There are only two certainties in life. Death. And, Oh Ya, that other thing, whatever it is. I think maybe it’s called extreme anxiety.
For a lot of us right now, one of the biggest anxieties is about whether or not you or someone you love is going to get the coronavirus and die a horrible painful death. Can you imagine if you carried that level of anxiety about your health with you every day of your life?
This is precisely how I and many other people with serious chronic illness or pain live every day.
Waking up to a good day, when I’m not in so much pain, or simply in less pain, would be a good reason to celebrate. Or so you would think, but it isn’t necessarily so. If I’m not in serious pain right now, I’m probably super anxious about when it will start up again, since it’s seldom very long until the next session. Can you imagine being so fearful of your next bout of pain that you can’t ever be rid of the sense of dread that hangs over you.
And people who come in contact with me try to cheer me up by saying something like, “Don’t worry it, it can’t last forever, can it?” “Just get over it, you’re too obsessed with it.” As if I, someone with serious chronic pain wouldn’t part with anything I have to make it go away. And, well, yes, it can bloody well last forever, well, at least until I die from it, or some other condition that doesn’t happen to hurt, right now.
If I seem focused on feeling sorry for myself, just leave me alone. If you just can’t provide some comfort to me, exactly as I need it right now, then please get out of my face. I hardly need you to tell me to cheer up. And if you can’t handle it to see me suffering in pain, then just don’t. Leave. Piss off.
For me, and a lot of people with chronic pain, the coronavirus is just more thing to worry about, and make me more anxious about everything I have to do, everybody I have to see, and also more fearful about being able to obtain the bare necessities of life.
As if there isn’t enough to stress out about already, without the Damned Tsunami Pandemic, sweeping over the whole world.
To someone with a serious disease and chronic pain, death isn’t the scariest thing, it’s just the most certain.
There is no going back. Damage to your nerves by neuropathy is a one way street. Start treating your diabetes while you still can prevent the worst of it.
The journey into becoming a diabetic is one that most of us join without knowing the consequences of what we’re doing. There are a lot opinions out there, even among doctors, as to what actually “causes” diabetes, but pretty much everyone I read knows that diabetes is highly related to obesity and carbohydrate overconsumption. And when I was diagnosed, more than twenty years ago, the information I was given was faulty and at the very least incomplete.
What no one ever said was that if I continued to eat what I thought of as a “normal” amount of carbohydrates and sugar every day, by the time I retired my life would be severely circumscribed, with many symptoms of diabetes and other metabolic syndrome related diseases causing continuing pain, physical exhaustion and emotional distress. I also suffer from chronic fatigue and despite having lost some weight, am still fighting the good fight doing intermittent fasting three days a week for 36 hours.
So what should I have been taught as a younger person, that might have protected me from getting full blown diabetes and other metabolic syndrome diseases.
Eat less carbohydrates. A lot less. On my current low carb high fat diet I keep my carbs below 150 grams a day. Eat even less added sugar. I try not to eat anything with added sugars, and when I do offend I eat very small portions of any sweet at all. Mind you, my appetite for sweet things has pretty much disappeared since I started avoiding them. Stay away from booze. Period. Lots of doctors and dieticians say that a one or two drinks a day is okay. I don’t believe them. Alcohol does similar things to the liver as carbohydrates, without the redeeming quality of providing me with any energy.
Always seek to reduce the amount of starch and sugar, and fill up on natural food if you are going to eat carbs. Eat fruit in season, in your area, and don’t overindulge even in fruit and vegetables.
Try not to get depressed because you can’t have any “real” food. Try to redefine what constitutes a meal, and understand that the meat and vegetables are really enough.
Rain Coast Review Blog author
It turns out that the best advice anyone can give anyone about diabetes is really simple – eat less carbs, fast intermittently, and exercise moderately as much as possible.
The Pain Mastery Institute, which I’ve been blogging about for a couple of months, is shutting down due to financial considerations.
