Disappointed newbie

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Bellago

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Hi, I’ve just joined as I’m so disappointed by my hbA1C result that I got today. 3months ago I found out it was a bit high 44/45, so immediately cut out all bread, pasta, potatoes, rice, sweets and upped my exercise to walking 5+ miles a day and doing long continuous swims 3-4 times /week. I only drink water or tea. Home baking was a big hobby, but is now a thing of the past. I’ve lost enough weight to be in the healthy range now.
Today I found out my test result , after 3months of this regime , is only down to 43 and I am so deflated.
I know that I much fitter on this diet etc , so I’ll stick with it, but I wonder if maybe my blood sugar has been high for a long time without me knowing and maybe I’m just too old ( 65) to get it to budge much. I’d really be glad of any encouragement. I did phone the helpline and they were very helpful, but it is good to hear of others’ experience,
 
Bellago said:
Hi, I’ve just joined as I’m so disappointed by my hbA1C result that I got today. 3months ago I found out it was a bit high 44/45, so immediately cut out all bread, pasta, potatoes, rice, sweets and upped my exercise to walking 5+ miles a day and doing long continuous swims 3-4 times /week. I only drink water or tea. Home baking was a big hobby, but is now a thing of the past. I’ve lost enough weight to be in the healthy range now.
Today I found out my test result , after 3months of this regime , is only down to 43 and I am so deflated.
I know that I much fitter on this diet etc , so I’ll stick with it, but I wonder if maybe my blood sugar has been high for a long time without me knowing and maybe I’m just too old ( 65) to get it to budge much. I’d really be glad of any encouragement. I did phone the helpline and they were very helpful, but it is good to hear of others’ experience,
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Well done on all those positive changes. Sometimes I think we are too hard on ourselves. Tests may have a plus or minus error due to dehydration for example or infection so keep going with what you’re doing and hopefully continue the downward trend.
I’ve got about ten more years on you and I managed to get mine down from 67 to 41 but I needed medication to help do that.
Do you have test strips and a meter or have you thought of trying a CGM. Libre is available on free trial to diabetics. I contacted Dexcom too and asked to trial one before purchasing and they were very helpful.
I found that an eye opener. Staples like porridge and lentils spiked me. I’m now on around 50/60 carbs a day but miss my bread, potatoes, rice etc.
I’m sure others will be along shortly with praise for your achievement and more suggestions for how you go forward from here. There’s a lot of valuable info and insight on the forum.
 
No, don’t have any home testing, but will look at that. To be honest I just expected my test to go into the normal range. My sister had a pre diabetes diagnosis a few years ago and with a less drastic diet change she’s been back in the normal range. Also the nurse I saw said that it was relatively easy to lower blood sugar, so I was full of hope until today.
 
I suggest you do a limited time listing of ALL the stuff you eat & drink. That way you get a full picture of what you input concerning carbs and glucose. I luckily had a spare set of postal scales so I could weigh each ingredient as I added it before eating it. Surprising how much sugar was in milk even though half-fat (fat = irrelevant for this). So I only have a small amount and not a good slosh. Ditto for porage - more sugars than expected due to the milk needed to make the porage cook etc etc. There are many websites that list ingredient %ages but one I found the most useful was the Waitrose one since we order all the time from W. I managed to get my listed sugars down below 30gm a day and carbs below 100gm a day, but my case is as a type 3c.

Re : a Glucose monitor. One of the real benefits of this is to be able to explore the cause/effect of having different amounts and items for meals. e.g. I managed to get the breakfast spike below 10 by not eating fruit/yog with the cereal but later (as well as limiting the milk quantity etc). Now I'm 100% within range for several weeks now.
 
