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woogalie

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Relationship to Diabetes
Type 2
I was diagnosed with type 2 diabetes last week and I must confess to feeling a bit 'lost'. Is a level of 77 in the blood bad? I have been put on Metformin and told to follow a low carb, low sugar diet. I have chosen to go cold turkey and am trying my best to cut out carbs at the moment. Do you actually have to cut out all flour when diabetic?
Also, would I be prone to hypos on Metformin?
Any advice would be really appreciated . Thanks in advance x
 
77 is fairly high.

Metformin doesn't cause hypos, generally. How much are you on?

Flour can be as over 70% carbs. Best kept low. I occasionally use a bit of corn flour in cooking.
 
Welcome to the forum.
The threshold for diagnosis is 48mmol/mol and above so at 77 is is quite high but not as high as some people on diagnosis but certainly something to take seriously. The advice for low carb dietary regime is a good one but that does not mean NO carbs, reducing the amount of carbs slowly over a few weeks is better than going 'cold turkey' as that can give people issues with their eyes and nerves.
Keeping a food diary of what everything you eat and drink with an estimate of the amount of total carbs you can see where some savings can be made so you can cut down, it is suggested that reducing by one third for a couple of weeks, then another third etc until you get to where you need to be is kinder on your system. Low carb is suggested as being no more than 130g per day.
People are different in how they tolerate different carbs so some are OK with bread but not rice or pasta or visaversa.
Hypos should not occur if just on metformin but what you may experience is false hypos if you have cut your carb intake too quickly.
This link may help you with some meal suggestions and some do's and don'ts https://lowcarbfreshwell.co.uk/, it is a low carb approach based on real food which many have found successful in reducing blood glucose and losing weight.
 
Thank you both very much for replying. I am on 1000mg of Metformin per day.
I am so confused! I bought a cookery book for diabetes and most of the recipes have flour and bananas etc. In them. All of which I've been told not to eat! How do you know how many carbohydrates are in food? Is it on the nutrients bit on packaging that says 'of which sugars'? I have been told not to eat anything that is over 5.
 
woogalie said:
Thank you both very much for replying. I am on 1000mg of Metformin per day.
I am so confused! I bought a cookery book for diabetes and most of the recipes have flour and bananas etc. In them. All of which I've been told not to eat! How do you know how many carbohydrates are in food? Is it on the nutrients bit on packaging that says 'of which sugars'? I have been told not to eat anything that is over 5.
Click to expand...
Hi and welcome! There is lots to learn, but don’t get overwhelmed, just take things slowly and one step at a time. Your healthcare team will help you as well as loads of useful information on this site and in these forums.

With regards to carbs, I use food labels quite a lot, but you must use the “Total Carbs” figure and not the “of which sugars”. Basically all carbs get converted by the body into glucose. Where there is no food labelling you will gradually get used to estimating carbs, for example a smallish potato would be around 10g, one slice of bread is about 6g, etc. There are plenty of websites that will give you carb content of various foods to help.
 
woogalie said:
Thank you both very much for replying. I am on 1000mg of Metformin per day.
I am so confused! I bought a cookery book for diabetes and most of the recipes have flour and bananas etc. In them. All of which I've been told not to eat! How do you know how many carbohydrates are in food? Is it on the nutrients bit on packaging that says 'of which sugars'? I have been told not to eat anything that is over 5.
Click to expand...

I eat fruit and my hba1c was 83. I've got a salad today with Apple in it, and last night had something with orange. I used to make fritters from bananas and peanut butter. As a T2 you are still producing insulin, just maybe not enough to handle a lot of carbs (Plus insulin resistance meaning it may be working properly.). The best thing to do is have a meal, and test your sugar a few hours later to see how you reacted.

For example, last night I was 5.1 before tea, and 2 hours later (Salmon, Fennel, orange, onion plus a kvarg yoghurt) I was 5.7. Given the error that exists with these meters, these readings may as well be considered as virtually equal.

I still eat carbs, but get them from fruit and vegetables (And I occasionally have potato, just a small amount.)
 