The Pain Mastery Institute, which I’ve been blogging about for a couple of months, is shutting down due to financial considerations. Their courses have been useful to me but not nearly as useful as if they had survived long enough for me to get through the whole program.
The main thing I learned from the courses is that much of what is available for mastering chronic pain is drawn by observed people as they take actions or make decisions which assist them in managing their pain, or ameliorating the amount and intensity of pain.
While the course is gone, and the Institute website shut down, this doesn’t mean that I’m abandoning my pursuit of effective pain management strategies. So keep watch for my blog because I will coming back with a new approach soon.
Update on Intermittent Fasting
Starting on Monday this week I began a five day fast, which so far has been a bit frustrating and challenging. The second day and the third day I found myself absolutely starving, which is odd because up until now, fasting for three days a week, 36 hours, I have never been really hungry.
It takes a bit of a different strategy for longer fasts, like a five days on, four days off, but I’m learning and will be putting together a new primer based on somewhat longer fasts.
Boing 737 crashed after being shot down near Tehran
This has been a really sad and horrific week for me, and for many Canadians. 147 Canadian residents and citizens were killed this week by an airline shot out of the sky by Iran, either by mistake or by design. Either way, we have all lost so much and I can’t really even begin to make any sense of it. I am just sick over it, and I didn’t know anyone personally on the plane, although I do know some family members.
The Prime Minister of Canada has been highly visible in his demands for accountability for this disaster, both from Iran and the United States governments, who put into play the violent altercation that led to these deaths, whether by misadventure or by malice.
I don’t know whether to rage or to cry, or both. I’m not expecting any closure any time soon. Iran is virtually certain to lie through their teeth on this, and Trump will do no better. This is a terrible tragedy for everyone involved in the flight, and all of their country mourns their loss.
WEEK 2 More Relieving Skills for the Physical Intensity of PAIN
The second weekly lesson from the Pain Mastery Institute is about another set of skills designed to reduce the experience of pain in the body. These skills are to impact pain that is a result of muscles tightening up as a reaction to pain of any type, located in various parts of the anatomy.
What is taught is a series of tensing and relaxing of muscle groups, starting at the toes and working up to the head and neck of the body. I was told to tighten and then release systematically the tension I had created, and then relax after releasing, and then breath deeply.
These techniques are very similar to some exercises I learned many years ago, as part of creative visualization and meditation. Instead of focussing on achieving a receptive state of mental suggestibility, these relaxation techniques are designed for the specific purpose of releasing muscle tension underlying many of my experiences of pain – especially in major muscle groups in my body, such as cramps in my feet and calf muscles, lower back and upper back muscle aching and tensions, head aches from neck and head muscle tensions. And so forth.
After completing the lesson, and doing all of the tightening, releasing, and relaxing exercises for the various parts of my body I realize that this technique is intuitively a part of pain management strategy for most of us, but only used occasionally. The purpose of the course, I’m sure, is to create a conscious awareness of yet another technique that promises some relief from pain, which we have all practiced once in a while, and bring this technique into daily use, as a part of our Pain Toolbox of resources.
Even after only two of the weekly courses in the Pain Management Institute online course I am beginning to realize the efficacy of this program. It’s success will be in part a result of bringing into conscious control elements of knowledge and behaviour that help ameliorate pain. These techniques are a part of innate knowledge but without conscious awareness of their use and potential benefit we only apply them randomly, rather than on purpose to structure our response to chronic pain.
This is a good start to a realization than I may indeed have the ability to management and improve my experience of and control of pain, not necessarily all at once, or even ever completely, but incrementally somewhat better.
When I started this set of blogs related to pain I was looking for some real improvement in my experience of and control of pain. Even after only a few weeks of analysis and discovery I am more hopeful of making gains.
In this week’s lesson on managing pain, I learned some new concepts about how pain functions in the brain, as well as on how to take something I already knew, and provide a better and more purposeful way to use it to reduce my experience of pain in my body.
Pain is experienced in the brain, after information is sent to the brain through neurons transmitted through the spinal cord.
