Simple Ways to Control Glucose Without Drugs. Part 1: Your Beverage, Please.

        Glucose control is tough. You can measure your carbs perfectly, resist random freshly baked cookies, take just the right amount of insulin and still end up with a mysteriously high blood sugar. If this happens regularly you should check to see if your overlooking a big contributor to daily intake: your frosty beverage.

"I had EGGS for breakfast. WHY IS MY GLUCOSE 1200mg/dl?"

        We all have our staple drinks, but some of them may be fooling you with "Sugar-Free" labeling. The U.S. government doesn't mind if people slap that label on their product as long as it doesn't contain Table Sugar. There are plenty of other sugars in the world that will raise your glucose just as well as the table variety, if not faster.

         Next time you pick up a drink, read the label. Become one of those hypochondriacs that reads every label. If your beverage says sugar free, but has an ingredient that ends in -ose or -ol, it's probably raising your blood sugar. Below is a list of common substitute sugars.

         Carob, honey, saccharose, corn syrup, lactose, sorbitol, dextrin, levulose, sorghum, dextrose, maltose, treacle, dulcitol, mannitol, turbinado, fructose, mannose, xylitol, glucose, molasses and xylose.

         Yes, Lactose as in milk and Fructose as in Orange Juice. No, it wont kill you to give these up. Eskimo, or Alaskan Natives, had never experienced either until the wonders of modern transportation introduced them and other western habits to their society. Now they have one of the highest occurrences of diabetes in any race.

        Ditching these, as well as sugar, from your beverages can go a long way in helping you manage your glucose naturally. I know naturally gets overused. I mean naturally in the sense of not having to rely on insulin or pills to keep your sugar in check. Which is the end goal for type-2's.

         I know what your thinking. This doesn't leave much for me to drink here guy.  Well, I'm here to tell you that yes in fact, it does. It may not be things your used to, but give these a try..

• Water- Yes, water. I hate to "beat a dead horse" about the 8 glasses a day and blah blah, but we rarely do drink enough. Have an ice cold glass when you wake up, it jump starts your metabolism. If you are diabetic, your more likely to be overweight. Did you know that overweight people get dehydrated faster than skinny people do? Verily. You see, fat cells hold no water and those are the main difference between overweight and skinny people. So you have less water to lose and a bigger surface area to lose it through sweat. Drink your water people. 

WATER! GALLONS UPON GALLONS OF IT!

"I'll have a Strawberry-Lemonade Cocktail, in a dirty glass"

• Stevia- Powdered or liquid. If you need something sweet, Stevia is there for you. You can do tons with it. This Link has quite a few recipes for it. I might not order a "Strawberry-Lemonade Cocktail" at my friendly neighborhood drinking establishment, but I would definitely make that in the comfort of my own home. The more traditional and considerably less alcoholic "Fresh Squeezed Lemonade" also looks pretty great.

• Coffee- Turning morning zombies into productive members of society since like, forever. Try to flavor with cream rather than milk, remember lactose. Sweeten with cinnamon or the above mentioned stevia.

• Tea- Antioxidants be Praised! aside from helping control your glucose, tea is amazing for you. Some are trying to pull the cure for cancer from it. Hot or cold works, just replace the sweeteners in any recipe with stevia or saccharin. There's a good looking recipe here.

• Diet Soda- Some people still believe aspartame gives you cancer, kidney stones or a third nipple. I'm relatively sure they debunked those myths some time ago. Besides who are we kidding, everyone has some kind of diet soda they need occasionally.

            Experiment with different sweeteners. Find something that works well for you. Most importantly test it against your glucose reading and make sure it's legitimately a "Sugar-Free" product. If you've never made the jump to sugarless and your waiting for something, here it is. Don't worry, in a few weeks your palate will change and when you breakdown one night and have "real" soda it will taste like liquid sugar.

A terrible, sugary kick in the teeth

           The goal of this blog is to help people live a life free from the restrictions, complications and ineffective control caused by long term insulin administration. Although kicking your favorite drink to the curb for the next 6 to 12 months sounds hard, it's worth it to help avoid terrible complications like blindness and heart disease sometime down the road. So give it a try. Whether your Type 1 or 2, you'll end up using less insulin, less often. If it doesn't work, come back and publicly tell the world I'm a big fat liar in the comments box. I'm cool with that.

