RJM62
Touchdown! Greaser!
- Joined
- Jun 15, 2007
- Messages
- 13,157
- Location
- Upstate New York
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Geek on the Hill
So I got my most recent A1C results a couple of weeks ago. A1C was 7.5, which was as high as its ever been. FBG was also high at about 160. I usually do get a little "dawn effect," but 160 was too high for my liking. So I decided to make some diet changes.
Basically, I did one thing: I eliminated processed foods. Even things like frozen, prepared chicken. I know how to cook, so I just started making everything myself "from scratch," as it were.
Not that I ate a tremendous amount of processed food, anyway, so it wasn't that big a change lifestyle-wise. But now I've eliminated it altogether. Everything from canned vegetables, to store-bought eggplant parmigiana, to frozen breakfast sandwiches (I mean, seriously, I can toast bread and cook eggs myself), to low-carb "meal replacements" supposedly made specifically for diabetics. Gone. All gone. Even artificial sweeteners. Gone. If I simply must sweeten something, I use stevia. It's as close as possible to being natural and unprocessed.
The results have both surprised and impressed me.
After about three days, my self-administered morning blood glucose readings started to fall dramatically. This morning's was under 130 for the first time in quite a while. And about an hour ago, I was pleasantly surprised with a preprandial of 90 mL/d -- the first time I've had a preprandial under 120 in years. (I'd been averaging in the 130 - 150 range over the past few months.)
The thing is, I'd already been reading the nutritional information on every single package of food I bought and staying within the basic ADA diet recommendations. Furthemore, I'm not really eating all that differently now than I was before, other than preparing all my meals entirely from scratch, using fresh ingredients. But the results have been both surprising and encouraging.
I've come to believe that the measured or calculated numbers on food labels don't tell the whole story, even if they're accurate. I think the more removed from nature food gets, and the more it is processed, the more it surprises the bodies' metabolism. The body's expecting the stuff that's been removed to still be there, because it's always been there throughout the course of human evolution; and when it's not there, it tosses a monkey wrench into the works.
In other words, the numbers of grams of carbs, fats, proteins, and so forth on a food package may indeed be accurate. But those components may not be metabolized properly by the body once they're removed from the context in which the body expects to find them.
Or in yet more other words, I think we're concentrating too much on numbers, when we need to concentrate on ... I don't even know if there's a word for it. Naturalness, I guess, comes closest.
I call what I'm doing "Nonna's diet," meaning that I won't eat anything that my grandmother wouldn't eat, which basically boils down to not eating anything that I didn't prepare myself from ingredients that are as close as possible to how they were when they were still alive and walking, flying, swimming, or waving in the wind.
Nonna lived well into her 80's and wasn't sick a single day that I know of until three days before she died. She was still teasing the little ones, chasing them around with a wooden spoon as if she was going to spank them, when she was in her 70's and 80's. She also couldn't spell "cholesterol" in either language, and she outlived quite a few of her doctors. But everything she ate, she prepared herself, from the freshest ingredients she could find.
Anyway, this seemed as good a place as any to post this. I do know that a lot of other folks here also struggle with DM2. Speaking for myself, completely eliminating the prepared, processed stuff has done wonders for my glucose levels. YMMV.
-Rich
Basically, I did one thing: I eliminated processed foods. Even things like frozen, prepared chicken. I know how to cook, so I just started making everything myself "from scratch," as it were.
Not that I ate a tremendous amount of processed food, anyway, so it wasn't that big a change lifestyle-wise. But now I've eliminated it altogether. Everything from canned vegetables, to store-bought eggplant parmigiana, to frozen breakfast sandwiches (I mean, seriously, I can toast bread and cook eggs myself), to low-carb "meal replacements" supposedly made specifically for diabetics. Gone. All gone. Even artificial sweeteners. Gone. If I simply must sweeten something, I use stevia. It's as close as possible to being natural and unprocessed.
The results have both surprised and impressed me.
After about three days, my self-administered morning blood glucose readings started to fall dramatically. This morning's was under 130 for the first time in quite a while. And about an hour ago, I was pleasantly surprised with a preprandial of 90 mL/d -- the first time I've had a preprandial under 120 in years. (I'd been averaging in the 130 - 150 range over the past few months.)
The thing is, I'd already been reading the nutritional information on every single package of food I bought and staying within the basic ADA diet recommendations. Furthemore, I'm not really eating all that differently now than I was before, other than preparing all my meals entirely from scratch, using fresh ingredients. But the results have been both surprising and encouraging.
I've come to believe that the measured or calculated numbers on food labels don't tell the whole story, even if they're accurate. I think the more removed from nature food gets, and the more it is processed, the more it surprises the bodies' metabolism. The body's expecting the stuff that's been removed to still be there, because it's always been there throughout the course of human evolution; and when it's not there, it tosses a monkey wrench into the works.
In other words, the numbers of grams of carbs, fats, proteins, and so forth on a food package may indeed be accurate. But those components may not be metabolized properly by the body once they're removed from the context in which the body expects to find them.
Or in yet more other words, I think we're concentrating too much on numbers, when we need to concentrate on ... I don't even know if there's a word for it. Naturalness, I guess, comes closest.
I call what I'm doing "Nonna's diet," meaning that I won't eat anything that my grandmother wouldn't eat, which basically boils down to not eating anything that I didn't prepare myself from ingredients that are as close as possible to how they were when they were still alive and walking, flying, swimming, or waving in the wind.
Nonna lived well into her 80's and wasn't sick a single day that I know of until three days before she died. She was still teasing the little ones, chasing them around with a wooden spoon as if she was going to spank them, when she was in her 70's and 80's. She also couldn't spell "cholesterol" in either language, and she outlived quite a few of her doctors. But everything she ate, she prepared herself, from the freshest ingredients she could find.
Anyway, this seemed as good a place as any to post this. I do know that a lot of other folks here also struggle with DM2. Speaking for myself, completely eliminating the prepared, processed stuff has done wonders for my glucose levels. YMMV.
-Rich
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