Passively attending to something in your body, other than the pain, will reduce the experience of pain to some degree or other. Sometimes this reduction in the experience of pain is significant, sometimes not.
Actively creating a mechanical distraction, especially in the area of the body which is experiencing the pain, can have a positive effect on that pain.
Interestingly, by creating a mechanical action, such as shaking your hand if you injure a finger or burn yourself, will reduce significantly the amount of pain actually experienced, by actively reducing the signal from the pain receptors in getting to the brain. This takes place in the spinal cord itself, rather than in the brain, so the reduction in the pain can be very effective.
Concentrating your attention on some part of your body not currently experiencing pain can help reduce that pain.
Now, lets stop thinking about the theory of pain, and think about what the theory of pain is teaching me. If I can move my attention from focusing on a specific cause of pain to focussing on some other part of my body, such as my face or ears, for example, I can significantly reduced my experience of the pain. This reduction is my experience of pain is relatively mild, for me, at this point, but it serves to reduce my experience of neuropathic pain from excruciating to merely troubling, a huge gain since when it is only troubling I can often drift off into sleep, which is nearly impossible when my neuropathic pain in my feet is most extreme.
Through practice and the investment of some time I hope to increase the effectiveness of this pain strategy, which holds out some promise in being an active tool to improve my current experience of pain.
The second strategy in this chapter of the course on Mastering Pain, is about a more physically active method, and requires some mechanical actions to be taken. So, when the pain in my hands or feet is most severe instead of mentally focussing on another part of my body, I use an action to draw my attentions elsewhere. This action can be pretty simple, such as playing with my car keys or making a cup of tea, and really paying attention to what I’m doing, rather than dwelling on my neuropathic pain.
Doing something physical, like washing a load of dishes in the sink, can sometimes be an effective distraction to even quite severe pain. It won’t make it go away, but it may help make it more bearable.
You’d be surprised at how often this helps reduce the experience of pain, sometimes by a lot, depending on how absorbing the actions being taken are, and depending on how seriously I focus on them.
Before I started taking this program I think I intuitively already knew some of this information, without knowing the underlying physiology of the spinal cord and the part of the brain responsible for experiencing pain.
A significant part of the benefit of taking this program is the development of a more organized and deliberate strategy for dealing with my everyday pain, in ways that improve my experience of life through my own conscious efforts, without taking opioids or other pain killers to deal with the pain. A major goal of Mastering Pain is to create a Personal Toolbox of resources to assist with what has become a major preoccupation of my life, the toleration and management of chronic pain.
For me, the alternatives to doing this program seem few and very unattractive. I have no willingness to go down the road of pharmaceutical solutions for my pain, unless I absolutely have no choice, in order to tolerate the ever increasing amount of pain in my life. It may be that at some point I won’t be able to function, whatsoever, without pain medications, but I intend to push that day off as long as possible.
Up until this week I was using a Drop Cap for the first letter of each paragraph in my blog. I recently received feedback from a mobile reader, using her cell phone, that said that the Drop Caps were screwing up her ability to follow my blog, by throwing text all over the place, when viewed on her phone. So I’m not going to use them in this blog from now on.
It’s Thursday night, and I’m sitting in an airplane, about to take off for New York. I’m heading home from Las Vegas after attending Obesity Week 2019, the world’s largest obesity medicine conference, a collaboration between The Obesity Society and The American Society of Metabolic and Bariatric Surgeons.
I don’t quite know how to express my feelings and thoughts about this event, but the words ‘anger’ and ‘hopelessness’ immediately come to mind. My anger and hopelessness are best exemplified by the first keynote speech, delivered by Dr. William Cefalu, who is chief scientific and medical officer of the American Diabetes Association.
After accurately describing our country’s spiralling healthcare costs, and the morbidity and mortality associated with diabetes and obesity, Dr. Cefalu went on to discuss the benefit of low-calorie approaches for diabetes reversal. He also highlighted bariatric surgery and medications. But ultimately, he harped on one point, that is frequently repeated at conventional obesity medicine conferences:
“There is no best diet. The best diet is one that a patient can adhere to.”
