Newbie

[karen dray]

Hi my name is Karen. I have had diabetes for around 30 years however over the past year my hb1ac test has risen to 102 but i hardly eat anything . I've been told if i can't get it down i will have to go on to insullin which i dont want as it puts weight on and i dont want that. I fo eat fruit a lot but not bread. Any help please. Thanks

 

[Drummer]

@karen dray It isn't the quantity we eat - I have never eaten a lot myself, but my Hba1c was 91 at diagnosis. Type 2s, if nothing more interesting is going on, usually find that reducing their intake of carbohydrates, they are starches and sugars, their glucose levels go down. I did that from diagnosis, and am now classed as being in remission, but I have to keep my carbs to under 40 gm a day if I want to prevent weight gain.
Perhaps if you add up all the sources of carbohydrate you eat in a typical day it will show you where you could make swaps to reduce it, and check after meals to see if your blood glucose levels are reasonable.
I bought a meter and strips to discover how to keep my blood glucose in normal levels - but you must have been seeing some quite high spikes, so it would be prudent to make the changes gradually as sudden alterations can be rather a shock and bring on false hypos or other unwanted consequences.

 

[karen dray]

Thank you for your reply. I don't eat bread and rarely potatoes but i eat a lot of fruit. Can you buy hb1ac machines

 

[Leadinglights]

Thank you for your reply. I don't eat bread and rarely potatoes but i eat a lot of fruit. Can you buy hb1ac machines

You may find it is the fruit which is causing the problem. Bananas, grapes, tropical fruits are particularly high in carb, things like apples and pears and citrus still high but less, berries are pretty well the lowest and are often the only fruits people can tolerate.
Blood glucose monitors you can buy give you a moment in time reading rather than an HbA1C which has to be done from a sample from the arm and sent to the lab.
By having a home monitor you can test what foods are the ones your body is not tolerating well so you could substitute, reduce portion or cut out.
Having meals with protein and healthy fat will give you better management that carbs will no matter how little of them you have.
If you post some examples of the meals you have people might be able to make some suggestions which will help.

 

[everydayupsanddowns]

Welcome to the forum @karen dray

Was it your nurse who suggested that insulin leads to weight gain? Some HCPs seem to ‘threaten’ people with T2 diabetes as some sort of awful consequence of their ‘misbehaviour’. While for people with T1, the threat of weight gain is rarely mentioned.

And in fact I’ve been taking insulin every day since the start of my 20s, and I am still pretty much the same weight.

So I would not fear insulin and weight gain. It certainly isn’t automatic.

I have gained weight over the years (and lost it again), by that has been much more based on what, and how much, I’ve been eating.

Which fruits are you eating? And approximately how many pieces a day would you estimate you are eating?

 

[TheClockworkDodo]

Hi Karen and welcome to the forum 🙂

Reading your post made me so angry - not with you, I hasten to add, but with whoever told you that insulin causes weight gain. It does nothing of the sort! There are thousands of slim and even skinny type 1s (many of us on this forum) who have been on insulin for years, if not decades, and who haven't put on any weight at all. Some of us struggle to keep enough weight on!

The thing which causes weight gain is eating too much in order to match an insulin dose which is too high. If the insulin dose is correctly matched to the food you are eating (rather than the other way round) then there is no risk at all of insulin causing weight gain. So please don't fear insulin, or view being put on it as a threat - it is just another way of treating diabetes, and people with very high blood sugar like yours generally feel a whole lot better after they start using it.

As @Leadinglights says, you can't buy HbA1c machines, but you can buy blood glucose meters which will tell you your current blood sugar level rather than your 90-day average. If you do get put on insulin they should give you one as with insulin you do need to check your blood sugar every time you inject and any time you feel your blood sugar might be going too low. If you want to get one for yourself now though to see how different foods effect you, this is one people on this forum have recommended - https://homehealth-uk.com/all-products/codefree-blood-glucose-monitoring-system-mmoll-or-mgdl/ because the test strips are comparatively inexpensive. If you buy it you will need to chose mmol/L as this is the measurement used in the UK, and you will need to get extra test strips with it (you can re-use lancets - you're not supposed to but most people do - but you'll need a new test strip each time). There are a couple of other meters mentioned on this thread too, as well as some other useful links - https://forum.diabetes.org.uk/board...for-people-new-to-diabetes.10406/#post-938458 (I know you are not new to diabetes, but some of them may be helpful anyway).

You can also get a sensor which you wear on your arm which measures your blood sugar all the time for 14 days - they are quite expensive and normally limited to type 1s, but the manufacturers are currently doing a free trial, so you could have a look at that and see whether you think it might be useful for you (you'd need the right sort of phone to scan the sensor) - https://www.freestylelibre.co.uk/libre/free-trial.html