Undesirable Results

It's now a few days since I stopped the 600 calorie diet and reverted to my more normal low carbohydrate plan.

On the day I stopped, I decided to treat myself to a takeaway meal. I had quite a large Indian meal with lots of chilli-infused curry and vegetables. As I avoid the rice and bread, I had this with a salad. The results of my blood glucose tests weren't bad but were not marvellous either. One hour after eating my BG was 6.3mmol/l (133mg/dL). After two hours it was higher, at 6.8mmol/l (122mg/dL). The first reading I was happy with, the second I wasn't. However, I had never eaten that particular meal before so wasn't sure what to expect.

The other days I've had since increasing my calorie intake were pretty normal, except that my fasting blood glucose has been a little higher than normal, averaging around 5.8mmol/l (104mg/dL). That's about 0.3mmol/l (5mg/dL) higher than I'd expect. Not the end of the world but certainly not improved by the two week starvation diet.

More worryingly, today's readings have all been higher than I like. It may be that I've an infection that I'm unaware of that's skewing the results or it may be "just one of those days", but "those days" make me nervous. My fasting BG this morning was 5.9mmol/l (106mg/dL). One hour after lunch, which was a small green salad with no dressings, I had 6.3mmol/l (113mg/dL). My evening meal gave the worst results though. It was a salad with a few Indian tidbits, some nuts and some cheese. I tested after 1.75 hours and recorded 7.9mmol/l (142mg/dL). That's the highest reading I've had since near my diagnosis and I'm very unhappy with it. I had to beat it into submission with a 2km run (not so pleasant in the dark, cold and wind we have here this evening). It had to be done though and got my BG down to a more reasonable 4.7mmol/l (85mg/dL).

I'll keep an eye on this and let you know if it's a blip, an infection or a new pattern emerging.

Week Two

That's week two complete. It really wasn't difficult to survive on 600 calories per day for me. I lost some weight (quite a lot actually at around ten pounds) but that's partly the point of the experiment so I won't worry unduly about it. My average fasting blood glucose numbers fell by about 0.5mmol/l (9mg/dL) but stabilised at that point and didn't go any lower. My body fat percentage fell by about 2% (or 10% of the starting value).

I've now got to think about what I'm going to do from now on, since I return to work on Monday. I also want to increase the amount of strength training I'm doing and I've found that I've not been able to do this on the low calorie diet. In fact, in some exercises I've been unable to even continue with the same weight, sets and repetitions that I could do before the experiment. I've decided that for the next week or two at least, I'm going to return to my "normal" diet. This isn't normal in the English sense; I won't be eating meat, as I haven't done so for twenty-five years, and I won't be eating bread, rice and pasta. It will be the normal-for-me, low carbohydrate, high protein, high fat, high fibre, vegetarian diet.

I'll keep an eye on my blood glucose over the next couple of weeks and report back on any improvement or deterioration. This might help me understand whether the low calorie diet has made any difference. I could do a glucose tolerance test - drinking nearly a full bottle of Lucozade and monitoring the blood glucose over two hours - but this isn't something I want to put my body through.

Alzheimer's = Type 3 Diabetes?

From "The Guardian".

Even if you can detach yourself from the suffering caused by diseases arising from bad diets, you will carry the cost, as a growing proportion of the health budget will be used to address them. The cost – measured in both human suffering and money – could be far greater than we imagined. A large body of evidence now suggests that Alzheimer's is primarily a metabolic disease. Some scientists have gone so far as to rename it: they call it type 3 diabetes.

>> Read the original article

Day Eleven

After yesterday's low fasting blood glucose level, today's was a return to normal for the experiment at 5.1mmol/l (92mg/dL). There's not a lot more to report really. I've decided that I won't continue posting a message every day. I'll now post weekly or if something out of the ordinary happens. I'll continue updating the progress chart, though I suspect that I'm not going to see much change. It does appear that my FBG numbers are sticking around the 5.0mmol/l (90mg/dL) mark.