The above article by Dr. Tro Kalayjian the physician behind Dr. Troys Medical Weight Loss and Direct Primary Care is a discussion about why it is so difficult for the medical profession to accept fundamental changes in medical understanding about diabetes and current treatments for it. It is why patients continue to get contradictory advice from doctors who really ought to know better than to recommend any number of established and well known dietary strategies that simply don’t work. It’s not that they don’t work anymore, it’s that they never worked, and there is no scientific basis for any of them.
This sounds pretty revolutionary to me. The esteemed Canadian doctor is joined by a number of US based colleagues who are challenging the status quo in the treatment of diabetes, and sending a message to their profession. Just stop! Stop misleading the public! Stop lying to patients! Stop killing your clients!
Closeup on medical doctor woman giving a choice between apple and donut
Of course, they are doctors and they don’t quite put it that way. But what else can you say when so many health professionals and authorities continue to promulgate misleading information, such as “moderation is the best strategy” when clearly, based on current information that is simply not true. Moderation will kill you if by moderation you include relatively mundate advice about carbohydrates and sugar. What sciences know is that consuming carbs in excess of certain pretty limited amounts leads to metabolic syndrome, metabolic syndrome leads to insulin resistance. Insulin resistance leads to diabetes. Diabetes leads to lots of really bad stuff that can kill you, or at the least, make you really really sick.
Stop being so gullible. Doctors aren’t necessarily up to speed on the current information about your health.
If you or someone you love is fat, obese, or has diabetes or prediabetes follow the link on this blog entry to the above article and understand what is being said. Doctors are willfully ignoring solid medical evidence in favor of standing by old, disproved theories because they are afraid of rocking the boat. Read Dr. Fung’s book, the Diabetic Code.
Stop believing anyone who says that eating many small meals a day is ok. Stop following advice so far heard that has led you to being overweight and obese. If you want to live and healthy, long life, fire your current endrochronologist if he or she disparages the most recent research and tells you not to follow Dr. Fung’s advice. Run away from anyone who says that carbs and sugars are not the cause of diabetes, metabolic syndrome, and many many many other life threatening diseases.
How has pain been a complex problem in your life? How has pain interacted with your movement, energy, sleep, social life, finances, identity, memory, and mood?
Mastering Pain Institute
After listening to and reading the materials in the 1st leasson of the Pain Mastery Class it asks the student to answer the above questions.
Movement
How has pain interacted with my movement? As pain from various causes has increased over the past few years I have observed that my ability and willingness to move has undergone an uncomfortable metamorphosis. Simple tasks like walking, bending over, picking up items, getting dressed, doing my toe nails, making the bed… etc. have all become much more difficult.
Neuropathic pain has combined with arthritis to make steering the car for long periods increasingly painful. I alternate from my left to my right hand constantly as I drive, because the pain builds up in each as it is used. Eventually the pain is too great in both hands and I have to take a break. The pain in my legs and feet make driving hard as well, and certainly limited my pleasure from doing so. Driving a car is one of my great pleasures, or, it used to be one of my great pleasures and it represented a kind of freedom that is now gradually disappearing from my life.
The same can be said for a lot of routine physical tasks, all the way from making the bed to cleaning the mirrors in my bathroom. I didn’t used to mind housework or gardening but it is now so painful to mow the lawn that I’d rather let it grow twice as long as I used to. These type of restrictions have inevitably reduced my freedom of movement, and my interest in and willingness to do routine, simple life tasks.
How has pain affected my energy? Anybody who suffers from chronic pain will attest to the fact that constant, unrelenting pain is exhausting. There is almost no time when I’m not tired and so sore I feel like I really just want to lay down and sleep for a while. Even a nap would seem like a relief, if I can sleep, that is.
