Diabetes

[kevin37b]

Eric , what are the clues you might be diabetic ? I am 60 and just wondering . Thank you .

 

[MinnesotaEric]

Eric , what are the clues you might be diabetic ? I am 60 and just wondering . Thank you .

I kept asking to have my blood tested but nobody told me I was prediabetic with a fasting blood sugar of 126, they told me that I wasn't diabetic.

Long story short, I have only ate one meal a day since I was a child, but I started run flat out of energy in 2009. I would become increasingly sleepy after my one, big meal. Also, after meals, I started feeling "funny," as in I knew something was wrong. I was always trying to diet, and tried all kinds of diets, hired fitness trainers, accepted and listened to dietitian advice and none of that worked well. I continued to become fatter and sicker. I noticed that my feet would "tingle" while driving in my truck after I had a snack. Through sheer force of will, I had taken 20 pounds off over the year before I was diagnosed as a type 2 diabetic, but increasingly I felt "funny" after meals even as I lost weight. Eventually somebody gave me an A1C test, which is what I should have had in the first place.

I'm told that due to education, our medical industry often diagnoses diabetes and pre diabetes years after the patient noticed the onset. The good news is that if a person ate their way into diabetes, they can eat their way out of diabetes. Once diagnosed I quickly found found out about the low carb, high fat diet and combined that with my one-meal-per-day-lifestyle, which for people reversing diabetes is a technique called intermediate fasting.

Here is the thing: in order to lose weight, you must calorie restrict. You can lose weight eating candy bars if you restrict calories enough but you'll be ravioniously hungry all the time and the candy-bar diet will fail because of the constant battle against hunger. For this reason any diet will work so long as you calories restrict but all diets will also fail if you're constantly hungry while attempting to continue the diet.

Hunger is caused by the increase and then sudden decrease of dietary fuel the liver uses to create the sugar in your blood to run our bodies.

The idea behind intermediate fasting is that okay, fine, insulin may spike after eating because you body's cells have become insulin resistant and therefore require more and more insulin in order to bring down your blood sugar. The trouble is that increased insulin causes the body to store fat and increasing stored fat causes increased cellular resistance to insulin. This creates a feedback loop where a person nearly starving themselves still continues to pack on fat. So the idea behind intermediate fasting is that if the body wants to store fat and not use that same stored fat to create the energy (blood sugars) it needs to run, the longer you deny the body the easy carb and protein energy, the longer your liver, and the better your liver gets at using stored fat to create the blood sugars your body needs to run and the healthier you will feel.

The idea is anything we eat, our bodes then take our dietary food and break it down into sugars that our bodies use as fuel. Food wise we think of macros. Macros are carbs (sugars and starches), proteins, and fats. A body eating a mix of all three will want to burn dietary sugars (carbs) before anything else. But dietary sugars are super short term energy and cause a big spike in blood sugar, and then an hour later, a huge crash in blood sugar that you sense as a sudden hunger craving, or as a near constant, uncontrollable hunger craving. Switching over from using dietary sugars to dietary proteins takes the liver several days to do but with proteins, blood sugar doesn't spike as high as eating carbs (sugars and starches) and it takes longer to process dietary protein and hunger to come back when the body runs out of dietary protein to break down into sugar and use as fuel. But forcing your body to burn fat as a dietary energy barely moves the blood sugar count and it takes the body forever to burn fat--meaning, that once a liver is adjusted to burning fat you simply don't get as hungry. You can easily go longer without eating anything because a fat-adjusted liver stops using dietary fat to create the sugars to run your body and starts grabbing stored fat and using stored fat to create the blood sugars you need to run your body.

The idea is if high blood sugar is the result of insulin resistance from your cells that require more and more insulin to function, but high insulin causes your body to store more and more fat and stored fat causes insulin resistance, we need to lower insulin. We need to break the feedback loop, and lowered insulin will cause everything else to fall into place.

Check out this diagram: here is what happens when you fast between meals.

After a few days of getting our livers used to burning fat rather than the easiest dietary sugars, and harder-to-digest proteins, when we fast, our livers readily switch from using dietary fat to create the sugars our bodies need to run, and start using stored fat to create the sugars our bodies need to run without causing a huge hunger spike. We become the hibernating bear, the whale that swims for 6 months without eating and so on.

Somewhere I read about an English study who took what must have been an orca-fat 27-year-old man who went in a clinical trial over 300 days without eating. Fasting works and eating a high fat diet kick-start the body to burn fat and in so doing, make our cells less insulin resistant which is what type 2 diabetes is. Type 2 diabetes is insulin resistance. Fix the resistance, and type 2 diabetes goes away.

Here is a A1C conversion chart. I was diagnosed at 9.0 and inside of 12 months was at 5.3 eating a LCHF diet.

Apologies for my rambling, but if it helps just one person, then all the better.

 

[daugen]

I think that was the most amazing answer I've seen online.

Others have said similar things in other ways and it's all starting to sink in.
Of course, I ate this way for 60 years, and I don't have 60 years to eat my way out of it.
but the exciting part is unless one has a bum liver or some serious problem including genetic predisposition,
there really is a way for many if not most of us to eat our way out of this problem.

the Truvia/Trevia(sp?) sugar blend isn't as good as the Spenda sugar blend but trying to get used to it. Straight Truvia I find awful...
I'm sitting here drinking my afternoon coffee with half as much sweetener in it and trying to like it. It's ok...
Perhaps a little pain and lots of gain.

 

[Gale Hawkins]

Eric that is a work of art. Thanks.

 

[MinnesotaEric]

I thought I'd add a video I found that helps summarize an aspect of what I shared in this thread.

 

[dickfoster]

Eric , what are the clues you might be diabetic ? I am 60 and just wondering . Thank you .

You start getting thirsty and drinking a lot of fluids, much more than normal, then you need to pee a lot because of all the extra fluid intake. Your body is trying to rid itself of excess sugar that way. At least that's what happened when I got it and the docs said that was the normal symptom.

 

[MinnesotaEric]

You start getting thirsty and drinking a lot of fluids, much more than normal, then you need to pee a lot because of all the extra fluid intake. Your body is trying to rid itself of excess sugar that way. At least that's what happened when I got it and the docs said that was the normal symptom.

Dovetailing onto what dickfoster shared, obesity, hypertension, metabolic syndrome and pre diabetes are all precursors to type 2 diabetes.

 

[dickfoster]

Dovetailing onto what dickfoster shared, obesity, hypertension, metabolic syndrome and pre diabetes are all precursors to type 2 diabetes.

Along with age. LOL
BTW For the obese, if you have gastric reduction surgery, it is said to outright cure type II about 75% of the time. It just goes away. They don't know yet why it does, it just does.

 

[joefromga]

Because it eliminates visceral fat.

 

[dickfoster]

Because it eliminates visceral fat.

You'd think a gastric surgeon would know that if it if that were the case. They, the medical types, said they didn't know why and it's really hard to for them to say they don't know anything. LOL If you're on meds for type II and get the surgery they take you off all the meds right away.