Type 2 Diabetes

General Discussion Forums Life, The Universe and (almost) Everything!
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I’ve joined the club, following blood tests while I was being treated for an infection in the last week. I thought I’d start a thread to share experiences etc.

My HbA1c is 88mmol/mol which makes in full blow diabetes. My blood sugar was, a week ago, 14mmol/l, which equates to the HbA1c number, so I’ve been diabetic for a while (HbA1c is a measure of glucose bound to haemaglobin, and is considered a more reliable indicator). I’m on Metformin, with the dosage gradually increasing over the next few weeks to a full 200mg per day. Also on a BP drug, on the strength of a sky high single measurement, which I have subsequently gotten nowhere near myself (nor had ever seen before, as I do regularly check my BP).

My immediate reaction was about how to go ino remission, but the GP seems to have no interest in that. Surprisingly, after a diagnosis, I’m pretty much on my own, as far as the NHS is concerned. No flyers, leaflets, just half a website name scribbled on an envelope and a promise of a blood test in 3-6 months time.

My general plan is to follow the recommendations developed by Prof Roy Taylor’s team at Newcastle:

ie. sharp reduction in carbohydrate.

Impossible to kick start that now. My wife is Thai, and is visiting me, feeding me delicious Thai food.

On the Thai food “diet”, my blood sugar has dropped from 14 to 6.9mmol/l. Time will tell how real that is. My plan is “shakes and soups” for 8-12 weeks, coupled with exercise (which I think will be the most difficult bit to get motivated , another HbAC1 test around january, which wil get me down to 40-50, and maybe a reduction in medication after than, then remission by April 2025. I don’t know if that’s realistic.

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Commiserations , I’ve just had a similar diagnosis, would very much like to get into remission without resorting to the pharmaceutical industry but seems to be very little info being shared with patients about how to go about this.

Dad has been diabetic for 40 years and his Dad was similarly diagnosed before him, I can’t bear the thought of being prescribed a bucket full of pills every month so that I can watch effin’ television for the last ten years of my life.

Can’t be rocket science to provide a 3 meal a day menu for seven days a week that could get at least some of us into remission.

I have collected a metformin pescription but have been wary of starting taking them given that I have spent two weeks recovering from a flu jab and nearly a week recovering from a COVID jab.

Any tips from anyone who has successfully reversed the type 2 process would be gratefully accepted, I am overweight, a regular swimmer and have started walking as part of my exercise routine, what next ?

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You/me have to lose 15kg in 8 weeks, irrespective of weight. The weight has to be lost quickly, so that you lose fat from around the liver and pancreas, to encourage restoration of physiological function

https://bjd-abcd.com/index.php/bjd/article/download/1055/1307/9553

The challenge is 800 kCal a day for 2 months isn’t really possible with real food, as you may develop deficiencies in the diet. So its 2 months of shakes

Exante though has just gone bust. And the key is low carbohydrate, not just low calorie.

I’m trying to understand the idea of resistant starch. Cooked potatoes, rice, bread, are bad because the starch is quickly converted to glucose in the small intestine by enzymes to sugar.

Quickly cooliing, or better, freezing these promotes the formation is resistant starch; a polymerized version. This renders the starch inaccessible to the enzymes, and so the starch ends up digested in the large intesting by bacterial fermentation to Acetyl Co-A, which completely cuts out glucose. (muscle cells oxidise the Acetyl Co-A). But not all the starch is converted. Warming the food does not affect this affect this conversion.

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Thanks, that ncl.ac.uk link is a useful starting point to get some sort of emergency weight loss menu together.

Going to be difficult to follow as Dad has a menu that includes potato, chocolate, fruit juice, buiscuits and who knows what other not recommended stuff as part of his controlled diet.

Long journey in self control starts here, looks like another shopping adventure is on the cards !

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Free food

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I’ve done 90 to 73 kg in four months following a strict Ketogenic diet. But the high meat diet caused a urea high that caused some damage to my feet and hands.
Best just cut down the amount you eat slowly so your stomach gets used to it. It’s easier than you think to cut out breakfast, I’ve only eaten my first meal at one pm for years. Gives your gut a rest for more than half the day.

