "but there’s more." There is also fat deposits within our muscle tissue as well. If you’ve ever eaten an elk steak or venison you know that the meat tastes drier and tougher than a nice corn-fed cow. The reason is both fat and exercise. Before that meat is cooked you can both see and feel the fat content of the muscle tissues. Your friendly neighborhood butcher will hold up a cut of meat and show you the marbling-striations of fat-in the meat. Or he would have before all of our meat came on little plastic trays covered with a window of clear plastic and we never saw the guys who whacked up and wrapped it.
Our bodies are the same. There has to be some fat there because it is the second place the muscles look for energy once they’ve depleted what is in the blood. They can’t use up all of the glucose in the blood or the rest of the body would starve, so it goes looking first to the fat within the muscle tissues and then to that stuff we can grab on to when we’re looking in the mirror with that look of total dismay on our faces.
The wild game had to work for its food and the food was not usually troughs of high energy corn. That elk had to walk up and down hills, swim lakes, run for its life, chase its mate and so on. It got a 24-7 workout every day until someone plugged it and put it on the dinner table. The feedlot cow, on the other hand, stood around all day. Entertainment was corn in the trough in the morning and evening. Not much work other than ambling over to the water and then back over to the corn-sound familiar? The result was meat with a lot more fat content. It is juicy, tender, sweet.
We would be a cannibal’s delight. No stingy dry old explorer for dinner tonight. Nice corn-fed couch potato. Mmm mmm, good eatin’ there. Silliness aside, our goal is to become elk. Use up the muscle fat, get rid of the fat roll and help our bodies do what they were designed to do. Reducing and controlling the quantity and quality of food is part of that. Making our muscles work harder and get hungrier is another part. Doing both will make T2 go find someplace else to live.
Gotta go to work again,
More to come.
Jim
August 16, 2011
Wt. 257.6
Blood Sugar (first thing in the morning) 163
Blood Pressure 142/94 61 bpm.
Elk or Corn-Fed Angus Beef
That’s more like it. Still too high but more in line with the numbers from previous days, but, as I was saying yesterday-it needs to be a lot lower. I would like my first test of the day to be somewhere between 90 and 105. 80 to 90 would be even better, but for now I’m keeping it to the slightly higher target. Your doctor would be thrilled at these numbers after seeing lots of 140 to 300s. He or she might be a little miffed that you did it without drugs because if you don’t need drugs to fix this then the entire paradigm of modern western medicine begins to look like it’s on shaky ground.
What if you didn’t need drugs for depression or high blood pressure, or insomnia or even drugs to mask the side effects of the drugs you took for other things? Oops-I digress, I was going to talk about making our muscles hungry.
The reasoning, besides 90 to 105 being healthy people numbers, is that when you start out low at the beginning of the day it is easier to keep your glucose in check the rest of the day, but because our bodies are no longer working as well we need to help that along a bit.
Surprisingly it doesn’t take much. Half an hour to an hour of brisk walking can do it and the more in shape your body gets the better it works. Odd about that.
Walking works well because it uses the largest muscle groups in the body, gets the heart rate up and gets blood moving all through the system at a good rate. That means the glucose is getting delivered right to those muscles that are needing fuel to keep on trucking and when the body needs energy it goes looking for what is in the blood first. After that it goes looking for fat stores. That’s a good thing because those of us with T2 in residence usually have more than a bit of it hanging around. Some of it is pretty easy to identify when we stand in front of a mirror. We can even grab hold of nice chunks of it but there’s more, and it is pretty well hidden.
Just like the infomercial guy says, "but there’s more." There is also fat deposits within our muscle tissue as well. If you’ve ever eaten an elk steak or venison you know that the meat tastes drier and tougher than a nice corn-fed cow. The reason is both fat and exercise. Before that meat is cooked you can both see and feel the fat content of the muscle tissues. Your friendly neighborhood butcher will hold up a cut of meat and show you the marbling-striations of fat-in the meat. Or he would have before all of our meat came on little plastic trays covered with a window of clear plastic and we never saw the guys who whacked up and wrapped it.
Our bodies are the same. There has to be some fat there because it is the second place the muscles look for energy once they’ve depleted what is in the blood. They can’t use up all of the glucose in the blood or the rest of the body would starve, so it goes looking first to the fat within the muscle tissues and then to that stuff we can grab on to when we’re looking in the mirror with that look of total dismay on our faces.
The wild game had to work for its food and the food was not usually troughs of high energy corn. That elk had to walk up and down hills, swim lakes, run for its life, chase its mate and so on. It got a 24-7 workout every day until someone plugged it and put it on the dinner table. The feedlot cow, on the other hand, stood around all day. Entertainment was corn in the trough in the morning and evening. Not much work other than ambling over to the water and then back over to the corn-sound familiar? The result was meat with a lot more fat content. It is juicy, tender, sweet.
We would be a cannibal’s delight. No stingy dry old explorer for dinner tonight. Nice corn-fed couch potato. Mmm mmm, good eatin’ there. Silliness aside, our goal is to become elk. Use up the muscle fat, get rid of the fat roll and help our bodies do what they were designed to do. Reducing and controlling the quantity and quality of food is part of that. Making our muscles work harder and get hungrier is another part. Doing both will make T2 go find someplace else to live.
Gotta go to work again,
More to come.
Jim
Wednesday, August 17, 2011
What is Going On with these numbers?
Day10
August 16, 2011
Wt. 256.6
Blood Sugar (first thing in the morning) 186
Blood Pressure 142/94 66 bpm.
What is Going On with these numbers?
Hmmm. Now I’m really wondering what is going on. Last night’s dinner was a bowl of pinto beans mixed with olive oil, vinegar, cayenne pepper, crushed chili and some mayo. All in all less than 500 calories and well within the fist sized portion. I went to bed at 10:30 and slept until 7:10 so I got my 8 and a half hours of sleep. So why is my blood sugar up two days in a row? It is possible that I have started burning fat stores as I did on that fast I told you about?
Ah, well. What has been built in 15 years is not undone in a week. Stick with it and see what tomorrow’s numbers look like.
This is sort of what my day will look like-Off to work in a little while, I have 2 insulated glass panels to build, a gate to rebuild. Some artwork to work on and some finish carpentry work to do on my house.
Right now I’m having my morning coffee-no sugar but some half and half, Lunch will be at noon or 2, depending on when I get home. Lunch will be steamed vegies and rice. Carrots, cabbage, parsnips, celery, onion, potato. Sometimes I add fish to the mix but for the next few days it will mostly be vegetables to give the meat I’ve been eating over the last several days a chance to clear the system. Not sure what dinner will look like yet. Somewhere in there will be an apple or two. As a snack I prefer apples to oranges. They seem to be slower to digest and hit the system than oranges. Bananas are great but best mixed with stuff that is a bit slower to digest. I find they can spike me almost as fast as oranges.
Considering the up turn in my glucose numbers I am considering adding in the exercise component of my program a little sooner. I had been planning on waiting until the beginning of the third week to add it in to give a better picture of the effects of diet alone. I’ve understoof for a while that while diet is hugely important and there are some foods to avoid as if they were the black death itself, it can’t be the only thing we do to chase this thing out of our bodies. Before we began developing type II----a little side note here-I am getting really tired of typing "type II" not so much because of the six key strokes but because it just doesn’t say what I want it to. It has a distant and clinical feel to it. It doesn’t feel like the thing that it is, the thing I want to get out of my body forever. From now on type II is going to be T2. If you’ve ever seen the second Terminator movie you’ll understand. That endlessly transforming liquid metal man was a monster that was really hard to get rid of.
OK-name change out of the way. Type II is now T2-on to what I started out to say. Since our bodies don’t handle our blood sugar as well as bodies of those who don’t have T2 we have to help them along a bit by making our muscles hungry by using them. It also helps with the weight loss as well.
More on this subject tomorrow as I need to go make like a working person for a while. Tomorrow we start tweaking this to get those morning numbers going in the right direction again.
More to come,
Jim
August 16, 2011
Wt. 256.6
Blood Sugar (first thing in the morning) 186
Blood Pressure 142/94 66 bpm.
What is Going On with these numbers?
Hmmm. Now I’m really wondering what is going on. Last night’s dinner was a bowl of pinto beans mixed with olive oil, vinegar, cayenne pepper, crushed chili and some mayo. All in all less than 500 calories and well within the fist sized portion. I went to bed at 10:30 and slept until 7:10 so I got my 8 and a half hours of sleep. So why is my blood sugar up two days in a row? It is possible that I have started burning fat stores as I did on that fast I told you about?
Ah, well. What has been built in 15 years is not undone in a week. Stick with it and see what tomorrow’s numbers look like.
This is sort of what my day will look like-Off to work in a little while, I have 2 insulated glass panels to build, a gate to rebuild. Some artwork to work on and some finish carpentry work to do on my house.
Right now I’m having my morning coffee-no sugar but some half and half, Lunch will be at noon or 2, depending on when I get home. Lunch will be steamed vegies and rice. Carrots, cabbage, parsnips, celery, onion, potato. Sometimes I add fish to the mix but for the next few days it will mostly be vegetables to give the meat I’ve been eating over the last several days a chance to clear the system. Not sure what dinner will look like yet. Somewhere in there will be an apple or two. As a snack I prefer apples to oranges. They seem to be slower to digest and hit the system than oranges. Bananas are great but best mixed with stuff that is a bit slower to digest. I find they can spike me almost as fast as oranges.
Considering the up turn in my glucose numbers I am considering adding in the exercise component of my program a little sooner. I had been planning on waiting until the beginning of the third week to add it in to give a better picture of the effects of diet alone. I’ve understoof for a while that while diet is hugely important and there are some foods to avoid as if they were the black death itself, it can’t be the only thing we do to chase this thing out of our bodies. Before we began developing type II----a little side note here-I am getting really tired of typing "type II" not so much because of the six key strokes but because it just doesn’t say what I want it to. It has a distant and clinical feel to it. It doesn’t feel like the thing that it is, the thing I want to get out of my body forever. From now on type II is going to be T2. If you’ve ever seen the second Terminator movie you’ll understand. That endlessly transforming liquid metal man was a monster that was really hard to get rid of.
OK-name change out of the way. Type II is now T2-on to what I started out to say. Since our bodies don’t handle our blood sugar as well as bodies of those who don’t have T2 we have to help them along a bit by making our muscles hungry by using them. It also helps with the weight loss as well.
More on this subject tomorrow as I need to go make like a working person for a while. Tomorrow we start tweaking this to get those morning numbers going in the right direction again.
More to come,
Jim
Tuesday, August 16, 2011
Day 9: Come On, Get Some Sleep
Day 9
August 16, 2011
Wt. 259
Blood Sugar (first thing in the morning) 174
Blood Pressure 138/93 59 bpm.
Come on, get some sleep
See what a little public crowing about success will get you. This morning’s glucose level was up to 174. I think that this up turn has two sources. I was working on stuff last night and stayed up until about 3:30 and along about 2 a.m. I had an apple.
There has been a lot written about sleep patterns and type II diabetes. Some studies suggest that the less sleep the body gets the more likely it is to develop type II and once type II has taken hold lack of sleep can have an even greater impact on morning glucose levels.
A University of Chicago study looked at the sleep patterns of 160 men with type II and found that on average less than a quarter of the men in the study slept for at least seven hours a night and only six percent got an average of eight hours sleep. The researchers found that as the number of hours of sleep decreased the men’s hemoglobin A1C levels tended to increase.
Those hated test strips I mentioned in my first blog are just snapshots in time. They give you an idea of where you are at any given point in the day when you do the test. I’ve found there is a bit of lag time, maybe 20 to 30 minutes between what the strip shows and where you are. The A1C test, however, provides more of a cumulative picture of how your are doing.
An October 9, 2005 Washington Post article on the effects of sleep depravation reported on several studies that indicated that the lack of sleep activates a number of stress hormones. Studies conducted by the University of Washington, Columbia University, the University of California at San Diego and the University of British Columbia all indicated the damage lack of sleep could do to the human body.
The various studies showed that human evolution has adapted us to sleeping for seven to eight hours at night and that missing sleep seems to activate a number of stress hormones that affect appetite suppression and increases the level of glucose in the blood.
