Tag Archives: type 2

Yes, you’re responsible for the obesity epidemic . . .

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Yes, you heard me.  It’s not the fault of the government, or the advertisers, or the farmers, it’s you.  Every time you make the choice to buy fast food, or one of those food products that you KNOW is bad for your body, and bad for your health, you are responsible for the obesity epidemic.  It’s your food choices, that fuel the government to keep subsidising GMO farmers, that keep advertisers finding new ways to hook you with their products, and keep the farmers trying to find those subsidies.  Every time you purchase foods from McDonalds, Taco Bell, Wendys, or Oreos, ice cream, soda products, juice boxes, and more, you are enabling the obesity epidemic.  You know what’s good for you.  Just choose it!

We have the responsibility as consumers, to let our government, our advertisers, and our farmers, know that we choose to live healthy, and that we prefer to spend our $$$ on whole foods, fruits and vegetables, grass fed or open pastured animal products.  That we want to live vibrant healthy lives, instead of the lives the majority of us are living right now.  With lifestyle diseases that are completely reversible like heart disease, type 2 diabetes, obesity, metabolic syndrome, and so many more.  We let them know this with what we spend our $$$ on.  Yes, it’s more expensive in the grocery store to buy healthy whole foods instead of frozen, prepackaged foods, snack foods, juice boxes, cola, etc.  Do know how much it costs for 10 years of diabetes treatments, or for bypass surgery?  A LOT MORE!  My bill after bypass surgery 10 years ago was $120,000!  Spend now, to save later.  Besides that, spending money on healthy foods makes your life more enjoyable because you feel good, instead of being cheap and living sick, and then having to spend all that money on treatment, and still not feel good.

Everyone wants to be healthy, but some people just don’t have the motivation.  How do you find that motivation?  You have to find your why.  The reason that you want to be around as long as you can.  Is your why your kids?  Do you want to be here for their high school graduation?  For college?  For their marriage?  To see your grandkids?  Do you want to fullfil a lifelong dream of running a marathon or a cross country bikeride?  When you discover your why, it makes those choices easier.  Everybody knows what their why is, but some people are afraid to think about it.  I encourage you to think about it.  Then admit it to someone, so they can help you stay on track, by reminding you of your why when you jump off the wagon.

So the next time you pull into the drive through, or you’re at the grocery store, and you reach for that bag at the window, or those packaged foods that you darnwell know are bad for you, you’re going to pause, and remember this blog.  You’re going to think of your why.  You’re going to wonder if you’re spending $$$ is really contributing to the obesity epidemic.  Then you’re going to look at yourself.  Then you’re going to put it down, and walk over to the produce isle and pick a food you’ve never tried before.  You’re doing to do this every trip to the store like I do, and you’re going to start to lose weight and feel good about your body and your choices.  Then you’re going to share your experiences with others, until you can inspire someone.  We can cure this epidemic, even it’s only 1 person at at time.  Be that person today.  Make the choice.  Be healthy.

If you need help in your journey, someone to keep reminding you of your why, please look for me at the socialize links in the right hand column of this page:  ——————>

“True health reform starts in your kitchen, not in Washington.”

 

Type 1 Diabetic: Insulin vs. Glucagon

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So I’ve been studying the role of glucagon in metabolism.  I’ve never really known anything about glucagon, except that when I was a juvenile diabetic, I’d have seizures from low blood sugar, and when I saw my parents coming at me with that weird syringe, I knew it was glucagon.  They never understood that I was totally conscious during my seizures.  So anyway, I always thought glucagon was a form of ultra pure glucose or something, until I read Robb Wolf’s book “The Paleo Solution” back in March of this year.  He barely touched on glucagon, but did mention that it was a hormone, so I knew it wasn’t a form of sugar.