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Thanks . Will try that. My diet is pretty strict. I don’t have porridge any more .I only eat lunch and dinner, nothing in between except one mug of tea with a little milk in evening and the morning. Lunch is usually cheese or egg with some veg and fruit ( berries, pear, apple ) or olives. I read that you need to treat fruit as a dessert, so should maybe avoid that except at dinner. Also I’ve been eating carrots , which I should maybe avoid - I read that above ground veg is better. Dinner is usually meat or fish with veg and then yogurt. We also have soup a lot either for lunch or dinner. Might need to limit carrots and peas in that as they seem to be high in carbs. I no longer put potatoes in soup for that reason.
 
Bellago said:
Also I’ve been eating carrots , which I should maybe avoid - I read that above ground veg is better. Dinner is usually meat or fish with veg and then yogurt. We also have soup a lot either for lunch or dinner. Might need to limit carrots and peas in that as they seem to be high in carbs. I no longer put potatoes in soup for that reason.
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FYI Carrots are usually rated at 7% sugar. Quite high for a non-fruit !
 
Well done for tackling your diagnosis by making the changes you have so it must be disappointing to not get a bigger reduction. Sometimes it is easy to underestimate the carbs in some foods and for portion sizes to be bigger than you think.
Also some people have to try different things as not everybody tolerates carbs the same so testing can be very revealing in both what you should avoid but also what foods you can actually tolerate which you may have rejected.
Have a look at this link for some ideas which may give you more variety https://lowcarbfreshwell.com/
 
Thanks for suggesting those links . I’ve had a look at the red,amber, green lists. I can honestly say , apart from maybe a few pieces of sweet potato, I’ve not had anything in the red group for over 3 months now. In the amber group, I do eat quite a few nuts each day, if I’m hungry and as I’ve said before carrots, peas, pears, apples.Ive also been eating more pulses and beans- maybe that’s not ideal either.
 
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Bellago said:
Thanks for suggesting those links . I’ve had a look at the red,amber, green lists. I can honestly say , apart from maybe a few pieces of sweet potato, I’ve not had anything in the red group for over 4 months now. In the amber group, I do eat quite a few nuts each day, if I’m hungry and as I’ve said before carrots, peas, pears, apples.Ive also been eating more pulses and beans- maybe that’s not ideal either.
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Pulses and beans seem to be foods which are variably tolerated but if they are added to something like chilli the amount in each portion can be small enough.
Testing would allow you to find out if they are OK for YOU
 
I would chalk up dropping down to 43 as a good start. I myself only dropped 2 points after 6 months and losing a lot of weight.

Have you taken a look at insulin resistance? You mention having lost weight, but one possibility is that insulin resistance may be a factor at the moment. People with a larger waist may have insulin resistance. As a rough guideline your waist should be approximately half your height, eg 160cm tall, 80 cm waist.

The primary thing as @Taighnamona points out is that the trend is downwards. Now you just have to keep it moving in that direction 🙂
 
Thanks @s’nic. That’s encouraging. I really felt this morning that I’d put in all the effort for nothing.
Yes my waist was big in comparison to rest of me, especially before I lost weight.
I’m 165 cm tall and I measured my waist tonight (lying down as suggested on the freshwell app) and it is 81cm, so that’s ok, but I’d like it to be a bit less .
I do feel better and fitter, so I just hope I can keep the blood sugar on a downward trend. I bought a glucose monitor this evening, so now I just need to learn what to do with it.
 
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Bellago said:
Thanks for suggesting those links . I’ve had a look at the red,amber, green lists. I can honestly say , apart from maybe a few pieces of sweet potato, I’ve not had anything in the red group for over 4 months now. In the amber group, I do eat quite a few nuts each day, if I’m hungry and as I’ve said before carrots, peas, pears, apples.Ive also been eating more pulses and beans- maybe that’s not ideal either.
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I can't get my HbA1c down into the 30s - but I now know that I was seeing high numbers at a test 10 years before diagnosis, which the GP dealt with my cancelling the test, which might have something to do with it.
I used a meter to test after eating and found that I get almost double the listed amount of carbs from peas and beans. I avoid potatoes, grain and anything over 10% carbs other than a very small amount of high cocoa chocolate.
When I lowered my carbs from a maximum of 50gm to 40gm I also hoped for lower numbers than the 42 I was getting - but a year later, it was still 42.
I did start off at 91 so I suppose I should not complain too loudly.
 