The researchers speculated that for humans the only reason to be awake is hunger and danger but that modern society has provided us with all sorts diversions that keep us up into the small hours and then demands we rise and shine and go to work. Millions of years of evolution have not adapted us for a change that has only been a part of our lives for the last hundred years or so, and the body reacts as if there is some danger near by and makes sure it is ready to fight or run like hell.
A sleepless night or two once in a while is probably not a bad thing, or at least no worse than having a bowl of ice cream once in a while. But done on a daily-or nightly basis- it can be disastrous.
The studies show that people with the least number of hours of sleep are the most likely to develop one or more of the killer diseases, cancer, heart disease, type II diabetes "There's absolutely no reason it should be limited to breast cancer, and it wouldn't necessarily be restricted to people who work night shifts. People with disrupted sleep or people who are up late at night or get up frequently in the night could potentially have the same sort of effect," said Scott Davis of the University of Washington who reported on the results of a study on sleep deprivation and cancer risk.
A while back there was a study that said it was best if people slept in dark rooms. No lights of any kind. That means turning off the LED on the clock radio, the little blips of light on the TV and stereo, the monitor lights on computer screens and so on. I don’t know about that, but I suspect that late night on the computer or watching TV into the wee hours could qualify as a bad thing.
So as much as I hate to do it, I’m going to add yet another rule and put it into effect tonight.
Rule 12. Go to bed early. Don’t squander sleep time on watching old movies or bopping around the internet. Make sure the room is dark-no artificial lights.
The upside of this rule is that if I am asleep, I am not likely to eat an apple at 2 a.m..
Looking forward to nice low numbers tomorrow morning. G’night all.
More to come.
Jim
August 16, 2011
Wt. 259
Blood Sugar (first thing in the morning) 174
Blood Pressure 138/93 59 bpm.
Come on, get some sleep
See what a little public crowing about success will get you. This morning’s glucose level was up to 174. I think that this up turn has two sources. I was working on stuff last night and stayed up until about 3:30 and along about 2 a.m. I had an apple.
There has been a lot written about sleep patterns and type II diabetes. Some studies suggest that the less sleep the body gets the more likely it is to develop type II and once type II has taken hold lack of sleep can have an even greater impact on morning glucose levels.
A University of Chicago study looked at the sleep patterns of 160 men with type II and found that on average less than a quarter of the men in the study slept for at least seven hours a night and only six percent got an average of eight hours sleep. The researchers found that as the number of hours of sleep decreased the men’s hemoglobin A1C levels tended to increase.
Those hated test strips I mentioned in my first blog are just snapshots in time. They give you an idea of where you are at any given point in the day when you do the test. I’ve found there is a bit of lag time, maybe 20 to 30 minutes between what the strip shows and where you are. The A1C test, however, provides more of a cumulative picture of how your are doing.
An October 9, 2005 Washington Post article on the effects of sleep depravation reported on several studies that indicated that the lack of sleep activates a number of stress hormones. Studies conducted by the University of Washington, Columbia University, the University of California at San Diego and the University of British Columbia all indicated the damage lack of sleep could do to the human body.
The various studies showed that human evolution has adapted us to sleeping for seven to eight hours at night and that missing sleep seems to activate a number of stress hormones that affect appetite suppression and increases the level of glucose in the blood.
The researchers speculated that for humans the only reason to be awake is hunger and danger but that modern society has provided us with all sorts diversions that keep us up into the small hours and then demands we rise and shine and go to work. Millions of years of evolution have not adapted us for a change that has only been a part of our lives for the last hundred years or so, and the body reacts as if there is some danger near by and makes sure it is ready to fight or run like hell.
A sleepless night or two once in a while is probably not a bad thing, or at least no worse than having a bowl of ice cream once in a while. But done on a daily-or nightly basis- it can be disastrous.
The studies show that people with the least number of hours of sleep are the most likely to develop one or more of the killer diseases, cancer, heart disease, type II diabetes "There's absolutely no reason it should be limited to breast cancer, and it wouldn't necessarily be restricted to people who work night shifts. People with disrupted sleep or people who are up late at night or get up frequently in the night could potentially have the same sort of effect," said Scott Davis of the University of Washington who reported on the results of a study on sleep deprivation and cancer risk.
A while back there was a study that said it was best if people slept in dark rooms. No lights of any kind. That means turning off the LED on the clock radio, the little blips of light on the TV and stereo, the monitor lights on computer screens and so on. I don’t know about that, but I suspect that late night on the computer or watching TV into the wee hours could qualify as a bad thing.
So as much as I hate to do it, I’m going to add yet another rule and put it into effect tonight.
Rule 12. Go to bed early. Don’t squander sleep time on watching old movies or bopping around the internet. Make sure the room is dark-no artificial lights.
The upside of this rule is that if I am asleep, I am not likely to eat an apple at 2 a.m..
Looking forward to nice low numbers tomorrow morning. G’night all.
More to come.
Jim
Monday, August 15, 2011
Blood pressure down by 9% / 13%, blood glucose down 17 % after just 7 days.
Day 8
August 15, 2011
Wt. 258.8
Blood Sugar (first thing in the morning) 157
Blood Pressure 144/95 67 bpm.
Blood pressure down by 9%/13%, blood glucose down 17 % after just 7 days.
It sure looks like it is working. I was expecting my blood sugar to be higher than 157 this morning because yesterday was an odd day for eating and my first meal didn’t happen until about 4 p.m. an then along about 11 p.m. I had cantaloupe and an apple and about a cup of cold chicken and a cup of pinto beans. I would have expected my blood sugar to be up from the sugars in the fruit but instead it is only three points up from yesterday morning.
The other very good number is the blood pressure. Well, in its self 144/95 is not a great number it places me in the mild hypertension range. However, on day one, just 8 days ago, my blood pressure was 158/102 which is in the moderate hypertension range.
I am now beginning week 2 of my Mad as hell: getting rid of diabetes without drugs program and the results are beginning to show real progress. There are no drugs involved. After the first couple of days when I had several of bad headaches I have not taken any aspirin or pain medications. The only other drugs going into my system is my daily coffee and the Vardenfil (Levitra) I took yesterday.
One of the rules, number 8: Don’t become a fanatic, give yourself permission to slide a bit. Pick a day that you can have a treat and break all of the rules a little bit. At first that day can be once a week. After you are in control and Bob is history then stretch it out to once a month. It is important not to go overboard. You can have that ham sandwich and the slice of chocolate cake, but not the rest of the ham and the rest of the cake. Whatever you put in your body has to be processed and the system just doesn’t work as well as it used to.
For me that day was Saturday. I met a friend for coffee and had two large cups of coffee with raw sugar and a pastry. A little later in the day I had a couple more pastries. I can tell you that they were fantastic. I enjoyed ever single bite and crumb of them. The coffee with sugar tasted equally great. Those treats tasted especially good because they were just that-they were treats.
Back in the days before electricity, ice cream was made by hand cranking an ice cream churn. Ice was stored in ice houses and delivered. To make ice cream in the summer involved a huge amount of work. The block of ice had to be broken into chips, you put it in a churn and added salt to make it colder. Then all of the ingredients went into the container with the paddle churn and then the lid went on and everybody got a turn cranking until you had ice cream. Unless you were rich or really lucky, ice cream was a once in a while thing. A couple times during the summer-maybe. Can you imagine how good it tasted after all of that work on a hot day? It was a real TREAT. When I was a kid my Dad would make his special fudge candy. He started making it during the Great Depression and it represented having a little extra money for something special. Sugar, cocoa, vanilla, milk, nuts. Back then it might have all cost about a dollar but when you earned 12 dollars a week and had a family to feed you just didn’t squander a dollar on a plate of candy. When I was a little kid, money was still tight. We had moved to Taos, Dad was an artist, and our first couple of winters we lived on the credit a local grocery store owner, Eloy Gurule extended to us. When Dad sold a picture and had a little extra money he would make a plate of fudge and let me help. Really special times and the taste of that candy is still with me–so are some of the bad lessons about food and feeling good, but that is another blog.
The point is that we have come a very long way from treats being special and far between. We now live a life of candy. It is everywhere, even where we would least expect it and our health is suffering for it. But when you remove the treat from the every day and make it something that happens once in a while then two huge things happen. One; the treat tastes like a gift of the gods and two; our bodies can handle the insult and adapt. When it gets hammered day in and day out with an overload of sweet, energy dense goodies it breaks. The proof of that is in expanding waistlines, diabetes, heart disease, and probably a dozen other illnesses we now have as a common fact of our lives.
How am I going to celebrate my new good numbers? I’m going to go finish my cup of coffee-without sugar-have a fist sized lunch of chili and beans and go do some work. Next Saturday when I wake up, I will think of the food I most want-possibly pizza and I will go fine some restaurant that will serve it by the slice and have one or two. No more. I can hardly wait. It will be a fantastic treat and a reward for even better numbers.
More to come,
Jim
August 15, 2011
Wt. 258.8
Blood Sugar (first thing in the morning) 157
Blood Pressure 144/95 67 bpm.
Blood pressure down by 9%/13%, blood glucose down 17 % after just 7 days.
It sure looks like it is working. I was expecting my blood sugar to be higher than 157 this morning because yesterday was an odd day for eating and my first meal didn’t happen until about 4 p.m. an then along about 11 p.m. I had cantaloupe and an apple and about a cup of cold chicken and a cup of pinto beans. I would have expected my blood sugar to be up from the sugars in the fruit but instead it is only three points up from yesterday morning.
The other very good number is the blood pressure. Well, in its self 144/95 is not a great number it places me in the mild hypertension range. However, on day one, just 8 days ago, my blood pressure was 158/102 which is in the moderate hypertension range.
I am now beginning week 2 of my Mad as hell: getting rid of diabetes without drugs program and the results are beginning to show real progress. There are no drugs involved. After the first couple of days when I had several of bad headaches I have not taken any aspirin or pain medications. The only other drugs going into my system is my daily coffee and the Vardenfil (Levitra) I took yesterday.
One of the rules, number 8: Don’t become a fanatic, give yourself permission to slide a bit. Pick a day that you can have a treat and break all of the rules a little bit. At first that day can be once a week. After you are in control and Bob is history then stretch it out to once a month. It is important not to go overboard. You can have that ham sandwich and the slice of chocolate cake, but not the rest of the ham and the rest of the cake. Whatever you put in your body has to be processed and the system just doesn’t work as well as it used to.
For me that day was Saturday. I met a friend for coffee and had two large cups of coffee with raw sugar and a pastry. A little later in the day I had a couple more pastries. I can tell you that they were fantastic. I enjoyed ever single bite and crumb of them. The coffee with sugar tasted equally great. Those treats tasted especially good because they were just that-they were treats.
Back in the days before electricity, ice cream was made by hand cranking an ice cream churn. Ice was stored in ice houses and delivered. To make ice cream in the summer involved a huge amount of work. The block of ice had to be broken into chips, you put it in a churn and added salt to make it colder. Then all of the ingredients went into the container with the paddle churn and then the lid went on and everybody got a turn cranking until you had ice cream. Unless you were rich or really lucky, ice cream was a once in a while thing. A couple times during the summer-maybe. Can you imagine how good it tasted after all of that work on a hot day? It was a real TREAT. When I was a kid my Dad would make his special fudge candy. He started making it during the Great Depression and it represented having a little extra money for something special. Sugar, cocoa, vanilla, milk, nuts. Back then it might have all cost about a dollar but when you earned 12 dollars a week and had a family to feed you just didn’t squander a dollar on a plate of candy. When I was a little kid, money was still tight. We had moved to Taos, Dad was an artist, and our first couple of winters we lived on the credit a local grocery store owner, Eloy Gurule extended to us. When Dad sold a picture and had a little extra money he would make a plate of fudge and let me help. Really special times and the taste of that candy is still with me–so are some of the bad lessons about food and feeling good, but that is another blog.
The point is that we have come a very long way from treats being special and far between. We now live a life of candy. It is everywhere, even where we would least expect it and our health is suffering for it. But when you remove the treat from the every day and make it something that happens once in a while then two huge things happen. One; the treat tastes like a gift of the gods and two; our bodies can handle the insult and adapt. When it gets hammered day in and day out with an overload of sweet, energy dense goodies it breaks. The proof of that is in expanding waistlines, diabetes, heart disease, and probably a dozen other illnesses we now have as a common fact of our lives.