 

Easy Explanation of Diabetes

       Medical Terminology is hard to understand. They have entire courses on it in college that people fail regularly. If you've just been diagnosed with diabetes, or know someone who has, the last thing you want to do is sort through a lot of greek just so you can walk away with a mediocre understanding of this complicated disease. This is a simple breakdown of diabetes and some answers to questions that everyone usually has.

      To know what's going wrong with something, you have to know how it works normally first.  When you eat food your body breaks it down into sugar, which floats around in your blood. However, your blood doesn't need the sugar as much as your cells do. Including cells in your heart, brain, liver and everything else in your body. They use it to do their job, and without it they starve and die. Just like you would without food.

       Somehow the sugar has to get from the blood into cells where it can be used, it can't do this by itself. The how happens to be insulin. Think of insulin as a friendly tour guide who is hanging out in your blood and directing sugar into cells. Insulin takes sugar directly by the hand and leads him right into cells. He will do this if you just ate and have tons of sugar running around, or if your starving and have hardly any. This is good to know when medicating yourself. Inject insulin when you haven't eaten and you run the risk of bottoming your glucose, which could end with you in the hospital.

        Sometimes due to obesity or other factors cells become resistant to insulin. They wont let insulin through the door with its glucose. This requires more insulin in order to get glucose into the cell. This is the beginning of what doctors call metabolic syndrome.

         Insulin is made in the pancreas by Beta Cells. It's their only job and their quite good at it unless one of two things happen. The first is pictured above, cells become resistant to insulin requiring the beta cells to work overtime to make more. They get worked so much that eventually they give up and quit. With no insulin the amount of sugar in the blood skyrockets, if left alone over time it can damage everything including kidneys, eyes, heart and brain.

       Usually between 80-100, glucose will eventually reach 400-600. The person becomes hot but dry, thirsty, really confused and will eventually become unconscious. This is known as a hyperglycemic attack and can lead to coma and death.

        A person will undergo one of these episodes and then wake in a hospital ER with a new diagnosis of Type-2 Diabetes. The difference in Type-1 is this. Instead of the beta cells becoming tired due to insulin resistance, the body confuses them for a foreign invader and actually destroys them. This is sometimes due to a virus but we're not entirely sure why. Either way the person is left with a body that cannot make its own insulin.

        If your not prescribed medication already at this point, then you will be. Your body has to get its insulin somehow. It usually involves you injecting yourself regularly or a pump monitoring your sugar for you. This route doesn't have to be taken though. Following a specific diet which cuts out most of your carbs has brought thousands of type-2 diabetics back into a drug free lifestyle. Carbohydrates like starches and sugars affect your glucose the most,  something you'll find out shortly if you've just been diagnosed.

         The American Diabetes Association recently recognized low-carb as a treatment for this disease. It can be hard to make the choice to not live like every other American with Frosting Crusted Sugar Sprinkles for breakfast and something-in-a-bucket for dinner, but you have to. Patients who use insulin long term consistently suffer terrible complications down the road. People complain about not being about to eat "normally". We have never eaten like this in our history, it's burning out our pancreas.


          Make the decision and stick with it, you'll look back 60 days later and wonder how you lived the other way.

Watch Your Step - Diabetic Neuropathy

              Half of all amputations in this country happen to diabetics. This happens in part due to something called peripheral neuropathy, which is basically a loss of touch and temperature sensation in your arms and legs. This usually happens after 15+ years of living with the big D. Long term exposure to high blood glucose eats away at your nerves, so maintaining tight control can lower your risk.

                Due to a depressed immune system and fatty deposits in the veins and arteries, diabetics also have decreased wound healing. Now if you add in the loss of sensation, what you can have is someone walking around for days with a huge cut on the bottom of their foot that they don't even remember getting. Not only that, but it's had days for infection to build up which is going to be harder to treat with an immune system that doesn't want to play ball. This infection can become so bad it reaches the bone, amputation is likely after that. 

              Unless you've got somewhere special to be, always wear white socks. It will be plainly obvious you've hurt your feet in those. The biggest prevention is following a diet which keeps your glucose within normal limits without having to worry about insulin. That means living a life with limited carbohydrate. Either way, you need to ask yourself a couple of questions to see if it's time to schedule an appointment with a podiatrist, or foot doctor.

Do you have foot or leg pain which keeps you up at night?

Problems with urination?

Tingling in fingers or toes?

Numbness in any extremity?

Burning, especially in the evening?

Erectile Dysfunction for men or Vaginal dryness for women?

