Advice please!!

[Kellie1981]

Good Evening everyone!

So i have just been diagnosed with type 2 diabetes with a reading of 62 obviously ive got alot to learn and get my head around but my main question is around meds! Do i have to take them? i have asked my doctor if i can have the 3 months until my next blood test to try to control it with diet and excercise and have been told no i must take metformin. I was diagnoised on saturday i straight away started following a diabetes reversal diet and have done a workout and a walk everyday and have lost half a stone in less than a week. i really just want the chance to see if i can make the changes to do something about my weight finally and if it doesnt work i will take the meds. So any advice am i just being a idiot by not wanting to take them and to try to control with diet and exercise or does taking them not effect my chances of reversal or a lower level at least? Any help would be so gratefully received. Thank you x

 

[trophywench]

Well the important thing with any diet for any diabetic is, what is eating this doing to my blood glucose? Hence you need the wherewithal to test yours at home before and after each meal and at other times, since it's most unlikely that your GP will supply you with a meter or the strips (them being the expensive part as far as the NHS is concerned) tp self test. Otherwise you won't know for a full 3 months whether this diet (of which I have no knowledge so no idea what you are eating and what you aren't) is any good for reducing and managing BG.

Half a stone in only a week sounds a bit too much to me unless you were very overweight to begin with - early good weight loss is normally loss of bodily water anyway, so don't go at it too quick and make yourself ill in other ways!

 

[Kellie1981]

Thank you for your reply.
I have just ordered myself a blood testing kit so i can monitor what is happening.
On saturday i weighed 17 stone 2lbs so very over weight especially as im 5 feet 2!
I have cut back on all sugars and due to having high colestrol to ive been eating very low fat food to so bascially veg chicken and salad with a small amount of fruit. i have this funny thing with food where the texture of certain things make me be sick so my choices are limited! i was hoping if i made the changes and thay could see i was serious about doing it (my gp told me u haven't lost the weight before so why will you now) they would not make me take the meds or atleast give me the 3 months to see if i could bring it down?

 

[Ljc]

Hello @Kellie1981 welcome to the forum. You have come to the right place to learn, so ask all the questions you need to about Diabetes and we will do the best to help based on our own experiences. An Hb1ac of 62 is less than ideal but not the worst. Bearing in mind I am not medically qualified I think you should be given the chance to try for a couple of months to see if you can gain control by diet and exersize alone , some people on here have with good results but for others no matter how hard they try medication is a must.

I do have a couple of questions that will help us.
What diabetes reversal diet are you following.
What is you concern about taking Metformin.
What is your Cholesterol level , we’re you given just a single figure or several.

Sadly once you have passed the pre diabetes stage , you have, then atm it is not possible to reverse diabetes, what is possible though is that you can lower your Hb1ac into to non diabetes range
< (lower than ) 42 or into the pre diabetic range 42 to 48 but if you go back to what you were eating before your BG (blood glucose) will rise too high again, so it’s really better control rather than a reversal.

One of the best things you can do is find out how the various carbohydrates affect you as we’re all different in this. So if your gp practice does what most do, you’ll be told no you don’t need to self test a variety of reasons will be given some of them daft.
If you decide to self test you’ll need a good glucose meter and testing strips. Often the ones you get on th3 high street may have cheap meters but the test strips are dear £15 + for a pot of 50, when your testing directly before eating then two hours after starting to eat and when you wake up in the morning, cost is important.
Their are two meters you can buy online that have test strips around £8 for 50. I only know the name of one others here will know the other one.
The SD Codefree meter is available from Amazon.

Edited to say I’ve just read you have ordered a glucose meter..
I agree with Jenny that is a lot of weight to lose in a week though often initially this is due to fluid loss. I hope you are not cutting back too drastically as you will only be setting yourself out to fail, as we often say on here this is a marathon not a sprint.

 

[Ljc]

ive just remembered, Metformin was originally developed to help with weight loss, then it was discovered that it helped with T2 diabetes. So helping you to lose Weight may be one of the reasons why your gp said you had to take them.

 

[trophywench]

Cutting sugar won't help that much on its own although it is the first obvious thing to cut down on - it is ALL carbohydrates we can't process properly, not just sugar. Hence we need to be careful with carbs - potatoes, rice, anything with flour in it, root vegetables, legumes etc - even lettuce has some carb but you'd have to eat half a ton of it before you'd even notice them.

A low fat diet or a high fat one, won't affect your blood cholesterol test results one little bit and never has. However, lowering the amount of carbohydrate we eat, does! You are very overweight so nobody would suggest you ate a lot of it, but we all need to eat some fat - a lot of the food products processed to reduce the fat, they have to add salt or sugar to, to make it taste of anything - hence can be high carb - the very thing you need to cut down on.

Remember, the changes you make are going to be for the rest of your life so you need to do this with some careful thought - and blood testing plus all the other tests our GPs have to arrange for us at least annually - so your GP is a person you really want to be 'with' you, not 'against' you.

FWIW, I can tell you - and I've tested it many times over the last 46 years! - when I was young all sorts of people would casually tell me that God helped those who helped themselves, well I still don't know whether that's true or not - but the NHS has certainly been more helpful when I've tried to help myself!

 

[Drummer]

Remember that fats are an essential part of your diet but carbs are not.
I have had normal results for over a year after reducing my carbs down to what I know was the level for controlling my weight for decades - I am a long time low carber, but have always had doctors who were against it. Eating low carb reduced my cholesterol levels - even though I have been eating and drinking cream on my berries and in my coffee.
I was told to take Metformin and a statin, but that made me dreadfully ill, so I stopped. The diet seems to solve things.

 

[JMyrtle]

I have reduced my glucose readings by cutting out most but not all carbs and increasing my "good" fats.
By testing I know I can tolerate brown bread and new potatoes but not white bread, any sort of rice and pasta although I can eat fruit.
The more you test the more you learn what you personally can eat and what you cannot.

 

[Martin Canty]

TBH, the decision to take drugs is yours, obviously if you can't control D by D&E alone then chemical intervention would be needed, that's not an admission of defeat but a statement about your condition.

At my last review, the Practice Nurse was not happy that I'd stopped metformin (particularly as I'd slipped back up into Pre-D range, but she accepted the fact that I was not going to take it again, the Lisinopril was another issue, my Blood Pressure was too high & I accepted that I needed help in this area

 

[CathyB]

I chose the low carb option, cutting out all rice, pasta, potatoes and the only bread I eat is Burgen, I also borrow a neighbours dog and walk at least half hour of an evening whenever I can, in four months my bg dropped from 22 to around 5.5 average and my weight dropped by two stone with very little effort! Keeping a food diary was key for me, I was able to see patterns with food and my bg readings, that enabled me to adapt the meal for next time. Remember that this is a life plan, not a quick fix, whatever you choose to do is how you will eat for the rest of your life so you must learn how your body will react. I’m so pleased with the advice and support I got here, I’m loving my meals and enjoying cooking again

 

[Lyn68]

What I think you need to understand is that you will always be diabetic but what you can be is a very well controlled diabetic. Don’t go around thinking that you are going to make this go away. I don’t know what your currently eating but can you see yourself maintaining it for the rest of your life as that is what you need to do. There is a lot of great advice on this site so take the time to work your way through it you will learn a lot. It’s just finding what works for you. It’s a bit of a shock when you first get diagnosed and I know I panicked about food my first food shop after diagnosis took forever. Could you possibly have another word with your doctor or nurse and explain why you would like to try with just diet and exercise if you can put forward a rational argument they may let you.