How am I going to celebrate my new good numbers? I’m going to go finish my cup of coffee-without sugar-have a fist sized lunch of chili and beans and go do some work. Next Saturday when I wake up, I will think of the food I most want-possibly pizza and I will go fine some restaurant that will serve it by the slice and have one or two. No more. I can hardly wait. It will be a fantastic treat and a reward for even better numbers.
More to come,
Jim
Sunday, August 14, 2011
40 Billion Capillaries Under Siege
Day 7
August 14, 2011
Wt. 259
Blood Sugar (first thing in the morning) 154
Blood Pressure 120/83 72 bpm.
40 Billion Capillaries Under Siege
To begin with I would love to claim that the recent life style change is responsible for the wonderfully lower blood pressure numbers this morning but the truth is I think that the half tablet of Levitra I took before I went to sleep has probably has more to do with the lower blood pressure numbers--unless it is even better tomorrow. I told you at the beginning that I was going to be honest.
What can be tied to the diet change is this. When I started this seven days ago, my morning blood sugar was up to 285 and that is a bad number. While I would like to think that it was an artificially high number, I really have no idea because I had not been testing in a while and had been deliberately eating whatever I felt like eating for several weeks before starting this program. I had also fallen into the habit of eating late at night, eating starchy foods with oil and putting sugar in my coffee on a regular basis. I even had a few of those HFCS poisoned sodas–I like the A&W Root Beer because it sort of reminds me of going to the A&W with my Dad when I was a kid. The long and the short of it is that I have been working on eating healthier for quite a while and have found that the advice I am offering you in these blogs works, but it only works if you keep doing it. Just as I have demonstrated by going back to my old ways, if you don’t commit and stay with it, this daemon will come back to live in the house we built for it. The only way to keep it out is not to do the things that opened the door in the first place.
I had planned on writing about something else this morning but looking back at the beginning paragraph I see a couple of things I would like to follow up on.
The first one is and isn’t related to diabetes and affects an enormous number of men. That would be Erectile Dysfunction which I first heard about from a man I met in the lobby of a hospital when I was about 29. He was about the age I am now-maybe a few years older. He was probably 40 pounds overweight and his skin as gray. In fact everything about him was gray. His hair, his clothes, his personality and his mood. Well, actually, his mood was a much darker shade of gray. He was angry and bitter. He had heart problems, his hips hurt, his wife was in the ICU, he had type II diabetes and a bad case of "limp dick." That seemed to bother him more than anything else. Being young and strong and no problems in that department other than not having a lover at the time I really didn’t understand. In fact, at 29 I didn’t understand much of anything he was telling me. Looking back on it I think he was trying to warn me, but as with most young people, I could see his mouth moving but nothing worth listening to was coming out of it and I didn’t understand the implications of what he was trying to tell me.
Now I do. All too well. I read an article just the other day that mentioned the the fact that when a man goes in to see his doctor and tells the doctor that he "can’t get it up" or that it won’t stay up, the doctor now assumes heart disease, even in young men. Why? Well, it’s pretty simple. The penis relies on blood flow and the ability of the blood vessels to relax and fill up with blood to achieve an erection. If they can’t do it, you can’t either. There can be other problems, low testosterone, physical damage and so on, but when you walk in and have high blood pressure-as I do, and have erection issues then the doctor can be pretty certain you have a 90 percent chance of having some degree of heart disease. Oh happy day.
Diabetes goes hand in hand with that as well. One of the reasons is that you have about 100,000 miles of blood vessels in you body and they range from the very large major distribution and return arteries to the smaller ones you can see near the surface. The greatest number-about 40 billion of them are the capillaries. They are so small that they only allow one blood cell at a time to pass. If you’ve ever taken a large dose of Niacin you know that you can feel every single one of them as they dilate to allow more blood to flow through. These little guys are everywhere in our bodies. They directly feed each of the cells and carry away the cell’s waste products. It is an amazing system.
Diabetes messes with that system by tearing up the smooth lining of the capillaries. Imagine a nice healthy blood cell, just like the ones you saw pictures of in your grade school biology book. That perfectly smooth cell goes zipping through your body as easy as grease through a goose. But when you have high blood sugar levels something really ugly happens. The excess sugar molecules are as sharp and jagged as gravel and they piggy-back onto the blood cells and make it all sharp and jaggy. It is not too bad a thing, not great but not horrendous, while the blood cells are all bumping along in the larger blood vessels, sure they are scraping along but the real damage happens when they hit the capillaries. The are being pushed by the heart and have no choice but the jam their way through, but being all sharp and jaggy they sort of grind their way along like a chunk of rock and as a result the lining of the capillaries is scarred. When they do enough damage the capillary can rupture under the pressure and then the blood clots and seals it off. Without blood supply all of the cells the capillary served start to die and this is a very bad thing. It leads to the death of nerves, blindness, erectile dysfunction, kidney failure and every one of the indignities that comes with the daemon that our friend Bob would invite in with his endless demand to be satisfied.
Just because men have this handy gauge of their heart health doesn’t mean that the very same process isn’t happening in women’s bodies as well.
You remember I mentioned the A&W Root Beer and how I liked them because it reminded me of spending time with my Dad. A lot of the foods that are bad for us are like that, they affects us emotionally because their tastes and smells take us back to better, happier times. A little bit of that, now and again, is not a bad thing but a lot of it starts the process that will kill us off a little piece at a time.
I don’t advocate never eating cake ever again, but suggest (very, very strongly) that a few bites once in a while is just fine, but not the whole cake every day.
Enough for today, more to come,
Jim
August 14, 2011
Wt. 259
Blood Sugar (first thing in the morning) 154
Blood Pressure 120/83 72 bpm.
40 Billion Capillaries Under Siege
To begin with I would love to claim that the recent life style change is responsible for the wonderfully lower blood pressure numbers this morning but the truth is I think that the half tablet of Levitra I took before I went to sleep has probably has more to do with the lower blood pressure numbers--unless it is even better tomorrow. I told you at the beginning that I was going to be honest.
What can be tied to the diet change is this. When I started this seven days ago, my morning blood sugar was up to 285 and that is a bad number. While I would like to think that it was an artificially high number, I really have no idea because I had not been testing in a while and had been deliberately eating whatever I felt like eating for several weeks before starting this program. I had also fallen into the habit of eating late at night, eating starchy foods with oil and putting sugar in my coffee on a regular basis. I even had a few of those HFCS poisoned sodas–I like the A&W Root Beer because it sort of reminds me of going to the A&W with my Dad when I was a kid. The long and the short of it is that I have been working on eating healthier for quite a while and have found that the advice I am offering you in these blogs works, but it only works if you keep doing it. Just as I have demonstrated by going back to my old ways, if you don’t commit and stay with it, this daemon will come back to live in the house we built for it. The only way to keep it out is not to do the things that opened the door in the first place.
I had planned on writing about something else this morning but looking back at the beginning paragraph I see a couple of things I would like to follow up on.
The first one is and isn’t related to diabetes and affects an enormous number of men. That would be Erectile Dysfunction which I first heard about from a man I met in the lobby of a hospital when I was about 29. He was about the age I am now-maybe a few years older. He was probably 40 pounds overweight and his skin as gray. In fact everything about him was gray. His hair, his clothes, his personality and his mood. Well, actually, his mood was a much darker shade of gray. He was angry and bitter. He had heart problems, his hips hurt, his wife was in the ICU, he had type II diabetes and a bad case of "limp dick." That seemed to bother him more than anything else. Being young and strong and no problems in that department other than not having a lover at the time I really didn’t understand. In fact, at 29 I didn’t understand much of anything he was telling me. Looking back on it I think he was trying to warn me, but as with most young people, I could see his mouth moving but nothing worth listening to was coming out of it and I didn’t understand the implications of what he was trying to tell me.
Now I do. All too well. I read an article just the other day that mentioned the the fact that when a man goes in to see his doctor and tells the doctor that he "can’t get it up" or that it won’t stay up, the doctor now assumes heart disease, even in young men. Why? Well, it’s pretty simple. The penis relies on blood flow and the ability of the blood vessels to relax and fill up with blood to achieve an erection. If they can’t do it, you can’t either. There can be other problems, low testosterone, physical damage and so on, but when you walk in and have high blood pressure-as I do, and have erection issues then the doctor can be pretty certain you have a 90 percent chance of having some degree of heart disease. Oh happy day.
Diabetes goes hand in hand with that as well. One of the reasons is that you have about 100,000 miles of blood vessels in you body and they range from the very large major distribution and return arteries to the smaller ones you can see near the surface. The greatest number-about 40 billion of them are the capillaries. They are so small that they only allow one blood cell at a time to pass. If you’ve ever taken a large dose of Niacin you know that you can feel every single one of them as they dilate to allow more blood to flow through. These little guys are everywhere in our bodies. They directly feed each of the cells and carry away the cell’s waste products. It is an amazing system.
Diabetes messes with that system by tearing up the smooth lining of the capillaries. Imagine a nice healthy blood cell, just like the ones you saw pictures of in your grade school biology book. That perfectly smooth cell goes zipping through your body as easy as grease through a goose. But when you have high blood sugar levels something really ugly happens. The excess sugar molecules are as sharp and jagged as gravel and they piggy-back onto the blood cells and make it all sharp and jaggy. It is not too bad a thing, not great but not horrendous, while the blood cells are all bumping along in the larger blood vessels, sure they are scraping along but the real damage happens when they hit the capillaries. The are being pushed by the heart and have no choice but the jam their way through, but being all sharp and jaggy they sort of grind their way along like a chunk of rock and as a result the lining of the capillaries is scarred. When they do enough damage the capillary can rupture under the pressure and then the blood clots and seals it off. Without blood supply all of the cells the capillary served start to die and this is a very bad thing. It leads to the death of nerves, blindness, erectile dysfunction, kidney failure and every one of the indignities that comes with the daemon that our friend Bob would invite in with his endless demand to be satisfied.
Just because men have this handy gauge of their heart health doesn’t mean that the very same process isn’t happening in women’s bodies as well.
You remember I mentioned the A&W Root Beer and how I liked them because it reminded me of spending time with my Dad. A lot of the foods that are bad for us are like that, they affects us emotionally because their tastes and smells take us back to better, happier times. A little bit of that, now and again, is not a bad thing but a lot of it starts the process that will kill us off a little piece at a time.
I don’t advocate never eating cake ever again, but suggest (very, very strongly) that a few bites once in a while is just fine, but not the whole cake every day.
Enough for today, more to come,
Jim
Saturday, August 13, 2011
What Bob wants may just kill us.
Day 6
August 13, 2011
Wt. 259.2
Blood Sugar (first thing in the morning) 162
Blood Pressure 138/92 72 bpm.
What Bob wants may just kill us.
Man oh man. Bob was noisy last night. Wanted everything-but just got an apple and some V-8 juice. I think it is becoming easier after almost a week to tell Bob to be quiet. Yesterday was an easier day. No energy crashes and not particularly hungry beyond really looking forward to lunch and dinner.
Now-to Rules 1 and 2.
Rule 1. You have to give up High Fructose Corn Syrup. It is the most energy dense food known to man. Think of it as poison or make up whatever story about it you want but get it out of your diet.
Rule 2. White flour, white sugar, white rice should be eliminated or at least reduced to the minimum.
I have a number of objections to High Fructose Corn Syrup (HFCS). First is that it is a manufactured food. It does not exist anywhere in nature and requires numerous chemicals and acids to produce.
Essentially corn is ground up, chemically broken down with sulphur dioxide, filtered and then treated with an enzyme that digests it and converts it to fructose. The resulting syrup is then mixed with glucose or sucrose to create a reliably consistent sweetener that is shipped in 55 gallon drums, tank trucks and rail tankers to manufacturers of just about every processed food we find on the shelves of grocery stores.
A recent estimate suggests that Americans consume as many as 200 calories a day from HFCS. In the course of a year that would amount to 73,000 calories from HFCS alone. I would suspect that for many Americans this is a very low number considering that there are 140 calories in a single 12 ounce can of sweetened soda. In an earlier blog I mentioned drinking one or more 48 ounce Mongo-Gulp 7-11 sodas a day. A drink like that comes with 560 calories. Good grief-two of them would be 1120 calories. AAARRRRRGGGGHHHH!!!!!
