This is the one year anniversary of being diagnosed with type 2 diabetes. It’s been an interesting year, and I’ve learnt a lot about what it means to have diabetes, and it’s definitely impacted my diet.
The biggest change is a sad one for me – some of my favorites are simply not good for me. I can’t eat a bunch of stuff, including white rice (> 200 mg/dL blood glucose for even small amounts), which eliminates so many foods and makes eating commercial asian food basically off limits. Pretty much everything white – white flour, white bread, sugar, potatoes, etc, is off limits.
Another loss, which I feel sad about the most is alcohol (I do have the very occasional drink, but I’ve had less than 1 litre of alcoholic drinks in the last year, mostly beer, and I usually pay at the finger jab for it too).
In some ways, knowing that I have diabetes helps explain some of the things I have had wrong with me for a while, but in other ways, I’m sort of frustrated as I’m at the very low end of the diabetic scale. My A1C is 6.1 for several endocrinologist visits. I’ve been put on some interesting medications, including one that helped me mostly get over my needle phobia. Nothing concentrates the mind more than having to inject yourself three times a day. However, that med made me feel quite ill, so I was able to stop it.
The one disappointment is that I’ve not had much luck in losing weight, which is a key component of getting off the various medications I’m on. I really need to spend way more time at the gym as my diet is optimized to the point that I’m no longer losing weight by eating less (and different). My body is extremely good at making me awesomely tired and exhausted rather than giving up the fat reserves. The only way to beat this thing is get the metabolism moving. I hope this time next year, I will have better news on the weight front. The good news is that I now fit into the clothes I came to the USA in, but that’s not as good as I wanted or expected of myself.
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