…in which I blather on about my permanently diabetic state…
Author: Linda M Au
Freelance humor and fiction writer; Proofreader; Typesetter; Word-Brain; Wife of a Math-Brain; Crocheter of afghans; Caretaker of Carl and Steve, the guinea pigs; and Meanderer around Sam's Club
Oh, goody! My A1C has crept back up. Just what I needed.
I’d like to say that it’s not my fault, that diabetes is a strange illness and is difficult to control. That last part may be true, but it’s still my fault. I didn’t just fall off the keto/ultra-low-carb wagon. I unhitched it from the horse, knocked off all the wheels, and sent it careening downhill and over the side of a cliff.
I can’t just blame the soft serve ice cream machine on the cruise ship, although that would be convenient. Things had gone bad long before that. It was the ice cream, the potatoes, the doughnuts, the potatoes, the pasta, the potatoes, and did I mention the potatoes?
Carbohydrates are a harsh mistress.
I don’t even know what that phrase means, but it really speaks to my soul today anyway. Plus, it sounds deep.
So, now that I’m done traveling for a while and am done with most of my outside freelance projects, I can focus once again on dietary issues and exercise issues. It’ll be back to one baby step at a time, but that’s how I got in this predicament, so that’s how I’ll have to get back out.
Let’s just hope that the A1C creeps right back down… and that I don’t send that wagon off another cliff. Once was enough.
I’m still learning how to adapt some of my favorite dishes into a low-carb or keto version. But I don’t think the words “cooking” and “creative” should be allowed in the same sentence. I hate cooking. I hate learning new things about cooking. I’ve been an adult for 37 years, and I’m still not used to the fact that I’m expected to concoct meals for the people in my family every single day. So, adding the criteria that my meals need to be low carb has been vexing, to say the least.
Tonight, for instance, I tried to adapt a favorite easy meal from when my kids were younger. We called it cheeseburger pie. The Bisquick box always called it something like Impossible Cheeseburger Pie, though I immediately changed a few aspects of the recipe. (Otherwise, the word “impossible” would describe my efforts to get them to eat it.) So, the sliced tomatoes on top were replaced with a thin coating of spaghetti sauce.
But that regular Bisquick baking mix had to go. Way too many carbs in that stuff for a diabetic. Last month I purchased a box of Carbquik through Amazon and successfully made pancakes with it. It uses a strange version of a wheat-based flour, so it’s not strictly keto, but it’s lower carb because it’s so high fiber.
Anyway, the Carbquik has an odd aroma to it. You wouldn’t think a baking mix would smell like anything, but this stuff does. The closest I can think of is that it smells like a box of Bisquick that you forgot about for a year in the back of the pantry. Old. Expired. Stale. It smells more like the box it comes in. (It’s not expired, by the way. I checked.)
For some reason, I forged ahead and made those pancakes when the box first arrived. And perhaps I was so desperate for pancakes that I enjoyed them anyway. Perhaps it was the sugar-free syrup I slathered all over those pancakes. And the butter. And the blueberries I tossed into the batter at the last minute. Whatever. I enjoyed the pancakes. A lot.
Tonight’s cheeseburger pie, though? Not so much. Of course, the recipe also calls for milk, and I had to substitute coconut milk for regular milk. So maybe that was the culprit, though I sniffed the coconut milk and found it had no odor at all. But, did it affect the flavor of the pie? Unsure. And I’m not in a hurry to find out by making this dish again soon.
But when I do, I’ll be sure to throw in some crumbled bacon. After all, a bacon cheeseburger is a real thing, so a bacon cheeseburger pie should also be a thing.
This, by the way, is why I shop at the Archie McPhee website every year for holiday gift giving. They have an entire page full of bacon-related gifts. Who doesn’t want bacon-flavored dental floss?
Because everything is better with bacon. And, the more bacon, the better. I just wish I’d thought of adding bacon to that cheeseburger pie a few hours ago. Lesson learned: always add bacon.
It’s a bird! It’s a plane! It’s a fad diet! It’s … KETOGENICS ‘R US!
Okay, seriously, folks. I started this crazy ketogenic diet right after the holidays last year, not knowing it was going to become a politically charged craze about three nanoseconds after I peed on my first ketone strip. Honestly, I hate following crazes, as anyone who knew me in junior high can confirm (yes, me, with my K-Mart wardrobe and bright yellow Sears five-speed bike). I didn’t own a pair of Chuck Taylors till I found a pair in a thrift store in the 1980s. I still don’t own a Mac. So what do I know or care about a fad diet craze, of all things?
Not much, but enough to lower my A1C nearly a full point in five months.
It started last autumn when a good friend was in town. I hadn’t seen her in a while, and she looked fabulous. Focused, fit, and, well, healthy. Huh. I had to have me some of that, so I asked her what she’d been doing. Turns out she herself had been on this diet for the past six months or so and had lost 40 pounds. And her mind was sharp and clear, and she was clearly ON somethin’. Yeah, I had to have me some of dat.
