My diabetes story
I've been in treatment for about 2 months at this point, and I've had so many ups and downs, I'm not sure which direction is which anymore.
This is part 3 of the story and continues on from a previous part. If you want to read the whole lot, please start at Part 1: Diagnosis.
This is my story about my journey to diabetes and back. It's what happened to me, and I'm not saying that this same thing will work for everyone, but I hope that if you're out there suffering through this insidious disease, maybe you can consider doing something similar and it works for you too.
What's going on?
I have to say I was really confused about the whole thing and just couldn’t work out why I had diabetes…
Before the diagnosis, I ate pretty well, I was not overweight, I didn’t even feel particularly bad, apart from starting to lose my eyesight and feeling in my legs. From that perspective, in my mind I was fine before I started taking all these pills that upset my stomach and made me feel sick and lethargic all the time.
I know that sounds really silly, because I was losing my eyesight (no retinopathy yet) and losing sensation in the feet is the precursor to getting limbs chopped off at some point, but it's hard to think rationally when you're mired in anxiety and depression.
I wanted to see my kids grow up, want to see them fall in love, get married, have a life however they choose. Watch from the sidelines as they have the adventure of their lifetimes.
Of course, I didn't want to admit to anyone how much trouble I was in, in a typically male fashion.
My Birthday
When I went out to my 41st birthday party with 3 of my friends, I was feeling really lousy and complained a little about it while we were eating. It was then that one of my friends told me about this diet he was on. This diet was one where I was supposed to eat virtually no carbs, but plenty of fat, and burn the fat instead of carbs, and apparently this diet will "reset" my diabetes.
Crazy right? I mean I kept looking at him during dinner, he looked a lot skinnier than I had seen him in years… No, it's gotta be some bull. Hahah, I'm no sucker.
Everyone knows you need to eat carbs to live, and fats are totally bad for you. I don't want to get rid of diabetes just to die from cardiovascular disease. I pretty much laughed it off, but was still thinking about it off to the side.
Fed Up With It All
It was a few days later. I was sitting at in the food court near my workplace, staring listlessly at my plate of food.
I had roast pork with gravy, vegetables, potato and pumpkin from the local carvery. One of my lunch mates had some chips, normally I'd finish my plate and filch some of the chips. But I had been mulling over the advice from a few days earlier.
Taking a close look at my plate, I started adding up the carb sources. When you get diabetes here in Australia, you get a crash course in identifying and seeing everything in terms of "Exchanges", which are 15g packages of carbs. And you're told you need to eat a certain amount of carbs at each meal of the day, of which there are 6.
| Meal | Exchanges |
|---|---|
| Breakfast | 1-2 ex |
| Morning tea | 1 ex |
| Lunch | 2-3 ex |
| Afternoon tea | 1 ex |
| Dinner | 2-3 ex |
| After dinner | 1 ex |
That's 11 exchanges, or about 165g of carbs a day.
I must point out at this stage I was eating way more carbs that I had before being diagnosed, and was packing on the weight on the scales to boot. I was up from around 79kg up to around 86kg.
The Decision
Staring at my plate and adding up the numbers, I was picturing what lowering the carbs would look like. Subtract the potato, no peas, only a little bit of pumpkin, leave most of the gravy on the plate, don't have any chips.
So I decided I'd leave the carbs on the plate, resisted the irresistible urge to eat some chips. To this day, I don't really know why I decided to do this, I was absolutely (and I mean 100% sure, no room for error, I was positive) that there was no merit in this crazy diet I didn't even know the name of.
Perhaps I had just reached my limit and needed to find some way to take control, any type of control I could in an uncontrollable situation. Fortunately common sense took over by the time I went back to the office. So when I went back to work, I started Googling, trying to find out what this diet was called, and what people were saying about it.
I was sure I was going to find out that it was a fad, or that it killed people. I didn't really know what I was looking for, but I found some stuff on Paleo. This sounded kinda like what he was describing, but not completely, it had people still eating whole-grains and milk, which I knew were still high in carbs. It just didn't sound right, so I kept searching.
Then I found it. LCHF. Low carb, High fat. 4 words, such a simple concept. And the weird thing was, people were raving about it, nobody was really complaining, the Switzerland government were actually even changing their long-held dietary guidelines to be more favourable towards lower carb, higher fat food consumption.
I'm sitting there, trying to find the catch. Where are they making money out of this. I mean normally you hit these sites, and they bait you, then when you're hooked, they reel you in. You see some heavy sales pitch, telling you how good it's going to be, or describing the miracle ingredient, then bam Subscribe Now…
But there was none on this site. There's free advice, there's free recipes, there's a members section which you need to pay for a subscription for, but, they're giving you a free month.
The website I'm talking about is Diet Doctor. After a minimal amount of research I thought I had all the bits of information I needed. Get rid of Sugar, Wheat, Starches. Eat Meat, Eggs, a few vegetables.
I didn't want my wife to think I'm nuts or anything, or worry about me having a heart attack, so I didn't tell her what I was doing. Purely experimental phase. But I was sure that I was going to give this an honest try. Maybe I'll try it for a week or so and then when it fails, no embarrassment how I got sucked in, no I told you it was a dumb idea.
Next
Next part is Part 4: The Big Lie, where I find out they lied to me. I was so angry, so upset, so disillusioned.
If you want to read the whole series, please start at Part 1: Diagnosis