Well now I understand a great deal more about glucagon.  Been studying like a madman.  I understand that it’s insulin’s sister hormone, that they both come from Islets of Langerhans in the pancreas.  Glucagon comes from alpha cells, and insulin from beta cells.  That together, they are the core of metabolism.  A perfect feedback system that regulates energy in your body.  Glucagon is the yin, to insulin’s yang.  Glucagon releases fat to be burned, where insulin stores it for energy later.  Glucagon raises low blood sugar by signalling the liver to convert stored glycogen into glucose via glyconeogenesis.  When blood sugar rises to high, insulin is secreted to store that glucose as glycogen in muscle tissue, or as fat.  When there’s insulin, you can’t burn fat.  When there’s glycogen, you can’t store fat.  Insulin is secreted when you eat carbohydrates.  Glycogen is secreted when you eat protein.

Ok, so I have the basic understanding I think?  Now, as a T1D how does glucagon work inside me, since it doesn’t work at all inside me?  I can’t find these answers yet?  I’m dying to figure this out.  I know how insulin works in a T1D.  I just take it externally.  T1D’s don’t take glucagon externally except in emergencies though, to raise blood sugar quickly.  In a T1D, those Islets of Langerhans are broken, so neither insulin nor glucagon is secreted.  When a T1D’s blood sugar falls, glucagon doesn’t bring us back up like it does in a normal person.  Haven’t you ever seen a diabetic that’s hypoglycemic?  We don’t know our own name or where we are sometimes!  So if our bodies don’t secrete glucagon, how do we burn fat?  I know we as T1D’s need to take external glucose to raise blood sugar.  Does epinepherine work in a T1D for releasing fat to be burned?  If I understand epinepherine (it’s totally possible that I don’t understand anything about all this), it can function similarly to glucagon in the release of fat for energy.  I know that T1D’s can burn fat, because I’ve done it,  but how if glucagon doesn’t work?

If anyone reading this, can explain how a T1D burns fat for energy without a working glucagon system, I would be eternally grateful.  I know I’m trying to understand something  that’s probably a whole course of material, but I’d really like to understand this.  I’m such a health nerd.

Thanks for any help you can offer.

Please join me on Facebook, Twitter, Goodreads: —————–>

Paleo and Ketosis for a Type 1 Diabetic

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Ketosis and diabetes are 2 words that instill fear in the hearts of most diabetics.  It used to instill fear into me as well, until I started reading about paleo and primal living, and how ketosis doesn’t always mean you’re gonna die.  When I started to read about ketosis, and how some diabetics have taken control of their diabetes with it, I began to get excited.  I studied and studied for weeks.  Trying to understand everything I could about ketosis and paleo, and I was slowly starting to believe that there’s a way to be in ketosis as a type 1 diabetic, without it killing you.  I have a lifetime of beliefs, drilled into me by my doctors,  that ketosis means death.  It does, “IF” you’re in ketosis and you’re blood sugar is over 250 mg/dl.  Most diabetics know this as DKA, or Diabetic KetoAcidosis.  Your blood literally becomes toxic with acid created by the lack of insulin in your body.  This is a life threatening condition, and must be avoided at all costs, by all diabetics.

So why on earth would a type 1 diabetic want to intentionally enter ketosis? What is ketosis?

Let me start by answering the second question.  Ketosis occurs when you’re body doesn’t have enough fuel.  Your bodies primary fuel comes from carbohydrates that the body turns into glucose to feed the muscle cells and the brain.  If you’re body doesn’t have enough glucose, it has to get fuel from somewhere so it starts to burn or break down fat.  When a fat cell is broken down, that creates ketone bodies.  3 types to be exact.  2 are used for fuel, and the 3rd is just waste.  (Which you can smell on the breath.  It’s called Acetone.)  The brain and the muscles can run on ketone bodies.  Actually, the heart runs close to 30% more efficiently on ketone bodies.  When ketone body levels get to high, the body produces insulin, and they are reduced.  If no insulin is sent into the bloodstream, the ketone bodies rise, and so does the blood glucose.  Since the 2 ketone bodies that are used as fuel are acidid, this combination causes the blood pH to become acidic, and toxic, causing Diabetic Ketoacidosis, or DKA.