She wisely cautioned me to read-read-read first and to NOT try to jump in right before the two biggest eating holidays of the year (Thanksgiving and Christmas, followed by New Year’s). And so I read. And read some more. And felt overwhelmed.
Macros. Wait, don’t you use those in Microsoft Word?
Ketones. Wait wait, I was pregnant four times. Aren’t those bad?
High fat. Wait wait wait … I’m already high fat. That’s precisely my problem. Isn’t it?
Intermittent fasting. Wait … HOLD ON. Not eating at ALL? For hours? On purpose? What is wrong with you people? Plus, diabetics can’t get away with that!
Aforementioned friend also added that it might be better to ease into it. I’d already been on a low-carb bandwagon for years since being diagnosed diabetic in 2010 (with more than my share of slip-ups), so getting back on THAT way of eating was second nature to me. I kept reading as I moved lower and lower carb. Then, in January, I bought the little test strips and dove in.
Within a month I’d lost 22 pounds and felt amazing. I’m 57 years old and often groaned and creaked as I climbed out of our massive waterbed every morning. (I’m also 5’2″ and just barely reach the floor when I try to climb up over the side of that thing.) But now I found myself zipping out of bed easily, no cranky noises. My joints felt great. I never even thought about them anymore. I could get up and down the two flights of stairs to do laundry without getting nearly as winded as I once did. I was sleeping like a log.
And my IBS-D symptoms (which I’d battled for more than two years) were gone.
I admit it took some head games to get used to adding bacon to my usual scrambled eggs for breakfast. I admit it took more head games to delay breakfast (although I never ate breakfast before my T2 diagnosis because I’m a night owl and mornings are evil). So many things about this diet seemed counterproductive for a diabetic (pretty much everything but the lower carb bit).
But the numbers didn’t lie. The weight loss. The lower fasting blood sugar numbers (which went from a consistent 150+ range down to as low as 87!). Then the A1C after five months of fairly consistent ketogenic eating and fasting.
I’m currently climbing back onto this fad/craze/bandwagon from a summer of too many road trips, meetings, and times away from the house. Too much carbage! But as I slowly crawl my way back, I find once again that everything about my body feels better when I lower those low-nutrient carbs and substitute them with higher fat.
And now, I’m outta here, to go treat myself to some coffee with heavy whipping cream and stevia. Gotta keep that heart pumping!
Your Type 2 partner in crime,
Linda
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NOTE: I’m not offering medical advice, but you can’t ramp up the fat without drastically lowering those carbs. If you don’t do both, you’re a walking heart attack. Do your homework, stay away from the fad/craze part of this whole thing, and make sure you’re getting regular check-ups.
One thing I learned early on in my diabetic journey is that I still can’t tolerate carbs for breakfast. And by “tolerate,” I mean my blood sugar can’t tolerate carbs for breakfast. I, personally, love carbs for breakfast. The perfect, non-diabetic me could eat pancakes, French toast, and granola cereal all day long and tolerate it just fine. (And just typing that makes me want to go make French toast. It’s a good thing I don’t keep bread in the house anymore.)
When I wake up (or, more realistically, when I wake up, hop outta bed, do my morning ablutions, fiddle around on Facebook, and check my email inbox for anything that’s not spam or an e-newsletter I keep forgetting to unsubscribe from), I scramble up some eggs (two or three) and cook ’em in some melted butter. If I’m feeling ambitious, I’ll make a few strips of bacon in the microwave with this cool little ridged pan made specifically to make a few strips of bacon in the microwave.
And there’s always the coffee, which I now drink with a packet of stevia and some heavy whipping cream. If I’m feeling daring, I’ll add a splash of some sugar-free coffee syrup. These days it’s been a raspberry flavor, but I see a bottle of salted caramel in the cupboard calling my name.
This is pretty much how I’ve started every day at home for nearly nine years. Does it get old? Nope. But then again, I love scrambled eggs and I’ve got the whole meal down to a science. I’m not a big fan of strict routines, but the breakfast thing has turned into a smooth routine every day I’m here. Of course, when I eat this meal varies from day to day, depending on how stupidly late I stayed up the night before … but the meal itself is a no-brainer. And the more I can go on auto-pilot with this whole diabetic planning thing, the better off I am.
Besides, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it, right?
Every so often I try a few more carbs at breakfast. And every so often, I’m reminded of why I still can’t do that. Curses, foiled again! Those blasted blood sugar numbers!
Apparently many diabetics have seen similar trends. Carbs are not kind to us in the morning, but as the day wears on, our bodies relax a little and can tolerate a few carbs at lunch, and even a few more by dinner. Of course, it’s all relative, and “a few” really does mean a few. Like, very few. Let’s not kid ourselves on that: upping that carb count is always risky. If you’re gobbling down carbs at levels best left to a normal person, you’d better make sure it’s your birthday or some other festive occasion and not just, say, Tuesday.