The net available energy is a function of pain in my body. The more severe the pain becomes, the less energy I have. And not only to do life in general, but in having the interest and energy to participate in the things of life. A lack of energy is behind so many other deficits experience by people with chronic pain that it tends to blind us to how serious it actually is. Without sufficient energy to function properly nothing actually works the way it is supposed to work. How the hell am I supposed to do my job at work, when I hardly have enough energy to get there in the first place every day?
How does pain affect my sleep? To most of us with chronic pain sleep is seldom deep or really very restful. Not a single night of sleep goes by without being disrupted, again and again by waking fully or partially because of pain in the body. For me it is all sorts of different parts of the body and different types of pain, but it all hurts, and it all makes me awaken at some point during sleep. If I wonder why I’m so damned tired all the time, I simply have to remind myself that I really haven’t had a decent night’s sleep in years.
I’ve been diagnosed with sleep apnea, but sleep apnea really isn’t the reason I’m awake half the night. It’s the pain, the pain. Snoring is a part of it. Blocked airways aggravates it. But pain causes sleep interruption, over and over again, every single time I go to sleep.
How does pain affect my social life? What social life? Who really has the energy to maintain a social group or friendships when you’re in constant pain? It takes energy I don’t have and mobility that is a constant struggle, simply to get out and visit with people. I’m no longer the happy go lucky guy I used to be. I try not to spread my pain around, or make my kids and grandkids suffer from my experience of pain. But I wonder if my increasing isolation from them is at least partly because I do longer know how to overcome my pain for long enough to actually properly engage with people.
And being socially isolated also increases my experience of pain, because lacking real human contact with others is not only uncomfortable, but it’s also actually harmful physically because it encourages inactivity and passiveness. Instead of getting out and doing things with the people I love, I stay at home, watching television, at least partly because it’s less painful than the alternatives of getting out of the house, and doing the things necessary to have a life.
How does being in pain affect my finances? This is one of the things that is most humiliating about being in pain. Instead of being vibrant and capable, I’m tentative and withdrawing from challenges. I used to love going to the office and taking on new challenges, meeting new people, creating new financial opportunities for myself, and for my staff. Now I have no staff, and I’ve been afraid for years of taking on jobs that I know I’m qualified to do because I’m afraid that I’m going to let them down, or worse, prove myself to be incapable of handling the physical and emotional demands of the work.
In addition, my increasing health problems cost a lot of money, which I am now having to pay with a lot less income, due to my reduced employment capabilities. I struggle to manage my prescription deductibles and copays. And that’s for the prescriptions, which doesn’t actually include any pain medications I can trust. Nothing the doctor has prescribed for pain has actually helped very much, if at all. I know that opioids would be more effective than OTC drugs but I also know that they are highly addictive, and have major other problems that I don’t need to add to my pain.
And being chronically short of money, as well as in pain, means that I can’t take advantage of one of the things I used to do a lot, which was going out to nice restaurants and have good meals with friends. Shortage of money means that I’m socially isolated by it, as well as by my resentment over finding myself in this situation. I never wanted to be dependant on anyone else but I find myself in a situation that make this every more a fact of life.
How does pain affect my sense of identity? Truthfully, I don’t really recognise myself any more. I no longer feel like the man I used to be, and I certainly don’t have the confidence I have always had. I’ve always thought of myself as a highly charged, somewhat hyperactive and oversexed Type A personality. If I had faults they were likely the faults of thinking that I could do anything, be anybody, accomplish anything. A little bit of humility probably wasn’t a bad thing for me to learn, but pain has driven me to distraction. The amount and persistence of pain has now reached proportions that are disabling my sense of self to a point of no return. I don’t actually know what it would look like for me to be me, the way I have always been. So damage to my sense of identity is a real cost of being a victim of chronic pain.