Bellago said:
Thanks @s’nic. That’s encouraging. I really felt this morning that I’d put in all the effort for nothing.
Yes my waist was big in comparison to rest of me, especially before I lost weight.
I’m 165 cm tall and I measured my waist tonight (lying down as suggested on the freshwell app) and it is 81cm, so that’s ok, but I’d like it to be a bit less .
I do feel better and fitter, so I just hope I can keep the blood sugar on a downward trend. I bought a glucose monitor this evening, so now I just need to learn what to do with it.
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There should be an instruction leaflet but there are also lots of YTube videos as well. Just remember the sample of blood is sucked into the end of the strip, it does not go on top of the strip. Get your finger pricking technique right and it will not hurt.
I accidentally pricked my finger with a pin today and it hurt far more and bled everywhere.
 
s'nic said:
Have you taken a look at insulin resistance? You mention having lost weight, but one possibility is that insulin resistance may be a factor at the moment. People with a larger waist may have insulin resistance. As a rough guideline your waist should be approximately half your height, eg 160cm tall, 80 cm waist.
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Although I had heard there was a relationship between insulin resistance and waist to height ratio, I had not investigated until I read your comment.
I confess my immediate thought was "surely it should be no more than half your height" - being slim I was concerned that my smaller ratio may indicate other issues.
I found this article/paper and two things stood out for me
- waist to height ratio is an indication of both insulin resistance and ability of β-pancreatic cells to secrete insulin.
- the optimal waist to height ratio "cut-off" for both is around two thirds. The paper mentions no disadvantages from having a smaller ratio.

Thinking about this selfishly, I have no concerns about insulin resistance although the ability of my β-pancreatic cells to secrete insulin was lost when my Type 1 diabetes autoimmunity decided it didn't like my β-pancreatic cell and killed them all regardless of my waist measurement.
And thinking about it less selfishly, the target waist to height ratio could be higher for some although aiming for half is unlikely to be an issue.

(I hope my curiosity does not derail this thread and I realise I stopped looking when I found one paper.
Thank you for piquing my curiosity enough to investigate before starting work. )
 
@helli, very interesting. I think both insulin resistance and ability of β-pancreatic cells to secrete insulin correlate with the accumulation of fat in the liver and pancreas, and the body, as described by Prof Roy Taylor in his book, 'Life without diabetes, T2'.

As I recall one of the findings in his team's Counterpoint study (c2008) was that β-pancreatic cell insulin secretion was down by about 50% just before the onset of T2 itself. In addition Roy Taylor had already demonstrated the insulin resistance of the liver before onset.

He said the $64 dollar question is, 'Can you still get into the jeans you wore in your twenties?' and added 'Show me a T2 diabetic and I will show you a fatty liver.'

Fatty liver is implicated as a precursor to CVD, Alzheimers, some cancers, etc. So changes to diet to get rid of it and then keep it at bay are a good idea. Equipment required, a tape measure or a pair of jeans.
 
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s'nic said:
As a rough guideline your waist should be approximately half your height, eg 160cm tall, 80 cm waist.
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Thanks for this information s'nic, something I didn't know and something to aim for - only another 3cms to go 🙂
 
JITR said:
'Can you still get into the jeans you wore in your twenties?
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Given the amount of wear I got out of my jeans in my twenties (I was rarely out of them), they did not survive to try.
If only they did: I am sure they will be back in fashion soon but whether I would still want to wear my beloved skin tight turquoise pair, is another matter.

Yes, I am that person who would still fit into them - I thank my parents for the jeans genes they gave me.
 
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