Pretend you’re back in school. Get yourself a notebook. Take notes. Write down numbers. Take lots of tests. (The school analogies just keep coming, folks.) Heck, in this day and age, start a spreadsheet like I did. (Sure, I had to ask my engineer-husband how to USE a spreadsheet, but I swallowed my pride—which is very low carb—and asked him how.)
I found that, with a lot of testing and tracking, I could see patterns. Not completely scientific patterns, of course. Managing diabetes is more of an art than a science sometimes. But there were trends. There were foods that I had to stay away from. And foods I could tolerate better than I anticipated. And ways to trick my body into not raising that BG number too much. (I’ll get to those tricks at some later date.)
And to this day I continue to learn. The body changes. The body ages. (Ugh, how the body ages!) And how the body is affected by specific foods also morphs. I’m in this for the long haul, so I still need to test in order to keep that information flow going.
And it looks like there are a lot of scrambled eggs in my future … at least for breakfast. And I’m okay with that.
It was January 2010. I wasn’t having a good winter. Things in my personal life were more than a little wonky. So, when someone from my doctor’s office called to give me the results of my boring, routine blood work, I wasn’t in the right frame of mind to hear that I was now a Type-2 diabetic.
I was sitting in my home office upstairs when the call came in. I’d been expecting the phone call with the lab results … just not what was actually said during that phone call.
The stunned silence from my end of the phone must have softened the heart of that office assistant who’d called me. She immediately pulled back from her stark announcement and assured me I could still eat sweets and that all was not lost. (I think back on that part of the conversation now and cringe. I understand why she said it, but it’s probably not the best thing to say right after telling someone she’s diabetic.)
Strangely, though, not much more was said that day. I was told to get a blood glucose meter and that I’d be insurance-approved for 30 strips per month. (I’d soon find out that number wasn’t exactly generous. A newly diagnosed diabetic should be testing like crazy in those early weeks—before and after each meal or snack to get information on how all sorts of foods affect blood sugar.) I felt like one of those astronauts you see in space movies—the ones who are walking in space outside the ship and whose tethers break or come loose, and who start slowly floating away from safety. Yeah, that’s exactly how I felt the rest of that day … and the rest of that month, really.
I vividly recall the first time I used a blood glucose meter. I read the instruction sheet (which, thank God, came with illustrations) over and over, leaving it spread out on my desk. I loaded the lancet with a new needle and held it hovering over my shaking fingertip for what seemed an eternity. I don’t know what I expected—probably that it would feel like being cut in two with a dull sword—but it was surprisingly painless and quick. Seeing the drop of blood well up wasn’t my favorite thing that day, but I felt empowered. This little plastic meter and these little strips were going to give me information, knowledge—things I would need in order to keep this diagnosis from ruining or shortening my life.
And I learned that the internet can be your best friend if you let it. If you’re smart. If you’re cautious. I found a forum of fellow diabetics and joined immediately. I lurked a lot. And I asked a lot of stupid newbie questions. I figured I was already shamed and embarrassed by my diagnosis, so a little more shame on the intrawebs wasn’t gonna kill me. I deflected my ignorance and stupid questions with humor. (That usually works in most situations, by the way. You’re welcome.)
And I made some amazing internet friends. A handful of the women there took me under their wings and added me to an email loop. They called themselves Diabetic Divas … and I immediately felt safe and welcome. And I learned a lot. And they’re still important, good friends.
These women were owning their diagnoses. They were beating the odds by sharing what was working for them. And many of them were routinely seeing A1C numbers in the normal ranges again. Turns out a little diligence and a lot of support go a long way. And in some small way, I kinda owe them my life. I learned to test constantly in the beginning. I learned how a post-prandial high blood glucose reading could be swiftly turned around by grabbing my shoes and taking a brisk walk around the block. (In those early months, I once lowered a post-meal number from 170 to 107 with a literal five-minute walk around the block … in February during a snowstorm. Where there’s a will—and a heavy winter coat—there’s a way.)
Those first months post-diagnosis were tough. I won’t sugar-coat that part with humor. (Technically, I shouldn’t be sugar-coating anything anymore.) I cried a lot. Feelings of failure and fear washed over me every single day. Looking at food scared me. Grocery shopping now took twice as long because I was reading every label in sight.
But, in the years that have passed since that fateful day in January 2010, I can tell you with certainty that the diagnosis snapped me back to reality faster than a few creeping pounds or even a high cholesterol count would have.
Hearing “You’re diabetic” over the phone doesn’t have to be the end of life as you know it. It means you’ll be forced to pay attention to what you eat, when you eat, and how you move. For anybody, these are good habits to learn. For a diabetic, they’re crucial.
The biggest thing I learned back then? I’m not alone. And neither are you.
Type Too 