At diagnosis i was 75. Following all the helpful advice on this forum I keepmy carbs between 100-130 a day. Sometimes a bit of cheating does go on. But I took i slowly and to date stable numbers.Good luck and ask away.
 
Eternal422 said:
one slice of bread is about 6g, etc.
Click to expand...
I am guessing that is a typo and it should say 16g carbs unless it is a special low carb bread. Your average medium wholemeal slice is around 15g carbs, so a 2 slice sandwich is about 30g carbs.

@woogalie

Welcome from me too. It is perfectly normal to be overwhelmed at the beginning. There is a lot to learn but gradually you will get the hang of it. As has been mentioned, reducing your carb intake slowly and steadily is important to reduce the stress on your body which has likely been running with high BG levels for a while. Sudden changes can put the fine capillary blood vessels in your eyes and feet at risk, so slow and steady with changes is the best way to go, particularly when your HbA1c is quite high. I started out just cutting out sugar and sugar products for the first couple of weeks which was a big change for me (sugar addict here 🙄) but was still eating bread and potatoes and stuff and dried fruit.... Then I cut the fruit down to just a handful of berries daily, then I gradually whittled down my starchy carbs like bread and pasta and potatoes and finally my morning porridge :(. Porridge is like rocket fuel for me despite supposedly being slow release. I made mistakes during that time and bought things I thought would be Ok or good, that turned out not to be, but gradually I developed a new routine with my meals and a new basics shopping list and tried new things and now I love my low carb diet and I intend to eat like this for the rest of my life. I have low carb treats like olives with feta and cheese is my new chocolate.... particularly nice cheeses including blue which I used to hate... and I have real double cream in my morning coffee each day because cream is lower carb than milk and just makes it taste yummy. Like cheese, it also provides my body with fat which it needs for energy when I am not giving it carbs for fuel. Our bodies are kind of dual fuel systems. The preferred fuel is carbs as they are easy to break down and provide fast release energy. Fats are slow to digest and therefore slow to release energy and that is an advantage for us diabetics as it doesn't spike our BG levels and because it is slow to digest it keeps us feeling full for longer, so we don't feel the need to snack between meals. And because I have these treats, I don't feel like I am on a restrictive "diet", so it becomes sustainable for life. Interestingly since reducing my carbs and eating more fat, my cholesterol levels have reduced rather than increased as you might expect, Eating more fibre is an impoertant part of the equation though and particularlywhen you remove or drastically reduce grain products from your diet, your body misses the roughage and you need to pay attention to other sources of fibre. I have a fibre drink on a morning with psyllium husk and chia seeds and I eat lots of seeds and veggies to increase my fibre intake.

Anyway, don't panic. 77 is high but not massive (I was 112 and there have been plenty of people who were higher than that). Take it slow and steady. Diabetes is a marathon not a sprint, so don't burn yourself out in the first couple of months and don't worry about making mistakes, as long as you are generally heading in the right direction you are doing great. Every small change will be having a positive effect. A low carb way of eating is a very powerful tool to manage Type 2 diabetes. More powerful than most if not all oral medication, so take it slow and steady and I am sure you will have success.
 
I would highly recommend the book or app Carbs and Cals as it gives the carb value for various portion sizes of foods and meals, which will help you make better choices in that you can decide whether it suits you better to have 1 small potato or a decent portion of carrots or peas for the same amount of carbs.
Looking on the internet for FOOD X and total carbs will tell you generally how many grams of carb per 100g, you would then need to do a bit of arithmetic to work out for the portion you are going to have.
Recipe books are aimed at people who manage their diabetes in different ways as some will be taking insulin and don't necessarily have to restrict the carbs they have, as they adjust their insulin accordingly.
Don't dismiss the recipes but just be aware what the portion size would be and how many carbs so you can bulk up with low carb veg or salad if it seems too much for what you want to have and have half of it.
Have a look at the meals in the link I posted as that is a low carb regime not a NO carb way.
Bananas are one of the highest carb fruits so many do avoid them or maybe only have half and go for berries instead.
 