The problem is not just with a can of soda however. HFCSs are in an amazing number of products. Catsup, canned beans, processed meats, crackers, bread, snack cakes, the list is endless. As you’re reading this, take a moment to get up and read a few of the labels on the food you have in your kitchen and the next time you go to the grocery store look at the labels there. It is scary. If they don’t list HFCSs they very often have some form of cane juice.
Why would a can of pinto beans need a sweetener? The answer is simple: Marketing. Manufacturers use focus groups to determine how their products should taste in order to outsell their competition. Sweet, salty, fatty are the tastes that drive consumers to pick this one over that one and manufacturers could not care less about our health as they develop products. Their biggest concern is market share and profitability. Sell as many as possible and make them as cheaply as possible. I once heard that sometimes the packaging costs more than the product. Health only becomes a concern if someone can sue them because it made them sick or killed a loved one. HFCSs are the cheapest sweeteners available. If a cheaper one comes along they will switch in a heartbeat–once the fucus groups give their stamp of approval.
The next objection to HFCS is a really serious one. After four million years of evolving into the creatures we are today and eating a diet of whatever we could find in nature and generally working pretty hard for it, our bodies have no idea what the heck to do with HFCSs. Its sweetness appeals to our desire for foods that are quickly turned into energy but once in our guts it bypasses most of the normal controls and goes directly to the liver to be processed.
A St. Luis University study tested the typical American diet on mice. The mice weren’t force fed but allowed to eat whatever they wanted and however much they wanted. The foods fed to them weren’t specifically selected for HFCS but represented what people would buy in grocery stores and take home for their families to eat. The results were frightening: One doctor involved noted, "we had a feeling we’d see evidence of fatty liver disease by the end of the study, but we were surprised to find how severe the damage was and how quickly it occurred. It took only four weeks for liver enzymes to increase and for glucose intolerance-the beginning of type II diabetes-to begin" (Dixon)
As I write this I am cringing at the thought of what I’ve done to my body and wondering if I will be able to undo the damage in the years I have left to me. We shall see.
The other big problem with HFCSs is that they seem to interfere with the feeling of satiation. In other words, you have a nice big meal, 1,000 to 1,500 calories, a few hundred calories come from HFCS and you don’t feel full. Old Bob starts jumping up and down and demanding something more. Another 500 calories of snack cake or a couple of nice apple turnovers and you go on about your day. You gotta know that the fast food industry loves it when you come back to the counter for their special apple turnovers-just like the one’s Grandma made–if she had a factory with 200,000 gallons of HFCS in storage tanks.
There is something that HFCSs share with the foods listed in Rule 2. For the body to digest highly processed flour, sugar, rice and, of course, HFCS it needs magnesium. As most people don’t eat a magnesium rich diet it has to come from somewhere. That somewhere is your bones.
OK, not a bad deal. The body has a ready supply of magnesium to help take care of digesting that Mongo-Gulp. The problem is that it has to be stripped away from the calcium in the bones and in the process it releases more calcium into the blood stream. Good thing, you say, we need more calcium. Nope. Your bones need the calcium and there is usually just the amount you need already circulating in your blood as it is. So now you have more calcium in your blood than you need. So what?
There is good evidence that excess calcium interfere with how the heart beats, it can cause confusion and concentration problems, gastrointestinal pain, kidney problems, osteoporosis and muscle weakness. Great, just great. All of that from the diet our mother’s encouraged us to eat. And diabetes too.
The solution is simple, but not always easy. Eliminate manufactured foods-that includes trips to the fast food chains. Eat as low on the food chain as possible and prepare most of your own food when you can. As I was reminded the other day-be sure and take your food with you so you don’t have to eat the stuff you are trying to avoid just to keep from falling over with low blood sugar.
As always-more to come.
Jim
Dixon, Rachel. ""Supersize Me" Mice Research Offers Grim Warning for America’s Fast Food
Consumers." 27 May 2007. Saint Louis University. 24 July 2009 <http://www.slu.
edu/x15990.xml>
August 13, 2011
Wt. 259.2
Blood Sugar (first thing in the morning) 162
Blood Pressure 138/92 72 bpm.
What Bob wants may just kill us.
Man oh man. Bob was noisy last night. Wanted everything-but just got an apple and some V-8 juice. I think it is becoming easier after almost a week to tell Bob to be quiet. Yesterday was an easier day. No energy crashes and not particularly hungry beyond really looking forward to lunch and dinner.
Now-to Rules 1 and 2.
Rule 1. You have to give up High Fructose Corn Syrup. It is the most energy dense food known to man. Think of it as poison or make up whatever story about it you want but get it out of your diet.
Rule 2. White flour, white sugar, white rice should be eliminated or at least reduced to the minimum.
I have a number of objections to High Fructose Corn Syrup (HFCS). First is that it is a manufactured food. It does not exist anywhere in nature and requires numerous chemicals and acids to produce.
Essentially corn is ground up, chemically broken down with sulphur dioxide, filtered and then treated with an enzyme that digests it and converts it to fructose. The resulting syrup is then mixed with glucose or sucrose to create a reliably consistent sweetener that is shipped in 55 gallon drums, tank trucks and rail tankers to manufacturers of just about every processed food we find on the shelves of grocery stores.
A recent estimate suggests that Americans consume as many as 200 calories a day from HFCS. In the course of a year that would amount to 73,000 calories from HFCS alone. I would suspect that for many Americans this is a very low number considering that there are 140 calories in a single 12 ounce can of sweetened soda. In an earlier blog I mentioned drinking one or more 48 ounce Mongo-Gulp 7-11 sodas a day. A drink like that comes with 560 calories. Good grief-two of them would be 1120 calories. AAARRRRRGGGGHHHH!!!!!
The problem is not just with a can of soda however. HFCSs are in an amazing number of products. Catsup, canned beans, processed meats, crackers, bread, snack cakes, the list is endless. As you’re reading this, take a moment to get up and read a few of the labels on the food you have in your kitchen and the next time you go to the grocery store look at the labels there. It is scary. If they don’t list HFCSs they very often have some form of cane juice.
Why would a can of pinto beans need a sweetener? The answer is simple: Marketing. Manufacturers use focus groups to determine how their products should taste in order to outsell their competition. Sweet, salty, fatty are the tastes that drive consumers to pick this one over that one and manufacturers could not care less about our health as they develop products. Their biggest concern is market share and profitability. Sell as many as possible and make them as cheaply as possible. I once heard that sometimes the packaging costs more than the product. Health only becomes a concern if someone can sue them because it made them sick or killed a loved one. HFCSs are the cheapest sweeteners available. If a cheaper one comes along they will switch in a heartbeat–once the fucus groups give their stamp of approval.
The next objection to HFCS is a really serious one. After four million years of evolving into the creatures we are today and eating a diet of whatever we could find in nature and generally working pretty hard for it, our bodies have no idea what the heck to do with HFCSs. Its sweetness appeals to our desire for foods that are quickly turned into energy but once in our guts it bypasses most of the normal controls and goes directly to the liver to be processed.
A St. Luis University study tested the typical American diet on mice. The mice weren’t force fed but allowed to eat whatever they wanted and however much they wanted. The foods fed to them weren’t specifically selected for HFCS but represented what people would buy in grocery stores and take home for their families to eat. The results were frightening: One doctor involved noted, "we had a feeling we’d see evidence of fatty liver disease by the end of the study, but we were surprised to find how severe the damage was and how quickly it occurred. It took only four weeks for liver enzymes to increase and for glucose intolerance-the beginning of type II diabetes-to begin" (Dixon)
As I write this I am cringing at the thought of what I’ve done to my body and wondering if I will be able to undo the damage in the years I have left to me. We shall see.
The other big problem with HFCSs is that they seem to interfere with the feeling of satiation. In other words, you have a nice big meal, 1,000 to 1,500 calories, a few hundred calories come from HFCS and you don’t feel full. Old Bob starts jumping up and down and demanding something more. Another 500 calories of snack cake or a couple of nice apple turnovers and you go on about your day. You gotta know that the fast food industry loves it when you come back to the counter for their special apple turnovers-just like the one’s Grandma made–if she had a factory with 200,000 gallons of HFCS in storage tanks.
There is something that HFCSs share with the foods listed in Rule 2. For the body to digest highly processed flour, sugar, rice and, of course, HFCS it needs magnesium. As most people don’t eat a magnesium rich diet it has to come from somewhere. That somewhere is your bones.
OK, not a bad deal. The body has a ready supply of magnesium to help take care of digesting that Mongo-Gulp. The problem is that it has to be stripped away from the calcium in the bones and in the process it releases more calcium into the blood stream. Good thing, you say, we need more calcium. Nope. Your bones need the calcium and there is usually just the amount you need already circulating in your blood as it is. So now you have more calcium in your blood than you need. So what?
There is good evidence that excess calcium interfere with how the heart beats, it can cause confusion and concentration problems, gastrointestinal pain, kidney problems, osteoporosis and muscle weakness. Great, just great. All of that from the diet our mother’s encouraged us to eat. And diabetes too.
The solution is simple, but not always easy. Eliminate manufactured foods-that includes trips to the fast food chains. Eat as low on the food chain as possible and prepare most of your own food when you can. As I was reminded the other day-be sure and take your food with you so you don’t have to eat the stuff you are trying to avoid just to keep from falling over with low blood sugar.
As always-more to come.
Jim
Dixon, Rachel. ""Supersize Me" Mice Research Offers Grim Warning for America’s Fast Food
Consumers." 27 May 2007. Saint Louis University. 24 July 2009 <http://www.slu.
edu/x15990.xml>
Friday, August 12, 2011
A little black and white and some chartreuse
Day5
August 12, 2011
Wt. 256.4
Blood Sugar (first thing in the morning) 168
Blood Pressure 157/96 80 bpm.
A little black and white and some chartreuse
Here I am at the beginning of Day 5 and all of the numbers are beginning to move downward, but as the man said, "just because the cat had kittens in the oven, it doesn’t make them cookies." Still it is encouraging. A solid week of lower numbers will begin showing real proof of progress.
Yesterday afternoon was a hard one. I was doing physical work and the fist sized lunch of chili I had for lunch wasn’t quite enough to sustain me. I didn’t have my glucose meter with me so I’m not sure if I just dropped into normal territory, say 80 to 100 or if I went below. Regardless, I had to have some juice and a couple of cookies and about a half an hour of rest before being able to go back to work.
The lesson, actually lessons that come out of this are good reminders.
First, when away from home and a controlled food source it is important to have food with you. The other is that while I recommend staying away from juice, white flour and sugar-sometimes they can be just the thing you need-in moderation, of course.
If you are wondering about the rapid drop in weight it is because I am only eating about 1000 to 1500 calories a day. If I wanted to maintain my weight I would be eating about 2,500 calories a day.
The main goal of this experience is to bring the blood glucose numbers into normal range and keep them there. To do this, the belly fat has to go. With the loss of belly fat the blood pressure numbers will come down as well. All of these things are tied together. They are the top of a pyramid built of eating too much of the wrong foods. I was about to add, and exercise, but I believe that while lack of exercise is a component, it is not enough to counteract the bad eating as the cause of diabetes.
I am short of time this morning but the next blog will take on the first two rules-the ones that address foods that should be avoided–oddly enough, the very foods I used yesterday to pull me out of an energy crash. Don’t you wish everything was just a nice black and white with no shades of gray or chartreuse?
More tomorrow,
Jim
August 12, 2011
Wt. 256.4
Blood Sugar (first thing in the morning) 168
Blood Pressure 157/96 80 bpm.
A little black and white and some chartreuse
Here I am at the beginning of Day 5 and all of the numbers are beginning to move downward, but as the man said, "just because the cat had kittens in the oven, it doesn’t make them cookies." Still it is encouraging. A solid week of lower numbers will begin showing real proof of progress.
Yesterday afternoon was a hard one. I was doing physical work and the fist sized lunch of chili I had for lunch wasn’t quite enough to sustain me. I didn’t have my glucose meter with me so I’m not sure if I just dropped into normal territory, say 80 to 100 or if I went below. Regardless, I had to have some juice and a couple of cookies and about a half an hour of rest before being able to go back to work.
The lesson, actually lessons that come out of this are good reminders.