How does pain affect my memory? My partner says that I’ve become a lot more forgetful than previously. I’m not sharp anymore, and I don’t automatically pick up on things so quickly. I don’t think I’ve lost my marbles, but I get confused more easily and mix things up, despite my best efforts to not do so. It means I slow down, because I can no longer count on my memory for important information. I’m a lot more cautious than I used to be, if for no other reason than I hate being unable to remember even the simplest facts or common words.
I’ve always been a prodigious reader, at one point reading more than a book a day, not to mention newspaper and magazines. Now it takes me a week to read a novel, and a month to work through a non-fiction title, no matter how interested I am in the subject. I don’t remember names very well, I never did, but I’m also losing the ability to remember what books I’ve read or which ones I liked or didn’t like. I find myself half way through the first chapter of novels only to realize that I read the damned thing six month ago. So yes, memory is being affected negatively, if only because I’m so distracted by the constant pain interrupting the flow of my thoughts and feelings.
How does pain affect my mood? I was diagnosed as being bipolar when I was about thirty years old, after a major breakdown and depression. After being hospitalized for six months I came out of the hospital with somewhat better emotional management tools than I had previously. Relatively quickly I abandoned the prescriptions for bipolar I had been given, because they made me feel like I was living in a fog. And I reconciled myself to living with vivid emotional ups and downs. So depression and mania have long been a part of my nature, and my life. I’ve done well in managing to live a full life despite these problems, but now it feels like depression stalk me, without the accompanying manio to provide any balance to it.
There are two kinds of depression with which I struggle, one of which is a direct result of serious and chronic pain. It’s tough to get out of being depressed when you feel like you’re under a constant pressure cooker caused by physical and mental pain. This past weekend, in addition to chronic neuropathic pain in my hands and feet, arthritic pain in my shoulders, fingers, hands, I was also slayed by a serious migraine headache. I haven’t suffered from migraines on a regular basis for years, ever since I started practicing a form of self-hypnosis that seemed to be effective at shortening their duration, and eventually led me to being able to predict and prevent the worst of them.
Even that ability seems to be beyond my control these days, because it’s pretty hard to meditate when I’m in so much pain that I can hardly sit still.
I don’t know if this exercise in counting the ways that pain affects me is supposed to make me feel better, but it hasn’t yet. I also suppose that to defeat an enemy I first have to understand the enemy and all the territory it has staked out in my life. This is the exercise from Chapter 1 in my program to begin to manage my pain. I hope the next exercises don’t leave me here.
In an article I read today in Endocrine Web, by Kathleen Doheny
Every year, about 1.5 million Americans learn they have diabetes. However, there are more than 7 million adults who have diabetes but haven’t been diagnosed, according to the American Diabetes Association. This matters since we are learning that the best chance of reversing diabetes seems to occur very early in the onset of the disease. Finding from several recent studies indicate that the timing of diagnosis matters a lot.
If you have diabetes, your doctor may have encouraged you to consider making lifestyle changes; for many, that may include losing weight. While that same message has been discussed for years, recent evidence suggests that achieving about a 10% weight loss may be even more important than experts thought—with a payoff that is greater than previously imagined.
So you don’t have to lose all your excess weight to get a benefit from weight loss. As noted above, even a weight loss of 10% has a powerful effect on your A1C levels. This should be a great incentive for diabetics who, like me, have been identified as obese, or even merely fat or overweight.
After nearly three months I can say that fasting is making my health a little better, including reductions in A1C but also including things like mobility. I can actually reach down and touch my toes for the first time in a long time. Fungal infections have been radically reduced already. And my sense of hope for the future is significantly better.
What some authors have written about is the profound effect that fasting and weight loss have on the emotional health of a person. This may be something I’m prepared to write about in the future, but right now I feel like I’m on a roller coaster emotionally, really happy with my results one moment, and anxious about further progress the next.
My wife was diagnosed with Type two diabetes about the same time as I started my fasting program. She tried fasting the same amount as did I, but found that she simply couldn’t sustain a fast for so many hours, so she reduced the fasting to 16 hours and also continued to cut carbs and sugar in the rest of the day. Barely two months into her lifestyle change, including the reductions in carbs and sugar, she managed to reduce her A1C from 11+ down to 7.4.