This is what I did.. It worked for me and it sounds like you have a similar mindset to mine so it might be helpful to you but obviously everyone is different. My initial diagnosis was at 68 in January 2019.


1. Get rid of any wheat flour in the cupboards and instead buy ground almonds/almond flour and coconut flour and blond psyllium husk (powder or otherwise). Using one part coconut flour and two to three parts almond flour and a quarter part psyllium you can then swap that into recipes instead of wheat flour for most purposes. If you make bread look on Youtube for Diedre's (that is how she spells it) Bread and Keto King Bread and you will find an easy recipe for a yeast baked bread you can make in a bread machine or conventionally - it has a few ingredients you may not have heard of before like xanthan gum - but if you like bread and also like not having the effects of diabetes you will soon become very familiar with it and psyllium husk. I held back for a while because i was timid but it changes things so you can have sandwiches and pies etc and eat 'normally' while staying healthy and I wish I'd got onto those things from the start.

2. Swap out rice and pasta for alternatives. You can have zero carb alternatives (I like them because there are carbs in other foodstuffs that are nutritionally dense and delicious like vegetables and onions and berries and I prefer not to waste my daily carb allowance on rice and pasta etc and spend them instead on lovely things. I like konjac pasta and rice (zero carbs but check the brand as some have added stuff that make them carby) but it is probably true that you will not love them if you go straight onto them while still having the original versions new in your memory. After six months of doing without I found it very easy to make the swap to them.

3. look on the thread on here for the A to Z of vegetables - lots of incredibly helpful information. I am a huge fan of celeriac. It looks like nothing on earth but it swaps for potato in every way with a tiny fraction of the carbs. Mixed with cauliflower and mashed with butter - it is in my opinion nicer than mashed spuds and I would not swap back even if my diabetes miraculously cleared up overnight.

4, Find Sugar Free Londoner and Megan Ellam - mad creations on Facebook and Heavenly Fan on Youtube. They are genius people who have tons of recipes and how to videos on various styles of cooking and after looking at their resources you will be inspired and have all the information you need to create menus that suit you and fit with whatever regime you end up going with and are definitely suitable for staving off sugar spikes. You are about to be introduced to a whole new world of wonderful flavours and it is (I promise) going to be fun x
 
Hi @woogalie and welcome to the forum.

It is difficult to get to grips with carbs. One way of looking at it is that you want to eat less carbs than you are eating now and so one way in is to see what your current intake is. One way into this is to find a quiet corner with a couple of sheets of paper and a pencil and write down what you ate for your meals in the last week. Include snacks and drinks and whatever, each item on a separate line.

Then alongside each item put the carb content. How do you do this? Here is an example for my current breakfast...

Granola (home made) 30g in portion 50%carbs -15g carbs
3 spoons of plain yoghourt 30g in portion 4% carbs - 1.2g carbs
milk splash 5% carbs - less than 1g carbs
Slice of toast small slice low carb bread - 9g carbs
marmalade scrape of home made - much less than 1g carbs
cup of tea with milk. - forget about it!

Total carbs for breakfast about 25g.

I got the weights from weighing portions sometime ago - you only need to do it once. The carb contents I got from packets and the carb content of the granola I got by looking up the carb content for the main ingredient (oats) and used that.

Two points. First, if like me you eat roughly the same breakfast each day, then you only need to do the calculation once. Second, my breakfast before diagnosis (commercial muesli, commercial marmalade on white bread) would have been about twice that level of carbs.

Do the same for all the meals on your list and a couple of things will happen. It will be a bit of a pain to start with. Bit of weighing, bit of packet checking and a bit of googling. Don't try and be precise, you can't, near enough will do. If you have to then guess. After a bit you will find that just like my breakfast you will be repeating things and can write the numbers down almost without thinking only looking up odd things when something new turns up.

When you have finished, you will have a decent idea of the amount of carbs you are eating. Expect that to be around 200g a day, assuming you eat a pretty normal diet. If you get 2000g/day or 2g/day then check your sums...you made an error somewhere!

