Day 3 almost done and really excited to be heading for a first all ‘green’ day in weeks. The excitement is twofold. It’s great to see that there are lifestyle levers I can still pull to control my blood glucose levels despite living with unmanaged T2DM for over 15 years. Also, it is great to see that the principles that I set out when starting on this journey are quite solid. Now just need to see where I take this over the next 25 days.
Almost two days down, only 26 and a bit to go! So far so good. Just. It is quite amazing how much mental effort it takes to battle your impulses and stay on plan. I’m more than ready to hit the sack even as I write this intro. So what have I been up to? Mostly throwing myself at work so that I don’t have to think about what my blood glucose levels are doing, but I have to say that it already is starting to look a little bit better than yesterday.
It’s now over a week since me having my wobble and my blood glucose levels have continued to slowly creep up and my weight loss has not only stalled but has gone in reverse. Reduction in my diabetes medication did come with a warning that something like this could happen. So it is not completely unexpected, but needs addressing. It looks like a more relaxed approach to eating is not working for me and I need to stick to my original principles a bit more rigidly. To keep myself accountable I’ll be tracking my interventions and detail the impact they are having on me on this blog. Welcome to Day 1 of my 28 day blood glucose boot camp. 🫣
As great as my progress has been over the last 12 weeks I’m having a bit of a wobble right now. It looks like relaxing my routine just a little bit (some extra carbs in a couple of meals, eating my last meal of the day closer to bed time a few times, missing out my alternate fasting day) has upset a very fine balance. My blood glucose levels feel like a runaway train - shooting up during daily dawn phenomena / foot on the floor occurrences, not returning to my normal baseline during the day and then the cycle repeats the next day but from a new slightly higher baseline. I am trying to keep calm, stay the course and recognise that my body might need time to adjust to the new normal of almost no diabetes medicine after years of maxing out on it, but it is mentally very hard.
Measuring different health metrics forms an important part of managing my health. It tells me what works and what doesn’t in terms of the different lifestyle changes I’m making. It allows me to correlate how I’m feeling subjectively with some more objective measurements. While for some, closely tracking their biometrics might be a total overkill, for me it acts as a great motivator. Nothing is more thrilling than maintaining a green streak! Here are some of my tools.
I’ve now seen several people online showcasing their healthy living mantras. These are simple rules of thumb that serve as a useful daily reminders for how you want to treat different aspects of your health. This made me think about my current journey and how I would summarise my approach on a card I could carry with me in my wallet. I’ve been building my mental list of these rules for a few weeks now, but if you don’t write them down, do they really exist? Now they do!
Hello and welcome to my blog. I’m a diabetic and a carb addict and this is where I’ll share my journey of managing my carb addiction as a root cause of poor diabetes control.