She also lost some weight but not really that much. The thing is that her BMI is a healthy 24 so she really didn’t need to lose weight, as much as she needed to reduce carbs. A ten pound weight loss translated into a radical change in her blood sugars, and indeed in her medication requirements after the test.
I’m really proud of her accomplishment is such a short time, and firmly believe that if she continues in this direction that she will effectively a “non-diabetic” by spring, if not sooner.
I still hover around 215 pounds, but my blood sugars came down to 7.0 from 8.1 two months ago. My family doctor was pretty surprised and pleased with my progress. The biggest thing I keep reminding myself is that Rome wasn’t built in a day. My obesity is the result of 25 or 30 years of overindulging carbs and sugars, and it’s taking me some time to get the weight off. So be it. I already notice and now so are some of friends and family.
Dietician working on diet plan for weight loss and right nutrition concept. Source: BS
Canada urgently needs a diabetes strategy – just not necessarily the one that Diabetes Canada would have us believe is the right path
The following information is from Diabetes Canada – Basic carbohydrate counting for diabetes management. The charts and recommendations are EXACTLY as outlined in their PDF file available from the Diabetes Canada website
Following the information provided by Diabetes Canada, I will discuss briefly my own take on what this actually means, in the context of intermittent fasting and the low carb lifestyles recommended by Dr. Fung in his Diabetes Code.
STEP 1 Make healthy food choices
Enjoy a variety of vegetables, fruits, whole grains, low fat milk products, and meat and alternatives at your meals. A variety of foods will help to keep you healthy.
Use added fats in small amounts. This helps to control your weight and blood cholesterol.
Choose portion sizes to help you to reach or maintain a healthy weight.
STEP 2 Focus on carbohydrate
Your body breaks down carbohydrate into sugar (glucose). This raises your blood sugar levels.
Carbohydrate is found in many foods including grains and starches, fruits, some vegetables, legumes, milk and milk alternatives, sugary foods and many prepared foods.
Meat and alternatives, most vegetables and fats contain little carbohydrate. Moderate servings will not have a big effect on blood sugar levels.
STEP 3 Set carbohydrate goals
Your dietitian will help you set a goal for grams of carbohydrate at each meal and snack. This may be the same from day to day or may be flexible, depending on your needs.
Aim to meet your target within 5 grams per meal or snack.
STEP 4 Determine carbohydrate content
Write down what you eat and drink throughout the day.
Be sure to note the portion sizes. You may need to use measuring cups and food scales to be accurate.
Record the grams of carbohydrate in these foods and drinks.
For carbohydrate content of foods, check the Beyond the Basics resources, food packages, food composition books, restaurant fact sheets and websites.
STEP 5 Monitor effect on blood sugar level
Work with your health-care team to correct blood sugar levels that are too high or too low.
My take on the information provided above by Diabetes Canada is that it is great information, as far as it goes… Which means that I think that there’s a lot more to it than meets the eye.
VARIATION 1 Make healthy food choices – just not the ones implied
Enjoy a variety of vegetables, fruits, whole grains, low fat milk products, and meat and alternatives at your meals. A variety of foods will help to keep you healthy.
Diabetes Canada
This is only one point of view, and one that isn’t necessarily all that helpful, especially since built into the advice are prejudices about the virtues of vegetables, fruits, whole grains and low fat. From my reading in the recent past I am now vitally convinced that the international obsession with starch and sugar based foods (ie: vegetables, fruit, and whole grains) is the fundamental CAUSE of the current epidemic of diabetes. Included in this obsession is the unproven argument against fat and meat.
Recent articles and books on the subject suggest strongly that the prejudice against fat has directly led the world’s health practitioners and public health authorities to make recommendations that have strongly affected whole populations into wrong minded and dangerous eating habits.