Slowed Healing, or cuts and bruises that hang about forever?

      If you answered yes to most of those it's time to schedule an appointment. In the meantime examine your legs and feet daily, easiest way is in the shower, apply lotion to dry or cracked feet and wear proper fitting shoes at all times to prevent foot injury. It's important you take care of your feet, last I checked we've yet to figure out a way to grow those back.

Good foot care: One of Lt. Dan's only two rules

If you would like to dive a little deeper into this topic, this is a great WebMD article describing it a bit more. Nothing beats a good old fashioned doctor if your having problems though.

Why Eating Fast Spikes your Glucose too High, and what to do about it

The average American meal clocks in at 11 minutes.

            Mexico takes the entire afternoon off for lunch. France and Italy take almost 3 hours to eat dinner in the evening. Here in America, we can finish an entire meal before Lynyrd Skynyrd plays the entirety of Freebird. Couple that with an overall increase in the American meal size and it's really no wonder we bring home the gold medal in obesity. Imagine if your boss popped into your cubicle tomorrow and instead of saying hello, dropped 3 hours of work on your desk and demanded its completion by the mid-morning meeting, which starts in ten minutes. Now rinse and repeat this horrible idea 3 times a day for the rest of your employment. You would probably try to find a new job, and it would probably be sooner than later. Fortunately for us, our stomach, pancreas, liver and other digestive organs can't put in their two weeks and hitchhike to Mexico. 

Without Passports, they have to settle for Kentucky

       Unfortunately, It’s really wearing them out, especially the pancreas. Many claim this is a contributing factor to our nation’s diabetes epidemic.


                   Would you rather sip your milkshake slowly through a straw, or get in a chugging contest with your older cousin that only ends in a brainfreeze and the terrible sting of defeat? If your older than six and can read this, it's probably the straw route. When you eat a meal faster than normal, it flushes your blood stream with more glucose faster than normal. This signals your pancreas to dump as much insulin as it takes to get your sugar back in normal levels. Insulin as we know pushes glucose into our body's cells to be used as energy and because the body only need's so much at one time, the rest gets stored as fat. When you examine the diet of the french, italian and brazilian you'll find it compares with ours very closely. Lot's of saturated fats, complex carbohydrates and sugars. However, the average figure in these countries is slimmer. Why? Because they eat a little bit less and a whole lot slower. 

Tomorrow, tell your boss you want a 3 hour lunch break. I’m kidding. “This is America, we weren’t first to the moon by taking 3 hour hippie lunch breaks.” That’s what mine would say anyway. Heck, some jobs don’t even get “official” lunch breaks, and if they did it wouldn’t allow for lounging toga-clad on a divan for 90 minutes while someone slowly fed them grapes.

                                             

The Greeks loved ‘em, I honestly just don’t see the attraction..

                          That’s not what I’m talking about. You don’t take all your meals at work, and even the craziest jobs allow for a little downtime occasionally. Below are a list of tips that you can use to significantly slow down the spike of insulin your body receives after a typical American meal. Start following these on a regular basis and you may find your pants a little lighter at the end of the holiday season. If you are diabetic, you could notice a glucose reading quite a bit lower than you normally expect. It’s crazy, but you may even find yourself actually enjoying your meals when you make the time to. Here’s the list.

·       Pick a meal with different textures and borders on a plate as opposed to “5 things mashed up in a bowl”. Look at any kid with a bowl of Sugar Bombs during Saturday morning cartoons. It’s easy to speed eat from a bowl.

·       Set time aside for the meal. Set a clock if you have to. 30 minutes for each meal unless your boss is going to throw you on the street or the house is burning down.

·       Use smaller silverware, and smaller plates. We tend to shovel it in, I’m just as guilty as any. Therefore, make the shovel smaller.

·       Set the fork down between every single bite. If someone is eating with you this is a fantastic time to strike up a conversation.

·       Get a large beverage (preferably Water) and take sips between each bite.

·       Consciously take smaller bites. Make and effort to never overstuff.

·       Tabasco pepper sauce. It slows you down and can be used on a lot of things, but only if you don’t get regular heartburn. It also helps if you like spicy food.

·       Sit at a table, this keeps you from multi-tasking and allows you to eat with others.

·       Try to eat before your starving. Nobody likes pacing themselves when their stomach is gnawing on their spine.

·       This last one is ancient, and we’ve all heard it, but it works. Count out a specific number of “Chews”. Say 10 at first, then bump your way up to 20.