First, when away from home and a controlled food source it is important to have food with you. The other is that while I recommend staying away from juice, white flour and sugar-sometimes they can be just the thing you need-in moderation, of course.
If you are wondering about the rapid drop in weight it is because I am only eating about 1000 to 1500 calories a day. If I wanted to maintain my weight I would be eating about 2,500 calories a day.
The main goal of this experience is to bring the blood glucose numbers into normal range and keep them there. To do this, the belly fat has to go. With the loss of belly fat the blood pressure numbers will come down as well. All of these things are tied together. They are the top of a pyramid built of eating too much of the wrong foods. I was about to add, and exercise, but I believe that while lack of exercise is a component, it is not enough to counteract the bad eating as the cause of diabetes.
I am short of time this morning but the next blog will take on the first two rules-the ones that address foods that should be avoided–oddly enough, the very foods I used yesterday to pull me out of an energy crash. Don’t you wish everything was just a nice black and white with no shades of gray or chartreuse?
More tomorrow,
Jim
Thursday, August 11, 2011
Our bodies are not on FedEx Time
Day 4
August 11, 2011
Wt. 258.2
Blood Sugar (first thing in the morning) 180
Blood Pressure 167/104 60 bpm.
Our bodies are not on FedEx Time
Well...Fooo. I was hoping for dramatic changes. I wanted to see a significant drops in blood sugar and blood pressure. Instead I got a bump upward on both and a bit of a drop on weight. What is going on?
Just a reminder: just because you want something does not mean it is going to show up overnight like an order from Amazon.com. My diabetes probably got its start somewhere around 1991 when I began to put on weight and really started eating the bad stuff in large quantities. It showed up as a danger sign in my 1997 physical and then as fully developed in 2002. In other words it has had 14 years to become a part of my body and four days of doing what I’m doing here is not going to make it go away. What is going to make it go away is my dedication to making it go away over the next month, the next six months, the next year. Even after I begin waking up with normal blood sugar numbers it is a thing that is always lurking about, just waiting to return if I return to the ways that opened the door for it in the first place.
I was looking over my Rules and realized that I should have added one more. This one has to do with quantity of food in a given meal. So Rule 11 is: No meal should be larger than your fist and more of it should be vegetables or grains than meat or oil.
Last night’s dinner was chili-I love chili, the hotter the better. I have a bowl that is just about the right size to put my fist in with a little room to spare. I have big hands but the nice thing about using your own fist as a guide is that it is always about equal to the size of your stomach. I make my beans separately and don’t mix them until I am ready to eat my chili so the beans are a little more than half of the bowl. I then add the chili part. The chili consists of tomatoes, spices, onion, potato and meat. The meat is maybe a quarter of the total volume of the chili. I put this in the bowl. Mostly I am eating vegetables with a small amount of meat.
One of the things I learned when I did the 30 day fast was that the human body does not need as much animal protein as the meat industry would like us to believe. In the course of a 30 day fast the average person will lose about three pounds of muscle mass. That is 48 ounces or 1.6 ounces per day. So as little as three ounces of high quality protein a day is plenty. You don’t need a 12 ounce rib eye steak for every meal. Vegetarians would argue that cows don’t eat steak at all. They become 800 pound meat on the hoof by eating grass and there are lots of very healthy active vegetarians out there as proof of their argument. Still, I like a bit of meat or some eggs from time to time and I feel like we have about four million years of evolutionary history as omnivores behind us that tells our bodies to eat a bit of everything.
Back when we were species that relied on being hunter/gatherers we ate what nature provided and what we could scrounge. Men and boys went hunting and often came back with nothing but some fruit for vegetables they happened across by dumb luck. Women and girls went out and brought in what they could find as well. Seeds, roots, berries, nuts, and in all probability small game they trapped. Meat was not a guaranteed part of their diet though there were probably times when it was plentiful and that was all they ate. For the American plains Indians a buffalo hunt was a huge deal. Vast quantities of meat, hides, bone and everything else they could take from the kill but it took everyone working on the kill to process it before it went bad-so no time for finding vegetables other than what had been dried and stored.
We have been successful as a species because we could eat just about anything, from bugs to grasses to bears but until recent times, the last hundred years or so, dinner was not a given. Even on successful farms there were lean times. A while back I made a Christmas pudding called, "Spotted Dick." It is a traditional English Christmas steamed pudding that I read about in Patrick O’Brian’s sea stories about Captain Jack Aubrey. I found a recipe for it on-line and got all of the ingredients together. One of which is suet-the hard fat from beef or mutton. Sounds icky, I know. As I mixed all of the ingredients I realized that this is what would be left at the end of the year. Dried fruits and berries, nuts, suet, flour, honey or sugar. It is a high fat, high starch, high sugar desert and after four hours of steaming it, I realized I had just made a......fruit cake. Great!! I have 20 people coming for Christmas dinner and I made a fruit cake for dessert. However, I was committed and figured that maybe the novelty of eating Spotted Dick would be enough to get them to give it a try. I was amazed to find that they were coming back for seconds and thirds. At the end of the evening there was nothing left, not even crumbs.
In the dark of winter our bodies want the things that went into that recipe, it needs them. In times past, when food was scarce this was a treat beyond compare-even if it was English cooking.
Back to Rule 11, we don’t need as much protein as we’ve been told and it can come from lots of sources, beans, meat, eggs, grains but it is probably better to eat lower on the food chain than higher as it is easier to digest even if it doesn’t provide the quick sources of amino acids and fast access to protein.
So–smaller meals made up of more vegetables and less meat or oil. Pretty easy. Tomorrow-energy dense foods and manufactured foods and how they are the source of what is trying to kill us. Bob says, "Hi," and that he wants a soda and a candy bar and some ice cream.
More tomorrow,
Jim
August 11, 2011
Wt. 258.2
Blood Sugar (first thing in the morning) 180
Blood Pressure 167/104 60 bpm.
Our bodies are not on FedEx Time
Well...Fooo. I was hoping for dramatic changes. I wanted to see a significant drops in blood sugar and blood pressure. Instead I got a bump upward on both and a bit of a drop on weight. What is going on?
Just a reminder: just because you want something does not mean it is going to show up overnight like an order from Amazon.com. My diabetes probably got its start somewhere around 1991 when I began to put on weight and really started eating the bad stuff in large quantities. It showed up as a danger sign in my 1997 physical and then as fully developed in 2002. In other words it has had 14 years to become a part of my body and four days of doing what I’m doing here is not going to make it go away. What is going to make it go away is my dedication to making it go away over the next month, the next six months, the next year. Even after I begin waking up with normal blood sugar numbers it is a thing that is always lurking about, just waiting to return if I return to the ways that opened the door for it in the first place.
I was looking over my Rules and realized that I should have added one more. This one has to do with quantity of food in a given meal. So Rule 11 is: No meal should be larger than your fist and more of it should be vegetables or grains than meat or oil.
Last night’s dinner was chili-I love chili, the hotter the better. I have a bowl that is just about the right size to put my fist in with a little room to spare. I have big hands but the nice thing about using your own fist as a guide is that it is always about equal to the size of your stomach. I make my beans separately and don’t mix them until I am ready to eat my chili so the beans are a little more than half of the bowl. I then add the chili part. The chili consists of tomatoes, spices, onion, potato and meat. The meat is maybe a quarter of the total volume of the chili. I put this in the bowl. Mostly I am eating vegetables with a small amount of meat.
One of the things I learned when I did the 30 day fast was that the human body does not need as much animal protein as the meat industry would like us to believe. In the course of a 30 day fast the average person will lose about three pounds of muscle mass. That is 48 ounces or 1.6 ounces per day. So as little as three ounces of high quality protein a day is plenty. You don’t need a 12 ounce rib eye steak for every meal. Vegetarians would argue that cows don’t eat steak at all. They become 800 pound meat on the hoof by eating grass and there are lots of very healthy active vegetarians out there as proof of their argument. Still, I like a bit of meat or some eggs from time to time and I feel like we have about four million years of evolutionary history as omnivores behind us that tells our bodies to eat a bit of everything.
Back when we were species that relied on being hunter/gatherers we ate what nature provided and what we could scrounge. Men and boys went hunting and often came back with nothing but some fruit for vegetables they happened across by dumb luck. Women and girls went out and brought in what they could find as well. Seeds, roots, berries, nuts, and in all probability small game they trapped. Meat was not a guaranteed part of their diet though there were probably times when it was plentiful and that was all they ate. For the American plains Indians a buffalo hunt was a huge deal. Vast quantities of meat, hides, bone and everything else they could take from the kill but it took everyone working on the kill to process it before it went bad-so no time for finding vegetables other than what had been dried and stored.
We have been successful as a species because we could eat just about anything, from bugs to grasses to bears but until recent times, the last hundred years or so, dinner was not a given. Even on successful farms there were lean times. A while back I made a Christmas pudding called, "Spotted Dick." It is a traditional English Christmas steamed pudding that I read about in Patrick O’Brian’s sea stories about Captain Jack Aubrey. I found a recipe for it on-line and got all of the ingredients together. One of which is suet-the hard fat from beef or mutton. Sounds icky, I know. As I mixed all of the ingredients I realized that this is what would be left at the end of the year. Dried fruits and berries, nuts, suet, flour, honey or sugar. It is a high fat, high starch, high sugar desert and after four hours of steaming it, I realized I had just made a......fruit cake. Great!! I have 20 people coming for Christmas dinner and I made a fruit cake for dessert. However, I was committed and figured that maybe the novelty of eating Spotted Dick would be enough to get them to give it a try. I was amazed to find that they were coming back for seconds and thirds. At the end of the evening there was nothing left, not even crumbs.
In the dark of winter our bodies want the things that went into that recipe, it needs them. In times past, when food was scarce this was a treat beyond compare-even if it was English cooking.
Back to Rule 11, we don’t need as much protein as we’ve been told and it can come from lots of sources, beans, meat, eggs, grains but it is probably better to eat lower on the food chain than higher as it is easier to digest even if it doesn’t provide the quick sources of amino acids and fast access to protein.
So–smaller meals made up of more vegetables and less meat or oil. Pretty easy. Tomorrow-energy dense foods and manufactured foods and how they are the source of what is trying to kill us. Bob says, "Hi," and that he wants a soda and a candy bar and some ice cream.
More tomorrow,
Jim
Wednesday, August 10, 2011
Rules Rule and getting Bob under control
Day 3
August 10, 2011
Wt. 260.8
Blood Sugar (first thing in the morning) 178
Blood Pressure 144/90 60 bpm.
Rules Rule
Over the next few blogs I am going to be explaining the rules and the reasoning, research and science behind them. Today I am beginning with Rule 6 because this one is key to success in beating back this thing that is trying to take over our bodies.
Rule 6. Stop eating after 8 p.m. and do not eat until noon the next day or until your blood sugar is in the normal range.
In my other blogs I mentioned that our bodies seem better at extracting energy from the food we eat and that people who have undergone laparoscopic or gastric bypass surgery quit being diabetic and that diabetes is a disease of abundance. Well, as I was unwilling to have my guts cut out I looked for something I could do that would mimic the effects. The answer came to me while I was fasting.
I had decided to do a juice fast, just a few days of cleansing but after day six of juicing I couldn’t stand the thought of another drop of juice. What had tasted like the food of the gods now made my stomach feel like it wanted to fall over like a plugged gopher. So I decided not to eat for a few days. Just water. I’d done this as a younger man and rather enjoyed it but hadn’t done one for over 20 years. What I discovered was absolutely amazing. I checked my glucose levels and blood pressure first thing in the morning and found my blood pressure dropped to really nice healthy numbers and my glucose jumped to really high numbers and then gradually came down during the course of the day.
That’s right. Nothing at all in my stomach. No food, no juice, nothing, and my blood sugar was up–What was going on?
The answer was several things were happening. First my body was burning stores of fat and a small amount of muscle mass. It did this at night while I was resting so in the morning I was fully charged. This didn’t change until the very end of the fast although as the fast went on, the morning numbers got lower and lower even though they were still higher than a non diabetic’s numbers. I talked to a diabetic friend of mine who has a much more serious case than mine and he told me that this was normal. Humans wake up with fully charged glucose levels and that scientists speculate that our ancestors had to be ready to hit the ground running first thing in the morning and there usually wasn’t a bowl of corn flakes waiting for them to give them that energy. The other thing that happens is that a lot of digestive processes are at work at night.