So the first point is almost right. Just totally wrong about low fat, oh, and about having a healthy mixture of vegetables, fruits and whole grains. Generally one considers that the first items listed in a list of recommended items should be the items encouraged and supported as the primary source of dietary energy. And this would be WRONG! Sugars and starches should never constitute more than about 10%, maybe 15% of your daily calories. The rest should be made up of proteins and fats, as your primary source of dietary energy for life.
And portion sizes are really important – mostly to keep the amount of starches and sugars to the lowest possible levels, to allow the body to use fat as a primary sources of energy, leaving dietary sugar and starches to supplementary roles.
VARIATION 2 – Don’t trust traditional dieticians or doctors to give you good dietary or lifestyle advice.
Don’t trust you dietician to set goals for you, especially regarding carbs, sugars, fats and protein. Most dieticians today have been trained in a world where fat and protein (especially from red meat) have demonized and starches and sugars elevated to saintly status. Most cook books, dietician training materials, and schools are teaching the same poisoned information that has led us into the diabetic disaster that is underscoring modern lifestyles.
If you want to continue to fight with obesity and diabetes, then follow the Canada or US National Health Strategies, because doing so with take you down the same path as millions of us who are now suffering from severe diabetes, and other side effects of this advice and governmentally supported policy.
On the other hand, if you want to get off the Merry Go Round, and start to live a healthy, happy life, start to adopt what is considered to be a radically reduced diet of sugars and starches. Take your primary sustenance from meat, butter, eggs and fat, or even from vegetables rich in fat. Sugars and starches should be considered as purely luxury items, to be consumed sparsely, and in consideration of their potential for causing harm
At the end of another week of three 36 hour fasts, I’m contemplating how much my life has already changed, and how much it may still change, as I continue my fasting and attack on diabetes.
Changing your lifestyle is the first key to beating diabetes
First of all, I currently weigh about 30 pounds less than when I started on the low carb high fat program. Fasting started about two weeks later, after I took the time to consult with my endocrinologist about how to manage my blood sugars during my fasting. We had already switched to two different types of insulin, long acting and fast acting, and I’m using the new meter that tests all day long, so he felt that the risk of a dangerous low could be managed.
Secondly, I now know that fasting isn’t really all that hard, for me. I suspect that motivation is a huge part of this, but fasting seems pretty straightforward to me now. Take care of my insulin and blood glucose levels, otherwise just don’t eat. Anything. Instead of it being hard, it’s been pretty easy, and the results so far are gratifying.
Weighing myself every day has become a lifetime habit. Getting my weight to a better levels is one of the keys to improving my diabetes, blood pressure, arthritis, and many other inflammatory problems and diseases.
I made the change to my lifestyle on July 10, and began fasting near the end of the month. It’s now the end of the first week of September so I’m approach two months into the program. My insulin levels are lower than ever as are my glucose readings. I take half of the prescribed dose of long acting insulin these days, and no fast acting insulin at all on my fasting days, and about three quarters of the previous prescibed dose on my non fasting days.
The biggest concern is keeping my blood sugars high enough not to end up in a coma from hypoglycemia from having too much insulin in my system and lowering my blood sugar too much. In more than 20 years of trying to manage my diabetes low blood sugar was never ever a remote possibility, even after being on insulin, as my blood sugars were always higher than desireable.
I recently made two new holes in my belt to keep my pants from falling down, after moving from the last belt hole at the other extreme. I didn’t measure my waist when I started because I was too embarrassed to admit how big I had become. Now I wish that I had because I’m shrinking fast.
When I started this fast, I told myself that I would stay the course for three months, and then re-evaluate where I’m at then, from a health perspective as well as general feeling perspective. I also said that I would be happy if I were to get my weight under 200 lbs or 90 KG by the end of the 90 days of fasting. Today I weigh 217 lbs, down from 244 lbs on July 10th. I believe that I will achieve both goals, at which time I will commit to the next phase of this program.
I wish I could say that there have been no negative effects of fasting. It’s a little early to make that statement. What I can say is that there haven’t been any, so far.
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