My symptoms hit suddenly. I had been out for a meal with my sister and some friends and as I was leaving the pub I felt thirsty. I decided to get a glass of water when I got home but by then the first glass didn't even take the edge off the thirst. I downed a second glass and was still thirsty. I assumed the steak and ale pie I ate must have been salty even though it didn't seem so. All night I drank water due to a raging thirst and consequently needed the loo. By the next morning when it continued I realised something was amiss and started cutting back on my sugar intake suspecting diabetes but being naïve as most people are, I was still eating plenty of starchy carbs. I let it go for 2 weeks getting up 4-6 times a night to wee and drink water before I eventually went and got a blood test. My eyesight for reading was very variable and my distance was also a bit odd and I would get sparkles or flashes occasionally. Other than that I didn't feel that bad. Heart would pound pretty badly sometimes but I get anxiety attacks so didn't necessarily think to link it to what I had eaten. I was also washed out a lot of the time.
Even after diagnosis of diabetes I was initially assumed type 2 but after 6 weeks of gradually stricter and stricter diet steadily reducing carbs eventually down to under 50g a day and eating low fat, low salt and no alcohol until I felt like I was eating cardboard and the weight dropping off at a rate of 4lbs a week (also a symptom of the Type 1 diabetes although the diet accelerated it) and oral Type 2 meds, my HbA1c had gone up and I was started on insulin.
With a reading of 48 I would imagine you will need very little, if any insulin, as your body must still be producing some and the less carbs you eat, the less strain is put on your struggling pancreas, so it might manage to trickle out a reduced amount of insulin for some time to come without needing extraneous insulin.
Most health care professionals are not aware that low carb eating is sustainable and they are horrified by the prospect of people eating more fat.... after all, they have been advising us to eat low fat for all of their careers and they know that diabetes puts you at increased risk of heart disease so from their perspective, eating less fat is even more important for diabetics...... because they have accepted the 50+ year old (now strongly believed to be flawed) research which indicated that dietary fat causes cardiovascular disease and the constant government advice to eat low fat as a result of that. There are some interesting presentations online by eminent medical professionals who have now reviewed the data on that initial research and many subsequent studies, many of which were cherry picked or biased to corroborate the low fat policy and believe the low fat advice may partly be the reason why we are now having such a diabetes epidemic.... because food tastes naff without fat, so the food industry adds sugar to improve the taste in it's absence. This is oversimplifying the situation but it is quite fascinating when you start to look into it.
Anyway, as a result of comments on this forum mostly by
@Drummer about increasing fat intake and doing that research myself to clarify things in my own mind, I was convinced and I am very happy with my low carb higher fat eating regime now and I don't feel deprived because I have plenty of lovely treats like cheese and olives available which are low carb even when people around me are eating chocolates and offering me them (I was a chocoholic) and there is no doubt that eating more fat keeps you fuller for longer.
I still need to inject insulin, both basal (long acting) insulin to cover the glucose produced by my liver and small amounts of quick acting bolus insulin to cover any carbs that I do eat, but by keeping those carbs to a minimum I can reduce the amount needed.