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Sounds good, hope at nearly 66 I can still get on the prog :wink:

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I recommend this….

My Doc reckoned that 800 calories a day is too low, so I modified it to around 1200. Worked for me. :+1:t3:

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Diabetics need regular and effective, good quality, eye care.
Find yourself a good, independent optometrist ( ophthalmic optician) - most towns have at least one, and you can usually tell because they’re booked up!
An annual eye examination ( or more often if advised) is essential to find and possibly treat retinal complications associated with diabetes. Standard examination may be augmented by retinal photography and/or OCT…which is Optical coherence tomography- a non-invasive imaging test that uses light waves to take cross-section pictures of your retina ie seeing down through the layers of the retina, as opposed to just seeing the surface.
Hopefully you will find all is well, and it’s the regular screening which can be effective by flagging up any retinal changes which may develop.
Nowadays most diabetics do very well eye-wise, but it remains essential to do the “routine maintenance “, much in the way you treat your Mx5😉

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Slightly different as I’ve been Insulin Dependant for over 30 years, after the shock to my system from a cruciate knee operation.
As I was a cyclist and needed to keep a low weight, I stopped as much sugar intake as I could.
Difficult as 90% of things on shelves has sugar added to them, baked beans, HP sauce etc. Pasta and curry sauces are the same, along with a lot of pre prepared meals.
My diet changed dramatically, even to the fact that I started making my own Muesli, with Jordans Oats, raisins and sultanas . Yes the fruit does have natural sugar in it, but the oats will see you through a few hours without wanting to snack on the sweet stuff!
Ive never gone down the ‘shakes’ route as not fancied them.
Exercise and keeping your mind occupied always worked for me.

My aim is always to keep my blood sugars between 3.5 mmol/L and 8 mmol/L, which I do quite well.
I have maintained my dietary regime since day one and I doubt that I would be this healthy if I had not changed. (Apart from diabetes!)

Type 2 diabetes, can progress to Type 1 if not kept in check, as I have seen many times with other Type 2 people.
It is a balance, that only the patient can decide which way they want their life to go.
No matter what diet you like or are used to, a change of diet can change your life.
It did with me, as I have had no eye, heart or limb problems.
Yes, I do have regular check ups for them all.

You have to rule the diabetes, don’t let it rule you.

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I managed my type 2 diabetes with diet and exercise after a borderline diagnosis six years ago. I cut as much sugar as possible from my diet and took more exercise.

Last year I let things slip a bit, (discovered cake and chocolate again…) and slipped into a positive test. A new nurse at the diabetes clinic discounted getting back to the diet and exercise regime and put me on metformin, which is a very common medication for type 2.

To cut a long story short, I suffered a rare reaction to it called metformin associated lactic acidosis. This led to complete kidney failure and admission to the intensive care unit at Bournemouth General. Not to be melodramatic, but prognosis from metformin associated lactic acidosis is not good with fatality rates from 50-75% depending on which study you read. Not a good outlook for someone in their 70s.

I was fortunate, my daughter saw something was going very wrong and got me to hospital early. Because my kidneys had failed from severe dehydration from a week of vomiting, my potassium level was through the roof which could have stopped my heart at any time but the wonderful doctors and nurses there saved me. Dialysis and saline infusions brought my kidneys back to life and I lived to tell the tale. God bless the NHS.

It was bad advice from the new nurse at the clinic, who told me to persevere with the medication even with side-effects like diarrhoea and vomiting. What she didn’t tell me was that onset of metformin associated lactic acidosis puts you in a very confused state and all I could think of was to keep taking the medication even though it was obvious something was going badly wrong.

I’m now back to diet and exercise and, I’m pleased to say, back to full (well, for a 73 year old) fitness.

Just a cautionary tale. No more meds for me thank you.

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Hmm, I’m approaching this from the other side.

