How Am I Doing?

It’s been a couple of weeks since I last did a blog post so I thought it would be nice to update you on how I am doing – bet you thought I had slipped off the wagon and hence was not updating my blog!

Well the news is really that there is no news! Yes I did slip off the wagon slightly… last Friday! I ate two Jaffa Cakes. According to my little carb counter they have 7.3 grams of carbohydrate each so added almost 15 grams of carbs to my diet that day (which would still leave me way under 60g).

Apart from that little slip up, I have eaten low carb high fat every single day since I started at the beginning of October, have easily been able to resist carbs in any form and in fact, out of pure curiosity, I checked one day how much carbohydrate I had eaten in that day and it stood at 13.9g in total.

What I don’t really know is, am I doing it right? What effect is it having on my blood glucose etc.? All I know is that I feel more satisfied on less bulk and am not then hungry again a half hour later.

Hopefully this is all doing my diabetes the world of good. Keep your fingers crossed for me.

Weight-wise, after the first week when I lost 7 lbs I didn’t lose any further weight until this week when I have lost a further 1 lb. However that’s a very happy 1 lb for me as it puts my weight under 17 stone for the first time in more years than I care to think about. 😀

Currently I am reading “Living Low Carb” by Jeremy Bowden PhD, CNS. It makes very interesting reading and if you can get hold of a cheap copy I thoroughly recommend reading it.

One thing that has been worrying me a little is the amount of fruit juice that the youngest generation are given as a “healthy” drink; and I am equally guilty of supplying it. It is so hard to overcome the diet mentality of the past 30 plus years in that even whilst becoming more and more convinced that LCHF is the way forward for me, I still can’t convince myself that it would be right for my grandchildren. For them I am still buying into the high carb, low-fat diet that I am increasingly aware is the worst thing we can do. How the mind does play tricks on us!

I have really surprised myself that I have carried this through as long as I have, almost a month now and no (apart from 2 Jaffa Cakes) sliding off the rails.

Oh, and I have lost a half-inch off my waist. A small amount so far but definitely in the right direction.

Keto Flu

This week I experienced Keto Flu. Most definitely flu-like symptoms, hot and cold, fatigue, inability to get out of bed – oh hang on, I suffer the last of those most work days! But seriously, I felt very, very unwell on Monday, slightly improved on Tuesday and almost normal today. Fortunately I spotted an article on Keto Flu on Tuesday so I knew it wouldn’t last too long. Did I feel like eating carbs? No, I didn’t really feel like eating much at all.

In Facebook I follow a page called KetoLiving and they have many interesting articles in favour, of course, of a low carb diet. Today they linked to an article on Carbs, Sugar Linked With Cognitive Impairment Risk In Elderly: Study which showed that a low carb high fat diet was linked with lower instances of mild cognitive impairment in subjects aged 70 to 89. If that’s not another good reason for changing my eating habits then I don’t know what is! I don’t know about you, but I am terrified by the thought of developing Alzheimers later in life.

No Scientific Support for Linking Dietary Saturated Fat to CHD

I thought this made interesting reading, especially the part that said

“In accordance, a meta-analysis of twenty-five cohort studies showed that the lowest total mortality, cardiovascular incidence and mortality, and incidence of diabetes were seen among those with the highest intake of dairy fat“

http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayAbstract?fromPage=online&aid=8479191

Two Days On

I wanted to say a little about what I eat.

Most days I have bacon and egg for breakfast. The first few days I was grilling the bacon out of habit and frying the egg in a little coconut oil. Now, I fry the bacon in a mixture of coconut oil and butter… yummy butter! Did I mention that I love butter? And then I fry the egg (sometimes eggs… but it depends on how well Betty and Millie are doing at producing them!) in whatever is left in the frying pan. Oh and I have to say.. I had forgotten how good fried bacon tastes!

My lunches could be anything from a chicken and olive salad at the pub, to a ham and cheese sandwich. “Ha!” I hear you say “Sandwich is bread and bread is carbs.” Well that is true unless you have substituted the bread with nice lettuce leaves! Today my lunch was some ham, cheese and full fat coleslaw and that kept me going all afternoon.

Dinner. Well tonight I had some left over roast chicken with lettuce, a little parsley, some sprouted mung beans and some full fat coleslaw (I was feeling a little lazy so it was leftovers). On other days I have had belly pork with broccoli and marrow or brussels sprouts, a nice loin chop or two with buttered veggies, or cold meat and cheese platter with some pâté and again full fat coleslaw – I am trying to break the coleslaw habit but it’s so much easier than cooking. Of course the coleslaw has to come in at under 5% carbs to be any good for me.

And for dessert… raspberries or blueberries absolutely smothered in 40+% fat double cream 🙂

To break up the monotony a little I have bought myself a book today called “George Stella’s Livin’ Low Carb”, so am hoping to have lots of different recipes to try. I am also planning to add some raw foods and smoothies for a little variation.

Weighed myself this morning – 6 days into the new regime and I have lost 7lbs. That’s an amazing half a stone in just 6 days. A lot of that will be water I am sure, as my liquid intake has fallen the last couple of days and the swelling in my ankles has greatly reduced! Of course, I won’t have any blood glucose tests to check my progress until December/January time but I think they can only back up the results I am already seeing.

All in all I am pretty amazed at the difference just 6 days can make.

Diabetes and Food

This week I started a new eating regime, lifestyle change and here is why…

Earlier this year I was diagnosed with type 2 diabetes, also known as age related diabetes. It was a bit of a shock, and even more so when I was put straight on medication – Metformin 2 x 500mg twice daily.

At first I tried to be very strict and follow the diabetes nurse’s advice and ate my carbs with every meal as I had been told. However, I really couldn’t get my head around why I was being told to eat carbs when sugar is a carb and sugar is a big no no! I tried asking people – the diabetes nurse, the dietician, the diabetes education day and no-one had an answer for me. For me that just wasn’t logical.

I joined a diabetes forum and suddenly started seeing that lots of people were controlling their diabetes by something called a LCHF diet, even to the extent that some who had been on medication, no longer needed to be. Well, I found out that LCHF meant Low Carb, High Fat and almost rejected it out of hand. The words ‘high fat’ are very scary! But the Low Carb part fitted in with my own thoughts on the subject. What to do?

Someone on the diabetes forum had recommended the book “Why we get fat and what to do about it” by Gary Taubes a nutritional journalist so I bought the book and read it cover to cover. It made a lot of sense and had plenty of scientific studies to back up what he was saying. I then did a bit more searching around on the internet and found that the LCHF diet is also called the Swedish Diet and I found a doctor in Sweden who is trying to spread the word about this way of eating. His name is Andreas Eenfeldt, MD.  And he has a website at www.dietdoctor.com and can also be found on Facebook 

I also discovered a talk he gave a couple of years ago at the Ancestral Health Symposium that I feel should be recommended.

Anyway, I will write more about this later but suffice to say that I started eating the LCHF way on 3rd October 2012 and I want this to be my blog of how I get on.

To date, as at 8am on Sunday 7th October 2012 (four days in) I have lost 5lbs, a lovely side effect but this is mainly about the diabetes and if some of the weight goes too I wont complain!