I wanted to go on a ketosis diet, because I read story after story of type 1 diabetics that got off the rollercoaster by going low carb (which naturally causes ketosis).  By low carb, I mean around 50g or less per day.  Low carbs = steady bloodsugar.  This means you eat mostly fat and protein.  (Hello butter and bacon!)  I know, I know, you think I’m going to clog my arteries.  Well I’m not, but that’s another story.  Anyway, I tried this for a week back in March as an experiment, and it worked great after about 7 days, but for those first 5 days something weird happened.  I wasn’t in ketosis continuously.  I kept jumping in and out of it.  Whenever I’d be in ketosis, my blood sugar would spike, dangerously high, over 250!  When I’d bolus, it wouldn’t go down!  (I had never been in ketoacidosis in my entire life, so I didn’t know how to treat this.)  Tons more research about treating ketoacidosis, and I got it under control.  I discovered that if I bolused, AND did a 4 hour temporary basal with my pump, everything worked great and the blood sugar would come down.  Perfect!  Nothing had I read warned me about this, and when I went looking for answers, I didn’t find any on the big name blogs.  Where I found answers was in the forum at Marks Daily Apple.  Other T1D’s told me this happens to a select few type 1′s when they start a ketogenic diet (lucky me) and it will go away in a few days.  It’s caused by the body being stressed due to what I’m doing to it, and that stress creates cortisol, which tells the liver to dump what little glucose it’s storing, or to convert protein into glucose (called gluconeogenesis).  After 5 days, everything was running smoothly.

But then I tried to come out of ketosis.  To end the experiment.  I increased my carbs back to around 100c per day.  Well, that didn’t go so well.  If I went for more than 3 hours without carbs, I’d get ketones, and my blood sugar would spike, and I developed dawn syndrome.  (Ketones early in the morning because you’ve been without carbs for hours.)   So I did a lot of fighting my blood sugar for a while.  Adjusted my basal rates, and my carb ratio, and got back to normal (the normal highs and lows I mean), but still had dawn syndrome.

Then I got a Metronic continuous glucose monitor (CGM).  I had become even more paleo over the last few months, and even more strict with my food choices.  Loving my bacon and butter, and all the steak, burgers, etc.  So I decided to do this again, but go even more hardcore into it, and NEVER COME OUT OF IT.  The CGM sure makes it easier to do this that’s for sure, because you can see your blood sugar change in almost real time.  I went with no carbs for 3 days at the suggestion of 1 particular blog, to effect the conversion from carbs to ketones more quickly.  It worked!  Smooth transition with no spikes, and my blood sugar hasn’t climbed above 150 for 7 days straight.  Most of the week my blood sugar has been around 80-90 mg/dl.  I used to be afraid of that low of a number!  I’d start eating glucose tabs, afraid of a crash.  Now I’m annoyed if it goes above 125!  I’ve been in ketosis 100% of the time all week now.  It’s been emotionally uplifting too.  Not that I have any kind of depression problems, but it just feels good that I’ve found a way to control my diabetes that’s actually working.  I keep seeing carbs everywhere, and thinking “No Rich, that will make your blood sugar spike, today, AND tomorrow, and the next day.”  Then I just walk away happy that my blood sugars are normal now.

Now, I feel the need to say this . . . . . DON’T TRY THIS AT HOME.  There’s a lot of things about starting a ketosis diet that you need to learn, and it can be really dangerous if you don’t do insane amounts of research.  I’m a little crazy, and don’t believe mainstream medicine, and this is MY LIFE, but I definitely don’t want you to try this just on a whim because you read my blog.  I wanted to tell you my story, so you can see what happens, because I didn’t see this in any of my research, and had no idea that it might happen with all of the hours of research I did before I tried (maybe 50 hours I think).

I hope this article was helpful to you.

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