Food doesn’t just go into the stomach and become everything the body needs to grow and move. It hits the stomach first and gets torn apart by digestive juices. It then moves into the upper end of the small intestines for the extraction process. The first thing that goes into the blood steam is the easily digested sugars and starches and fats. But the process doesn’t stop there. There are another 25 feet of small intestines and five feet of large intestines. The food that got torn apart by our teeth and then shredded even more by our stomachs has a 30 foot obstacle course ahead of it and it can take several days to make its way to a nice satisfying dump. Bowel movement, if you prefer.
The entire time it is being digested. Every bit of energy is being extracted and turned into the building blocks of our body and the fuel that makes it go. We don’t run on steak and potatoes, we run on the sugars extracted from them.
Wow.
So yesterday’s breakfast, lunch and dinner is still with us, still being strip mined for every last bit of nutrients. Probably some of the food we ate the day before is still with us as well and still going through the process. So-here is the question, and it is a really important one for you to consider. Why do we need to eat breakfast when our blood sugar is high, and in the case of diabetics-way higher than it should be?
Because our mommas told us to. Nutritionists told them. And my cynical side says that the manufacturers of breakfast foods told the nutritionists to tell our mommas to tell us that we had to eat a good breakfast. There may be some validity to this for young people, children whose bodies are still growing and burn calories the way a wild fire burns dry grass, but we aren’t children anymore and our bodies aren’t growing in the same way. So why do we need to pop 500 to 1000 calories in our systems every morning? We don’t. We do it because we have always done it that way.
There is a story motivational speakers like to tell. It's about a man watching his wife prepare a ham for Easter Sunday dinner. His wife slices off both ends of the ham and puts it in the oven. He asks her why she does that. She says it makes it taste better. He asks her who taught her that. She says her mother taught her. Then the mother-in-law walks in the room and he asks her the same questions and gets the same answers. Then the door bell rings and it is the mother-in-law’s mother. The husband asks her the same questions. The grandmother says that when she was a young mother she had a very small oven and unless you cut off the ends of the ham it wouldn’t fit in the oven. She had no idea why her daughter and granddaughter thought it tasted better.
Just because something has always been done a certain way does not mean it has to be done that way forever and eating breakfast is one of those things. I remember talking to an old farmer who told me that the big meal of the day was lunch. They would get up really early, grab a couple of biscuits left over from the previous evening and then go to work. They would work like fiends until noon and then go inside for a monster meal that the women had been working on all morning. Then they would go out and work like fiends all afternoon and come back to the house so tired they could hardly stay awake to eat. The evening meal tended to be light.
This is the back story for Rule number six. I decided to try giving my body a longer stretch to use up the calories already in the system and not add to the already high numbers first thing in the morning. As you can see, if you’ve been following my blogs these past few days, the numbers are coming down. The first day it was 285. The night before I’d eaten late and had something more to eat later. The morning of day 2 was down 100 points. I had a bit of cantaloupe, about 1/3 of one, about 10 p.m.–habits can be hard to break, but I told Bob he was gonna have to be happy with the cantaloupe cause he wasn’t getting nothing else. Last night the same with the addition of a half a cup of chili I’d just finished making. Bob was screaming at me and so I gave in just a little. This morning the count was down just a few more points at 178.
Tonight Bob is in for a really rude surprise. He isn’t getting a single bite of anything after 8 p.m.. Nada, zip, zilch. In the morning my number will be higher than normal but it should be much lower than this morning’s numbers. We shall see.
At the end of 7 days I will add in the morning exercise routine and you will be able to see how that affects what I’m doing as well.
The goal here is to help the body do what it used to be able to do on its own. If you keep shoveling in the food your body never gets a chance to get back to normal because there is always more and more stuff to deal with. Remember that old I Love Lucy episode where Lucy gets a job in a candy factory. She is supposed to put chocolates in boxes as they come off the line on a conveyor belt. At first the belt moves along slowly and she has no problem keeping up. But then it speeds up and pretty soon she is overwhelmed and starts stuffing chocolates in her pockets and down the front of her dress and trying to eat them. Chocolates are going everywhere, all over her, all over the floor, it is chaos. That is what has happened to our bodies with good old Bob in charge.
Getting Bob out of the driver’s seat won’t be easy but within a few days of eliminating the evening and morning feedings you will begin to see results.
One last note before I go-I may hate test strips but in the beginning it is important to test several times in the morning to see where you are. Is that really a hypoglycemic crisis or just your body not having adjusted to the new lower high numbers? Keep a close watch, make notes on how you feel as you come down from your sugar high.
I’ll take on another rule in the next blog.
Jim
August 10, 2011
Wt. 260.8
Blood Sugar (first thing in the morning) 178
Blood Pressure 144/90 60 bpm.
Rules Rule
Over the next few blogs I am going to be explaining the rules and the reasoning, research and science behind them. Today I am beginning with Rule 6 because this one is key to success in beating back this thing that is trying to take over our bodies.
Rule 6. Stop eating after 8 p.m. and do not eat until noon the next day or until your blood sugar is in the normal range.
In my other blogs I mentioned that our bodies seem better at extracting energy from the food we eat and that people who have undergone laparoscopic or gastric bypass surgery quit being diabetic and that diabetes is a disease of abundance. Well, as I was unwilling to have my guts cut out I looked for something I could do that would mimic the effects. The answer came to me while I was fasting.
I had decided to do a juice fast, just a few days of cleansing but after day six of juicing I couldn’t stand the thought of another drop of juice. What had tasted like the food of the gods now made my stomach feel like it wanted to fall over like a plugged gopher. So I decided not to eat for a few days. Just water. I’d done this as a younger man and rather enjoyed it but hadn’t done one for over 20 years. What I discovered was absolutely amazing. I checked my glucose levels and blood pressure first thing in the morning and found my blood pressure dropped to really nice healthy numbers and my glucose jumped to really high numbers and then gradually came down during the course of the day.
That’s right. Nothing at all in my stomach. No food, no juice, nothing, and my blood sugar was up–What was going on?
The answer was several things were happening. First my body was burning stores of fat and a small amount of muscle mass. It did this at night while I was resting so in the morning I was fully charged. This didn’t change until the very end of the fast although as the fast went on, the morning numbers got lower and lower even though they were still higher than a non diabetic’s numbers. I talked to a diabetic friend of mine who has a much more serious case than mine and he told me that this was normal. Humans wake up with fully charged glucose levels and that scientists speculate that our ancestors had to be ready to hit the ground running first thing in the morning and there usually wasn’t a bowl of corn flakes waiting for them to give them that energy. The other thing that happens is that a lot of digestive processes are at work at night.
Food doesn’t just go into the stomach and become everything the body needs to grow and move. It hits the stomach first and gets torn apart by digestive juices. It then moves into the upper end of the small intestines for the extraction process. The first thing that goes into the blood steam is the easily digested sugars and starches and fats. But the process doesn’t stop there. There are another 25 feet of small intestines and five feet of large intestines. The food that got torn apart by our teeth and then shredded even more by our stomachs has a 30 foot obstacle course ahead of it and it can take several days to make its way to a nice satisfying dump. Bowel movement, if you prefer.
The entire time it is being digested. Every bit of energy is being extracted and turned into the building blocks of our body and the fuel that makes it go. We don’t run on steak and potatoes, we run on the sugars extracted from them.
Wow.
So yesterday’s breakfast, lunch and dinner is still with us, still being strip mined for every last bit of nutrients. Probably some of the food we ate the day before is still with us as well and still going through the process. So-here is the question, and it is a really important one for you to consider. Why do we need to eat breakfast when our blood sugar is high, and in the case of diabetics-way higher than it should be?
Because our mommas told us to. Nutritionists told them. And my cynical side says that the manufacturers of breakfast foods told the nutritionists to tell our mommas to tell us that we had to eat a good breakfast. There may be some validity to this for young people, children whose bodies are still growing and burn calories the way a wild fire burns dry grass, but we aren’t children anymore and our bodies aren’t growing in the same way. So why do we need to pop 500 to 1000 calories in our systems every morning? We don’t. We do it because we have always done it that way.
There is a story motivational speakers like to tell. It's about a man watching his wife prepare a ham for Easter Sunday dinner. His wife slices off both ends of the ham and puts it in the oven. He asks her why she does that. She says it makes it taste better. He asks her who taught her that. She says her mother taught her. Then the mother-in-law walks in the room and he asks her the same questions and gets the same answers. Then the door bell rings and it is the mother-in-law’s mother. The husband asks her the same questions. The grandmother says that when she was a young mother she had a very small oven and unless you cut off the ends of the ham it wouldn’t fit in the oven. She had no idea why her daughter and granddaughter thought it tasted better.
Just because something has always been done a certain way does not mean it has to be done that way forever and eating breakfast is one of those things. I remember talking to an old farmer who told me that the big meal of the day was lunch. They would get up really early, grab a couple of biscuits left over from the previous evening and then go to work. They would work like fiends until noon and then go inside for a monster meal that the women had been working on all morning. Then they would go out and work like fiends all afternoon and come back to the house so tired they could hardly stay awake to eat. The evening meal tended to be light.
This is the back story for Rule number six. I decided to try giving my body a longer stretch to use up the calories already in the system and not add to the already high numbers first thing in the morning. As you can see, if you’ve been following my blogs these past few days, the numbers are coming down. The first day it was 285. The night before I’d eaten late and had something more to eat later. The morning of day 2 was down 100 points. I had a bit of cantaloupe, about 1/3 of one, about 10 p.m.–habits can be hard to break, but I told Bob he was gonna have to be happy with the cantaloupe cause he wasn’t getting nothing else. Last night the same with the addition of a half a cup of chili I’d just finished making. Bob was screaming at me and so I gave in just a little. This morning the count was down just a few more points at 178.
Tonight Bob is in for a really rude surprise. He isn’t getting a single bite of anything after 8 p.m.. Nada, zip, zilch. In the morning my number will be higher than normal but it should be much lower than this morning’s numbers. We shall see.
At the end of 7 days I will add in the morning exercise routine and you will be able to see how that affects what I’m doing as well.
The goal here is to help the body do what it used to be able to do on its own. If you keep shoveling in the food your body never gets a chance to get back to normal because there is always more and more stuff to deal with. Remember that old I Love Lucy episode where Lucy gets a job in a candy factory. She is supposed to put chocolates in boxes as they come off the line on a conveyor belt. At first the belt moves along slowly and she has no problem keeping up. But then it speeds up and pretty soon she is overwhelmed and starts stuffing chocolates in her pockets and down the front of her dress and trying to eat them. Chocolates are going everywhere, all over her, all over the floor, it is chaos. That is what has happened to our bodies with good old Bob in charge.
Getting Bob out of the driver’s seat won’t be easy but within a few days of eliminating the evening and morning feedings you will begin to see results.
One last note before I go-I may hate test strips but in the beginning it is important to test several times in the morning to see where you are. Is that really a hypoglycemic crisis or just your body not having adjusted to the new lower high numbers? Keep a close watch, make notes on how you feel as you come down from your sugar high.
I’ll take on another rule in the next blog.
Jim
Tuesday, August 9, 2011
Living with Bob
Day 2
August 9, 2011
Wt. 261
Blood Sugar (first thing in the morning) 185
Blood Pressure 157/107 70bpm.
Life with Bob.
The first day is never easy. Not only are there familiar patterns but there is the body acting like a spoiled child in the checkout line. "I want, I want, I need, I need." Think the Bill Murray character in "What About Bob." In fact, I think I’ll call that side of me, Bob. After years of giving in to Bob, Bob has gotten used to getting his way. If you were to check your blood sugar levels, most likely they would be just fine, probably even on the high side. But Bob wants what Bob wants and it is up to us to reign him in until he gets used to the new voice. That one that says we have enough food in us right now, Bob. We don’t need a box of Sugar Bumps, or a soda, or a pizza. We are on our way to helping out the body we broke by giving in to Bob for years. If Bob stays in control, he will kill us.