Much more important is that if you look at the results of your hard work, you will be able to see where the high carb items are and if you want to reduce carb intake you can see obvious things to tackle. Coming back to my breakfast, swapping my commercial muesli and standard bread for a home made granola and a low carb bread halved the carb intake from what for all intents and purposes was the same breakfast. Same thing happened with all my other meals... bit of swapping and a bit of portion control meant I could just about halve my carb intake without making radical changes in the style of my diet. One or two things had to go. One thing that disappeared was pizza - only thing I could do there was start making my own low carb bases and despite being a keen cook, that was a step too far.

Take your time and work it out is my thought. Finish up with something that suits you.
 
Eternal422 said:
Hi and welcome! There is lots to learn, but don’t get overwhelmed, just take things slowly and one step at a time. Your healthcare team will help you as well as loads of useful information on this site and in these forums.

With regards to carbs, I use food labels quite a lot, but you must use the “Total Carbs” figure and not the “of which sugars”. Basically all carbs get converted by the body into glucose. Where there is no food labelling you will gradually get used to estimating carbs, for example a smallish potato would be around 10g, one slice of bread is about 6g, etc. There are plenty of websites that will give you carb content of various foods to help.
Click to expand...
Sorry, as @rebrascora pointed out, should have been 16g for the bread, but will of course depend on type of bread. I would tend to use 2U of bolus per slice and at 1U:8g that should be about right.
 
rebrascora said:
I am guessing that is a typo and it should say 16g carbs unless it is a special low carb bread. Your average medium wholemeal slice is around 15g carbs, so a 2 slice sandwich is about 30g carbs.

@woogalie

Welcome from me too. It is perfectly normal to be overwhelmed at the beginning. There is a lot to learn but gradually you will get the hang of it. As has been mentioned, reducing your carb intake slowly and steadily is important to reduce the stress on your body which has likely been running with high BG levels for a while. Sudden changes can put the fine capillary blood vessels in your eyes and feet at risk, so slow and steady with changes is the best way to go, particularly when your HbA1c is quite high. I started out just cutting out sugar and sugar products for the first couple of weeks which was a big change for me (sugar addict here 🙄) but was still eating bread and potatoes and stuff and dried fruit.... Then I cut the fruit down to just a handful of berries daily, then I gradually whittled down my starchy carbs like bread and pasta and potatoes and finally my morning porridge :(. Porridge is like rocket fuel for me despite supposedly being slow release. I made mistakes during that time and bought things I thought would be Ok or good, that turned out not to be, but gradually I developed a new routine with my meals and a new basics shopping list and tried new things and now I love my low carb diet and I intend to eat like this for the rest of my life. I have low carb treats like olives with feta and cheese is my new chocolate.... particularly nice cheeses including blue which I used to hate... and I have real double cream in my morning coffee each day because cream is lower carb than milk and just makes it taste yummy. Like cheese, it also provides my body with fat which it needs for energy when I am not giving it carbs for fuel. Our bodies are kind of dual fuel systems. The preferred fuel is carbs as they are easy to break down and provide fast release energy. Fats are slow to digest and therefore slow to release energy and that is an advantage for us diabetics as it doesn't spike our BG levels and because it is slow to digest it keeps us feeling full for longer, so we don't feel the need to snack between meals. And because I have these treats, I don't feel like I am on a restrictive "diet", so it becomes sustainable for life. Interestingly since reducing my carbs and eating more fat, my cholesterol levels have reduced rather than increased as you might expect, Eating more fibre is an impoertant part of the equation though and particularlywhen you remove or drastically reduce grain products from your diet, your body misses the roughage and you need to pay attention to other sources of fibre. I have a fibre drink on a morning with psyllium husk and chia seeds and I eat lots of seeds and veggies to increase my fibre intake.

