Diabetics

Hi! I was just diagnosed as prediabetic. I am doing research to try and figure out what I should be eating. I checked my blood sugar lever this morning after fasting and it was 140. I really want to get this under control. I changed my eating habits 2 weeks ago. I am also walking every day. I'm new to this and could use a friend. You can add me if you like.

What to say? I'm relatively new at this weight loss thing and a diabetic, too. I'm not a friendly guy (consider my avatar) but I do try to help out others in the same boat - if for no other reason than I don't want them rocking it and tipping it over.

Here's what has worked for me so far:

My nutritionist has been more important than my endocrinologist at getting my eating under control. The endocrinologists job is to tweak the settings on the carburetor, the nutritionists job is to manage what's going into the fuel tank. My biggest problem was that I kept pouring more sugar into the tank than the carburetor could handle.

Lots of little meals. Three small meals and three smaller snacks, on a schedule, every day, hungry or not. I found that eating regularly helped keep me from becoming hungry and made everything go a lot easier.

Log everything that goes in your mouth. Everything. It really helped to see what I was eating as well as how much I was eating. It's easy to cheat on my log but my butt always rats me out.

Initially, I was focused strictly on calories and didn't worry about proteins/carbs/fats. After months of fiddling with my intake, I found that I can't eat "balanced" and need to have more protein and fat in my diet than the professionals recommend or I get too hungry. Bread, sugar and starchy vegetables were hard to kick but, with time and a little determination, they are largely gone from my diet. That has made a huge difference in my hunger, too. I still miss potatoes - now I use them as a "once a month if I'm doing well" treat to motivate myself. All things in moderation, including moderation.

I HATE exercise but physical activity is important so I make time to play every day. Find something - anything - that's a little bit physical that you can do every day.

Find a Doc that you can trust and respect. My first endocrinologist was an arrogant, insufferable, @#$%$ who treated me like just another peg to move from one hole to the next, was disrespectful of my time and about as friendly as a piece of cold poo. I hated him so much I actually stopped going to see him. At my primary Docs insistence I went back and told him why I didn't like him and had stopped coming to see him. Apparently that doesn't happen to Docs very often because he actually sat down, listened for awhile and then we had a long talk - and it was a good one. He made some changes in how he treats me as a person and I've realized that some of my dislike of him was really misdirected anger at my situation. It turns out that once we both started seeing each other as people instead of faceless cogs, we're much better at working together and have been getting along famously ever since.

Once I straightened my endocrinologist out, we started fiddling with some of my meds. I found that some of my meds were actually making me hungry - some of the new ones not only don't make you hungry they actually help make you less hungry. Some of the drugs make your blood sugars more unstable, some help smooth things out. Many of the drugs promote water retention, etc. Test like a maniac, log like your life depends on it and you'll begin to better understand what different foods and drugs do to you. It has been enlightening - and kind of fun to see how much of a difference some of this stuff actually makes.

Stay positive. Instead of looking at progress as a series of ups and downs, I try to look at it as little meanders to the left and right. I have a target and a path and I know I'm going to take as many left steps as right. It really doesn't matter if I take a step off course, so long as I know it and take a step back in the right direction. When I have a bad day (and we all do) I don't punish myself but just dust myself off, have a good laugh and get back on the trail. My last A1c was down to 6.1 and the pounds are still falling away, so I have a lot to be thankful for.