I used to think diabetes was a disease of failure, my failure. Then I came to realize it is a disease of abundance and density. In our modern world the least of us can have what used to be called, "The Blue Blood Disease." Diabetes was once a disease of the wealthy as was gout and they have a lot in common. While the poor folks were working their butts off for table scraps the men and women at the table were packing away food like there was no tomorrow. Much of that food was loaded with fats and sugars in vast quantities. Abundance and energy density coming together like slam dancers on amphetamines.
What I’m about to say may seem radical in the face of everything the Diabetes Profit Machine is telling us but I believe it to be true. Diabetes is not a disease, it is a symptom of our bodies working too well. I came to this realization after reading that people who had laproscopic surgery that reduces the size of their stomach, either by banding or removing most of it, instantly quit being diabetic. That’s right they are diabetic when they lay down on the table and when they wake up from surgery they are no longer diabetic. Doctors are at a loss as to why but it seems to be a common side effect of the surgery.
My theory is that there are some of us whose bodies process food better than the rest of the population and in a world where food is hard to come by this was a huge advantage. However, in the world we now live in where food is manufactured with lots of sugar and fat our bodies are overwhelmed and like most things that are exposed to repeated stressors, it breaks.
We might not have a disease, but we are not healthy and well either. The automatic system is broken and so instead of going along like lots of other folks and letting the body do its job without us paying attention, we have to take control. We have to get Bob out of the driver’s seat and this blog is about how to go about doing that.
There are some simple rules, but Bob is not gonna like it until he gets used to it. Some of these rules are more like suggestions, you can fudge them a bit, those are the ones in blue. The ones in red you need to follow as closely as possible. If you go of the path just get back on it as soon as you can, don’t waste your energies beating yourself up. The occasional slip is not the end of everything, just Bob trying to get back in the driver’s seat. You can’t let that happen though. I will go into more depth about each of these rules in future blogs but for now know that there is solid reasoning and research behind each of them.
EVERYONE CONSIDERING THIS COURSE OF ACTION SHOULD TALK THESE OVER WITH YOUR DOCTOR. IF YOU REQUIRE INSULIN THEN YOU REALLY NEED TO WORK WITH YOUR DOCTOR AND CONSIDER THESE AS NO MORE THAN GUIDELINES AND FIT THEM TO YOUR OWN REQUIREMENTS.
Rule 1. You have to give up High Fructose Corn Syrup. It is the most energy dense food known to man. Think of it as poison or make up whatever story about it you want but get it out of your diet.
Rule 2. White flour, white sugar, white rice should be eliminated or at least reduced to the minimum.
Rule 3. Quit eating manufactured foods. Manufacturers are interested in profits so they make the foods that Bob likes. Their only interest in your health is that the food the make doesn’t make you sick or kill you right away. There is no profit in killing you and losing all future sales and they might get sued and that would be bad for business.
Rule 4. No more cured meats, hotdogs, bacon, sausage, bologna, spam, chicken or turkey breast that doesn’t come directly from the bird, ham. If it comes in a package it is not good for you.
Rule 5. Avoid fruit juices. You would think fruit juice would be really good for you but you would be wrong. Most people would not sit down and eat a dozen oranges, or even 6 in a single sitting. But with juices that is exactly what happens. Wham!!!! In less than a minute you can consume all of the fructose sugar of a pound or three of fruit. It hits your body like a freight train. It is better to eat an apple or orange than drink a dozen of them.
Rule 6. Stop eating after 8 p.m. and do not eat until noon the next day or until your blood sugar is in the normal range.
Rule 7. Exercise first thing in the morning. The exercise should be one that makes all of the muscles in your body hungry so that it uses up the excess glucose in your blood.
Rule 8. Don’t become a fanatic, give yourself permission to slide a bit. Pick a day that you can have a treat and break all of the rules a little bit. At first that day can be once a week. After you are in control and Bob is history then stretch it out to once a month. It is important not to go overboard. You can have that ham sandwich and the slice of chocolate cake, but not the rest of the ham and the rest of the cake. Whatever you put in your body has to be processed and the system just doesn’t work as well as it used to.
Rule 9. From time to time you may feel like your sugar levels have dropped into the pit of doom. Don’t panic. Test your glucose level. You may find that you have been running on high levels of blood sugar for so long that dropping into normal ranges feels like a hypoglycemic crisis. Check you sugar levels, have some fruit and rest until you feel normal. I try and keep the orange flavored glucose tablets around, especially if I am out walking or riding my bike. Don’t let Bob be in charge of them, you usually only need one or two and a bit of time to let them get into the system. Give your body time to adjust. After a while normal levels will feel normal and not like you are about to keel over.
Rule 10. Eat as low to the ground as possible. In other words, lots of vegetables, some animal protein, some fruits, some grains. Once things are canned or processed beyond picking then they are on shelves and no longer close to the ground. If you have to eat canned then read the labels-the fewer ingredients the better. If it has any high fructose corn syrup then put it back on the shelf, same thing if it has lots of sugar.
That’s it. Ten simple rules. In the next blogs I will give you more details about how I came to formulate them and why I think they are important enough to make them rules.
Jim
August 9, 2011
Wt. 261
Blood Sugar (first thing in the morning) 185
Blood Pressure 157/107 70bpm.
Life with Bob.
The first day is never easy. Not only are there familiar patterns but there is the body acting like a spoiled child in the checkout line. "I want, I want, I need, I need." Think the Bill Murray character in "What About Bob." In fact, I think I’ll call that side of me, Bob. After years of giving in to Bob, Bob has gotten used to getting his way. If you were to check your blood sugar levels, most likely they would be just fine, probably even on the high side. But Bob wants what Bob wants and it is up to us to reign him in until he gets used to the new voice. That one that says we have enough food in us right now, Bob. We don’t need a box of Sugar Bumps, or a soda, or a pizza. We are on our way to helping out the body we broke by giving in to Bob for years. If Bob stays in control, he will kill us.
I used to think diabetes was a disease of failure, my failure. Then I came to realize it is a disease of abundance and density. In our modern world the least of us can have what used to be called, "The Blue Blood Disease." Diabetes was once a disease of the wealthy as was gout and they have a lot in common. While the poor folks were working their butts off for table scraps the men and women at the table were packing away food like there was no tomorrow. Much of that food was loaded with fats and sugars in vast quantities. Abundance and energy density coming together like slam dancers on amphetamines.
What I’m about to say may seem radical in the face of everything the Diabetes Profit Machine is telling us but I believe it to be true. Diabetes is not a disease, it is a symptom of our bodies working too well. I came to this realization after reading that people who had laproscopic surgery that reduces the size of their stomach, either by banding or removing most of it, instantly quit being diabetic. That’s right they are diabetic when they lay down on the table and when they wake up from surgery they are no longer diabetic. Doctors are at a loss as to why but it seems to be a common side effect of the surgery.
My theory is that there are some of us whose bodies process food better than the rest of the population and in a world where food is hard to come by this was a huge advantage. However, in the world we now live in where food is manufactured with lots of sugar and fat our bodies are overwhelmed and like most things that are exposed to repeated stressors, it breaks.
We might not have a disease, but we are not healthy and well either. The automatic system is broken and so instead of going along like lots of other folks and letting the body do its job without us paying attention, we have to take control. We have to get Bob out of the driver’s seat and this blog is about how to go about doing that.
There are some simple rules, but Bob is not gonna like it until he gets used to it. Some of these rules are more like suggestions, you can fudge them a bit, those are the ones in blue. The ones in red you need to follow as closely as possible. If you go of the path just get back on it as soon as you can, don’t waste your energies beating yourself up. The occasional slip is not the end of everything, just Bob trying to get back in the driver’s seat. You can’t let that happen though. I will go into more depth about each of these rules in future blogs but for now know that there is solid reasoning and research behind each of them.
EVERYONE CONSIDERING THIS COURSE OF ACTION SHOULD TALK THESE OVER WITH YOUR DOCTOR. IF YOU REQUIRE INSULIN THEN YOU REALLY NEED TO WORK WITH YOUR DOCTOR AND CONSIDER THESE AS NO MORE THAN GUIDELINES AND FIT THEM TO YOUR OWN REQUIREMENTS.
Rule 1. You have to give up High Fructose Corn Syrup. It is the most energy dense food known to man. Think of it as poison or make up whatever story about it you want but get it out of your diet.
Rule 2. White flour, white sugar, white rice should be eliminated or at least reduced to the minimum.
Rule 3. Quit eating manufactured foods. Manufacturers are interested in profits so they make the foods that Bob likes. Their only interest in your health is that the food the make doesn’t make you sick or kill you right away. There is no profit in killing you and losing all future sales and they might get sued and that would be bad for business.
Rule 4. No more cured meats, hotdogs, bacon, sausage, bologna, spam, chicken or turkey breast that doesn’t come directly from the bird, ham. If it comes in a package it is not good for you.
Rule 5. Avoid fruit juices. You would think fruit juice would be really good for you but you would be wrong. Most people would not sit down and eat a dozen oranges, or even 6 in a single sitting. But with juices that is exactly what happens. Wham!!!! In less than a minute you can consume all of the fructose sugar of a pound or three of fruit. It hits your body like a freight train. It is better to eat an apple or orange than drink a dozen of them.
Rule 6. Stop eating after 8 p.m. and do not eat until noon the next day or until your blood sugar is in the normal range.
Rule 7. Exercise first thing in the morning. The exercise should be one that makes all of the muscles in your body hungry so that it uses up the excess glucose in your blood.
Rule 8. Don’t become a fanatic, give yourself permission to slide a bit. Pick a day that you can have a treat and break all of the rules a little bit. At first that day can be once a week. After you are in control and Bob is history then stretch it out to once a month. It is important not to go overboard. You can have that ham sandwich and the slice of chocolate cake, but not the rest of the ham and the rest of the cake. Whatever you put in your body has to be processed and the system just doesn’t work as well as it used to.
Rule 9. From time to time you may feel like your sugar levels have dropped into the pit of doom. Don’t panic. Test your glucose level. You may find that you have been running on high levels of blood sugar for so long that dropping into normal ranges feels like a hypoglycemic crisis. Check you sugar levels, have some fruit and rest until you feel normal. I try and keep the orange flavored glucose tablets around, especially if I am out walking or riding my bike. Don’t let Bob be in charge of them, you usually only need one or two and a bit of time to let them get into the system. Give your body time to adjust. After a while normal levels will feel normal and not like you are about to keel over.
Rule 10. Eat as low to the ground as possible. In other words, lots of vegetables, some animal protein, some fruits, some grains. Once things are canned or processed beyond picking then they are on shelves and no longer close to the ground. If you have to eat canned then read the labels-the fewer ingredients the better. If it has any high fructose corn syrup then put it back on the shelf, same thing if it has lots of sugar.
That’s it. Ten simple rules. In the next blogs I will give you more details about how I came to formulate them and why I think they are important enough to make them rules.
Jim
Monday, August 8, 2011
Begin Transformation: Day 1
Hi there. This is my introductory blog-it is a little long winded but bear with me as I get the disclaimers out of the way as well as give you a little history on how I got to where I am. In future blogs I will be filling you in on how I have found my way to this point in time and how I decided I am now ready to share what I am certain will be transformative in many, many ways. So, let’s begin.
I’m mad as hell and I’m not gonna take it anymore.
What I did to my body was stupid and I knew it was stupid while I was doing it, but that isn’t what I’m mad about.
That my body, which has always been good and strong, succumbed to the onslaught of sodas, hotdogs, snack cakes, doughnuts, candy, burgers and every other damn thing I fed it for 50 years doesn’t make me mad either.
Nor does the understanding that if I don’t take charge this disease will destroy me piece by piece until I die just to escape the endless indignities heaped on me. Although I have to admit that one is running a close second to what really upsets me.
What really makes me mad is a small thing but one that is indicative of a much larger issue.
Test Strips.
Yup-test strips make me really mad, and I’ll tell you why. Test strips can run anywhere from about 20 cents to 1.25 each and if you follow your doctors advice or the dictates of your own fears then you can test three to eight times a day. At the low end that is 60 cents to 1.60 a day. At the high end that is 3.75 to 12.00 a day. Day in and day out, year in and year out until you get hit by a bus and quit being a cash cow for what is becoming just about the fastest growing industry in the world.