Anyway, don't panic. 77 is high but not massive (I was 112 and there have been plenty of people who were higher than that). Take it slow and steady. Diabetes is a marathon not a sprint, so don't burn yourself out in the first couple of months and don't worry about making mistakes, as long as you are generally heading in the right direction you are doing great. Every small change will be having a positive effect. A low carb way of eating is a very powerful tool to manage Type 2 diabetes. More powerful than most if not all oral medication, so take it slow and steady and I am sure you will have success.
Click to expand...
That's a very in depth response! Thank you so much Barbara x
rebrascora said:
I am guessing that is a typo and it should say 16g carbs unless it is a special low carb bread. Your average medium wholemeal slice is around 15g carbs, so a 2 slice sandwich is about 30g carbs.

@woogalie

Welcome from me too. It is perfectly normal to be overwhelmed at the beginning. There is a lot to learn but gradually you will get the hang of it. As has been mentioned, reducing your carb intake slowly and steadily is important to reduce the stress on your body which has likely been running with high BG levels for a while. Sudden changes can put the fine capillary blood vessels in your eyes and feet at risk, so slow and steady with changes is the best way to go, particularly when your HbA1c is quite high. I started out just cutting out sugar and sugar products for the first couple of weeks which was a big change for me (sugar addict here 🙄) but was still eating bread and potatoes and stuff and dried fruit.... Then I cut the fruit down to just a handful of berries daily, then I gradually whittled down my starchy carbs like bread and pasta and potatoes and finally my morning porridge :(. Porridge is like rocket fuel for me despite supposedly being slow release. I made mistakes during that time and bought things I thought would be Ok or good, that turned out not to be, but gradually I developed a new routine with my meals and a new basics shopping list and tried new things and now I love my low carb diet and I intend to eat like this for the rest of my life. I have low carb treats like olives with feta and cheese is my new chocolate.... particularly nice cheeses including blue which I used to hate... and I have real double cream in my morning coffee each day because cream is lower carb than milk and just makes it taste yummy. Like cheese, it also provides my body with fat which it needs for energy when I am not giving it carbs for fuel. Our bodies are kind of dual fuel systems. The preferred fuel is carbs as they are easy to break down and provide fast release energy. Fats are slow to digest and therefore slow to release energy and that is an advantage for us diabetics as it doesn't spike our BG levels and because it is slow to digest it keeps us feeling full for longer, so we don't feel the need to snack between meals. And because I have these treats, I don't feel like I am on a restrictive "diet", so it becomes sustainable for life. Interestingly since reducing my carbs and eating more fat, my cholesterol levels have reduced rather than increased as you might expect, Eating more fibre is an impoertant part of the equation though and particularlywhen you remove or drastically reduce grain products from your diet, your body misses the roughage and you need to pay attention to other sources of fibre. I have a fibre drink on a morning with psyllium husk and chia seeds and I eat lots of seeds and veggies to increase my fibre intake.

Anyway, don't panic. 77 is high but not massive (I was 112 and there have been plenty of people who were higher than that). Take it slow and steady. Diabetes is a marathon not a sprint, so don't burn yourself out in the first couple of months and don't worry about making mistakes, as long as you are generally heading in the right direction you are doing great. Every small change will be having a positive effect. A low carb way of eating is a very powerful tool to manage Type 2 diabetes. More powerful than most if not all oral medication, so take it slow and steady and I am sure you will have success.
Click to expand...
Thank you x
 
NotWorriedAtAll said:
This is what I did.. It worked for me and it sounds like you have a similar mindset to mine so it might be helpful to you but obviously everyone is different. My initial diagnosis was at 68 in January 2019.


1. Get rid of any wheat flour in the cupboards and instead buy ground almonds/almond flour and coconut flour and blond psyllium husk (powder or otherwise). Using one part coconut flour and two to three parts almond flour and a quarter part psyllium you can then swap that into recipes instead of wheat flour for most purposes. If you make bread look on Youtube for Diedre's (that is how she spells it) Bread and Keto King Bread and you will find an easy recipe for a yeast baked bread you can make in a bread machine or conventionally - it has a few ingredients you may not have heard of before like xanthan gum - but if you like bread and also like not having the effects of diabetes you will soon become very familiar with it and psyllium husk. I held back for a while because i was timid but it changes things so you can have sandwiches and pies etc and eat 'normally' while staying healthy and I wish I'd got onto those things from the start.