When young I had insufficient fat/carb storage, and blood sugar was often dangerously low despite supposedly normal insulin levels. I even slowed to a black-out halt for an hour during a Uni exam - fountain pen wicked out to a two inch patch on two sheets of the answer paper.
Plenty of beer helped mitigate the problem, but weight was still too low.
After several glucose tolerance tests (sore finger tips!) it turned out I was cycling too much for my carb intake!

That was six decades ago. Since then I’ve applied an OCD engineer’s analytic eye to what other people do about hyper/hypo thyroid and weight, including some friends who are coping with possible T2 and one who suddenly discovered he was T1 and needed to learn how to administer his insulin etc only two days before our ski trip.

One of those who had been warned about his impending T2 noticed Jimmy Carr change shape from tubby to slim over only a few months. Then I saw an interview where JC explained how he did it, while still eating the same amount of food every day!
It was all in the timing of his food intake while forced into the unhealthy lifestyle of gigging in the evenings.
His first big improvement step was to eat a healthy main meal at leisure in the middle of the day (instead of hurried greasy spoon at midnight after a gig).
Then nothing to eat, not even a sandwich or biscuit, after a light snack about 6-8pm before the gig.
Drink as much fluids as you want, but again no alcohol later on.
It still seems to work for him.

Science backs him up to some extent; simply because the way we metabolise the foods changes with time of day and our activity or rest.

I’ve tested it in an informal way; measuring how far old age spreads the belt notches.
Since lockdown if I succumb to the midnight munchies for a week or two I gain 2-3kg and the belt needs another notch. Cut them out and eat before 7pm and those surplus kg drop off in a few days and I’m back to correct weight.
Regular swimming used to help before first lockdown, and I could eat as much as I liked, but then the pools closed. Bad words were said.

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Very glad you lived to share the cautionary tale.

I’ve long had a suspicion about eating a big lunch being the healthy option with out any idea why.

Wondering if anyone has any experience with continuous glucose monitioring :thinking:

I am thinking about going this route, since I am not big on needles in general or pinpricks specifically, to see what happens if I cut the bad stuff out and eat smaller portions before indulging in metformin treatment.

Reviews seem contradictory, FDA seems to be against which suggests the tech if not quite there yet ?

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Thats not good considering my MX5 now is barely used.

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Right then, here goes…
I have throughout my life had an acute aversion to needles.
My consultant said to me "You either have injections or die…’
Putting it bluntly, he was correct.
I also went down the pinprick blood testing route for over 25 years, up to 10 times a day.
Very over the top you might say, but as I only have one life and wanted to keep all my limbs and organs, I thought stuff it, here we go…

As technology moved on I also did and changed to Freestyle Libre 2, which is a sensor that attaches to your upper arm for 14 days, before changing and updates your iPhone/Android every 5 minutes.
You can set alarms for high/low blood glucose levels and upload results to your PC if so desired.
An absolute game changer for me with all of my daily routines and work.
Well worth a look if you want continuous monitoring and on prescription.

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Yeah, but presumably you’ll still service it???
Best wishes going forward.

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You might want to check out Diabetes UK charity which provides advice on exercise and diet but also about personal case studies, research etc.

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Already have. The forums are full of people dependant on quack Youtubers.

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Once a year, and its a coin toss what the MOT finds these days. The analogy is poor, because the car is getting closer to the Knackers Yard in the Sky after nearly 20 years of ownership. Its a high miles NA, second engine, 4th hood, , sticking brakes, welded sills and weeing oil on the garage floor.

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The light bulb moment for me was a TV series a few years ago presented by the late Michael Mosley in which he took a group of overweight type2 diabetes sufferers on a diet and exercise regime. Over a period of a few months most of them were able to lose weight and improve their fitness to a point where many of them were able to come off medication altogether.

Fortuitously this coincided with my initial borderline diagnosis. I was a couple of stone overweight, pretty unfit and not eating a good diet. Following the guidelines of that series I was able to keep myself below the threshold for five years and apart from my little metformin episode last year (see above) I’ve been medication free.

Weight is the biggest issue; if you’re overweight you’re asking for trouble and a healthy, balanced diet is the answer. That and daily exercise are the key.

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