When test strips are made they are printed by the zillions and at that scale of manufacture they can’t cost more than fractions of a penny to make but are so profitable that manufacturers give away the test equipment for free to get you to use their strips. They are the printer ink of the medical industry. Then there are the books, the drugs, the clinics, the diabetes specialists, the actors shilling for the industry. It is a money making machine that rivals slot machines for strip mining our wallets—and that makes me mad as hell, and I hope you will join me in not taking it anymore.
A FEW WORDS OF CAUTION
THIS IS IMPORTANT STUFF SO READ THESE WORDS AND PAY ATTENTION
YOU SHOULD NOT UNDERTAKE ANY COURSE OF ACTION THAT MAY AFFECT YOUR HEALTH WITHOUT CONSULTING YOUR DOCTOR. SHOW HIM OR HER THIS BLOG AND WHAT I AM DOING TO GET RID OF MY DIABETES AND ASK THEM IF YOU ARE HEALTHY ENOUGH TO DO THIS.
THAT SAID, LET’S GET ON WITH THE REST OF WHAT I HAVE TO SAY AND YOU CAN DECIDE IF IT IS FOR YOU-WITH YOUR DOCTOR’S ADVICE OF COURSE.
In the blogs that follow I am going to be honest with you. If I got a wart on my plan of action then I am going to let you know. You will also see for yourself the reasoning behind what I am doing and if the results hold up to expectations. Each post will begin with my daily stats. Right off the bat you can see if this works or not. You will be able to see what it looks like after a week, a month, a year. You will be able to judge for yourself if you want to try it. WITH YOUR DOCTOR’S APPROVAL-OF COURSE.
Now I am going to be up front with you-I don’t have all that much faith in doctors. I grew up that way. My Dad was that way. My Mom damn near waited too long before she went to her doctor and he diagnosed her with breast cancer. So my advice to you is SEE YOUR DOCTOR-your health is your responsibility and you need to do what is best for you, which includes getting advice from other sources besides my blog. That said-let’s get going.
How I came to have type 2 diabetes
By being stupid, stressed, overworked, not getting enough sleep, not taking time to exercise, not doing what I knew I should be doing for my health, thinking I was different or stronger and that I could get away from paying for all of the above with my health.
I was first told that I was in dangerous territory in 1996 when I went to a doctor for the first physical I’d had in 10 years. You remember what I said about doctors. My partner nagged me and I’d just had a wicked bout of vertigo that had nothing at all to do with the roll of belly fat I was packing. My blood pressure was up and my fasting blood sugar was 124. The doctor gave me a bunch of info and told me to lose weight. I read the stuff, and then went to 7-11 for a Spicy Bite hotdog with lots of sauerkraut and extra mustard. To wash it down I had a monster 42 ounce soda, non diet, and a package of Hostess chocolate Zingers. Good healthy eatin’ there.
As it turns out, a 2003 Women’s Health Study that looked at nearly 50,000 healthy women 45 years old and older they had tracked for 8 years and found that a diet high in red meats and processed meats had higher chances of getting diabetes. Frankfurters, hotdogs, and the like upped this risk by 24%. Not being satisfied with a mere 24% risk I made sure to have that fine meal four or five times a week. I justified it by saying that I needed that energy boost to keep going. I had work to do and I was feeling run down. That huge wack of calories would give me the bump I needed to get through the day. Oh-add to that the breakfast coffee and doughnuts and maybe another 42 ounce soda late in the day and I made sure of it. Nothing less than a 110% chance for me.
By the time I had my next physical my blood sugar was up to 145 and my blood pressure was something like 160/115 and I weighed in at 301. The doctor who gave me the news made no bones about it. I was on the way to being dead. She gave be drugs for the blood sugar-something called Glucophage-and another drug to bring down the blood pressure. I asked her if there were alternatives to taking drugs. She said, "death." So I tried them and I modified my diet some and the drugs made me feel weird so after a while I quit taking them and as I didn’t have health insurance or a lot of spare money I didn’t go back to her either.
So there I was. The year was 2002, I was 48 years old and tipping the scales at 300 pounds, I had high blood pressure, diabetes and my man parts were unreliable at best. What to do. I was unwilling to accept the drugs or death scenario the doctor laid out and so I started learning about diabetes. I am not a doctor but I do have some scientific training and I know how to think, so that’s what I did.
It is now nine years later, August of 2011 to be specific and I have put together a plan which I will be telling you about in these blogs. I think it is a good one that is based on solid information and a variety of experiments I’ve done on my own body to see what would happen. Now I am ready to make the change I should have made back in 1990 before I did 20 years of damage to a body that really was working very well. But done is done and now let’s see what can be undone.
The beginning.
August 8, 2011
Wt. 258.4
Blood Sugar (first thing in the morning) 285
Blood Pressure 158/102 68bpm.
For the last month I have been eating reasonably well-no hotdogs and not too much in the way of sweets, though there was a soda a few days ago, some ice cream and a couple of candy bars. The test was to see what happens when I go back to more or less normal eating. Better than some, worse than others but typical.
Now, today, right this moment I am starting with the plan I have been putting together for the last couple of years. There are no drugs other than aspirin for the occasional headache and my morning coffee.
Here is what the plan looks like-I’ll fill you in on the reasoning later as this first blog is getting really long.
Other than the coffee nothing to eat until noon. Tonight I will not eat anything after 8 and not eat until noon. It is a long stretch without food but the reason for that is based on everything I have learned about diabetes. This becomes the daily routine. Stop eating at 8 pm. First meal at noon. 16 hours without food. Sounds like a lot but really the only real change is eliminating breakfast and snacks. For eight hours you are sleeping. Just keep thinking about how good lunch is going to be. I’m already looking forward to it.
Hope you can join me for the adventure in transformation. More tomorrow.
Jim
I’m mad as hell and I’m not gonna take it anymore.
What I did to my body was stupid and I knew it was stupid while I was doing it, but that isn’t what I’m mad about.
That my body, which has always been good and strong, succumbed to the onslaught of sodas, hotdogs, snack cakes, doughnuts, candy, burgers and every other damn thing I fed it for 50 years doesn’t make me mad either.
Nor does the understanding that if I don’t take charge this disease will destroy me piece by piece until I die just to escape the endless indignities heaped on me. Although I have to admit that one is running a close second to what really upsets me.
What really makes me mad is a small thing but one that is indicative of a much larger issue.
Test Strips.
Yup-test strips make me really mad, and I’ll tell you why. Test strips can run anywhere from about 20 cents to 1.25 each and if you follow your doctors advice or the dictates of your own fears then you can test three to eight times a day. At the low end that is 60 cents to 1.60 a day. At the high end that is 3.75 to 12.00 a day. Day in and day out, year in and year out until you get hit by a bus and quit being a cash cow for what is becoming just about the fastest growing industry in the world.
When test strips are made they are printed by the zillions and at that scale of manufacture they can’t cost more than fractions of a penny to make but are so profitable that manufacturers give away the test equipment for free to get you to use their strips. They are the printer ink of the medical industry. Then there are the books, the drugs, the clinics, the diabetes specialists, the actors shilling for the industry. It is a money making machine that rivals slot machines for strip mining our wallets—and that makes me mad as hell, and I hope you will join me in not taking it anymore.
A FEW WORDS OF CAUTION
THIS IS IMPORTANT STUFF SO READ THESE WORDS AND PAY ATTENTION
YOU SHOULD NOT UNDERTAKE ANY COURSE OF ACTION THAT MAY AFFECT YOUR HEALTH WITHOUT CONSULTING YOUR DOCTOR. SHOW HIM OR HER THIS BLOG AND WHAT I AM DOING TO GET RID OF MY DIABETES AND ASK THEM IF YOU ARE HEALTHY ENOUGH TO DO THIS.
THAT SAID, LET’S GET ON WITH THE REST OF WHAT I HAVE TO SAY AND YOU CAN DECIDE IF IT IS FOR YOU-WITH YOUR DOCTOR’S ADVICE OF COURSE.
In the blogs that follow I am going to be honest with you. If I got a wart on my plan of action then I am going to let you know. You will also see for yourself the reasoning behind what I am doing and if the results hold up to expectations. Each post will begin with my daily stats. Right off the bat you can see if this works or not. You will be able to see what it looks like after a week, a month, a year. You will be able to judge for yourself if you want to try it. WITH YOUR DOCTOR’S APPROVAL-OF COURSE.
Now I am going to be up front with you-I don’t have all that much faith in doctors. I grew up that way. My Dad was that way. My Mom damn near waited too long before she went to her doctor and he diagnosed her with breast cancer. So my advice to you is SEE YOUR DOCTOR-your health is your responsibility and you need to do what is best for you, which includes getting advice from other sources besides my blog. That said-let’s get going.
How I came to have type 2 diabetes
By being stupid, stressed, overworked, not getting enough sleep, not taking time to exercise, not doing what I knew I should be doing for my health, thinking I was different or stronger and that I could get away from paying for all of the above with my health.
I was first told that I was in dangerous territory in 1996 when I went to a doctor for the first physical I’d had in 10 years. You remember what I said about doctors. My partner nagged me and I’d just had a wicked bout of vertigo that had nothing at all to do with the roll of belly fat I was packing. My blood pressure was up and my fasting blood sugar was 124. The doctor gave me a bunch of info and told me to lose weight. I read the stuff, and then went to 7-11 for a Spicy Bite hotdog with lots of sauerkraut and extra mustard. To wash it down I had a monster 42 ounce soda, non diet, and a package of Hostess chocolate Zingers. Good healthy eatin’ there.
As it turns out, a 2003 Women’s Health Study that looked at nearly 50,000 healthy women 45 years old and older they had tracked for 8 years and found that a diet high in red meats and processed meats had higher chances of getting diabetes. Frankfurters, hotdogs, and the like upped this risk by 24%. Not being satisfied with a mere 24% risk I made sure to have that fine meal four or five times a week. I justified it by saying that I needed that energy boost to keep going. I had work to do and I was feeling run down. That huge wack of calories would give me the bump I needed to get through the day. Oh-add to that the breakfast coffee and doughnuts and maybe another 42 ounce soda late in the day and I made sure of it. Nothing less than a 110% chance for me.
By the time I had my next physical my blood sugar was up to 145 and my blood pressure was something like 160/115 and I weighed in at 301. The doctor who gave me the news made no bones about it. I was on the way to being dead. She gave be drugs for the blood sugar-something called Glucophage-and another drug to bring down the blood pressure. I asked her if there were alternatives to taking drugs. She said, "death." So I tried them and I modified my diet some and the drugs made me feel weird so after a while I quit taking them and as I didn’t have health insurance or a lot of spare money I didn’t go back to her either.
So there I was. The year was 2002, I was 48 years old and tipping the scales at 300 pounds, I had high blood pressure, diabetes and my man parts were unreliable at best. What to do. I was unwilling to accept the drugs or death scenario the doctor laid out and so I started learning about diabetes. I am not a doctor but I do have some scientific training and I know how to think, so that’s what I did.
It is now nine years later, August of 2011 to be specific and I have put together a plan which I will be telling you about in these blogs. I think it is a good one that is based on solid information and a variety of experiments I’ve done on my own body to see what would happen. Now I am ready to make the change I should have made back in 1990 before I did 20 years of damage to a body that really was working very well. But done is done and now let’s see what can be undone.
The beginning.
August 8, 2011
Wt. 258.4
Blood Sugar (first thing in the morning) 285
Blood Pressure 158/102 68bpm.
For the last month I have been eating reasonably well-no hotdogs and not too much in the way of sweets, though there was a soda a few days ago, some ice cream and a couple of candy bars. The test was to see what happens when I go back to more or less normal eating. Better than some, worse than others but typical.
Now, today, right this moment I am starting with the plan I have been putting together for the last couple of years. There are no drugs other than aspirin for the occasional headache and my morning coffee.
Here is what the plan looks like-I’ll fill you in on the reasoning later as this first blog is getting really long.
Other than the coffee nothing to eat until noon. Tonight I will not eat anything after 8 and not eat until noon. It is a long stretch without food but the reason for that is based on everything I have learned about diabetes. This becomes the daily routine. Stop eating at 8 pm. First meal at noon. 16 hours without food. Sounds like a lot but really the only real change is eliminating breakfast and snacks. For eight hours you are sleeping. Just keep thinking about how good lunch is going to be. I’m already looking forward to it.
Hope you can join me for the adventure in transformation. More tomorrow.
Jim
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