2. Swap out rice and pasta for alternatives. You can have zero carb alternatives (I like them because there are carbs in other foodstuffs that are nutritionally dense and delicious like vegetables and onions and berries and I prefer not to waste my daily carb allowance on rice and pasta etc and spend them instead on lovely things. I like konjac pasta and rice (zero carbs but check the brand as some have added stuff that make them carby) but it is probably true that you will not love them if you go straight onto them while still having the original versions new in your memory. After six months of doing without I found it very easy to make the swap to them.

3. look on the thread on here for the A to Z of vegetables - lots of incredibly helpful information. I am a huge fan of celeriac. It looks like nothing on earth but it swaps for potato in every way with a tiny fraction of the carbs. Mixed with cauliflower and mashed with butter - it is in my opinion nicer than mashed spuds and I would not swap back even if my diabetes miraculously cleared up overnight.

4, Find Sugar Free Londoner and Megan Ellam - mad creations on Facebook and Heavenly Fan on Youtube. They are genius people who have tons of recipes and how to videos on various styles of cooking and after looking at their resources you will be inspired and have all the information you need to create menus that suit you and fit with whatever regime you end up going with and are definitely suitable for staving off sugar spikes. You are about to be introduced to a whole new world of wonderful flavours and it is (I promise) going to be fun x
Click to expand...
Thank you so much for all this information. I really appreciate it x
 
Docb said:
Hi @woogalie and welcome to the forum.

It is difficult to get to grips with carbs. One way of looking at it is that you want to eat less carbs than you are eating now and so one way in is to see what your current intake is. One way into this is to find a quiet corner with a couple of sheets of paper and a pencil and write down what you ate for your meals in the last week. Include snacks and drinks and whatever, each item on a separate line.

Then alongside each item put the carb content. How do you do this? Here is an example for my current breakfast...

Granola (home made) 30g in portion 50%carbs -15g carbs
3 spoons of plain yoghourt 30g in portion 4% carbs - 1.2g carbs
milk splash 5% carbs - less than 1g carbs
Slice of toast small slice low carb bread - 9g carbs
marmalade scrape of home made - much less than 1g carbs
cup of tea with milk. - forget about it!

Total carbs for breakfast about 25g.

I got the weights from weighing portions sometime ago - you only need to do it once. The carb contents I got from packets and the carb content of the granola I got by looking up the carb content for the main ingredient (oats) and used that.

Two points. First, if like me you eat roughly the same breakfast each day, then you only need to do the calculation once. Second, my breakfast before diagnosis (commercial muesli, commercial marmalade on white bread) would have been about twice that level of carbs.

Do the same for all the meals on your list and a couple of things will happen. It will be a bit of a pain to start with. Bit of weighing, bit of packet checking and a bit of googling. Don't try and be precise, you can't, near enough will do. If you have to then guess. After a bit you will find that just like my breakfast you will be repeating things and can write the numbers down almost without thinking only looking up odd things when something new turns up.

When you have finished, you will have a decent idea of the amount of carbs you are eating. Expect that to be around 200g a day, assuming you eat a pretty normal diet. If you get 2000g/day or 2g/day then check your sums...you made an error somewhere!

Much more important is that if you look at the results of your hard work, you will be able to see where the high carb items are and if you want to reduce carb intake you can see obvious things to tackle. Coming back to my breakfast, swapping my commercial muesli and standard bread for a home made granola and a low carb bread halved the carb intake from what for all intents and purposes was the same breakfast. Same thing happened with all my other meals... bit of swapping and a bit of portion control meant I could just about halve my carb intake without making radical changes in the style of my diet. One or two things had to go. One thing that disappeared was pizza - only thing I could do there was start making my own low carb bases and despite being a keen cook, that was a step too far.

Take your time and work it out is my thought. Finish up with something that suits you.
Click to expand...
Thank you so much for all this information. I really appreciate it x
 
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