Sweet Peace #41: Looking for answers

 

Looking for answers

Sunday aha. I have been doing this challenge in the same manner I used to do diets … seeing how much I could get away with. The keto “aids” I touted last report have turned into a lurking snack attack. I’ve managed to barely eke under the wire on carbs so I’m still in the challenge; however “barely” is the operative word. Somehow, I forgot this was about health and turned it into a cat-and-mouse challenge of seeing how I could game the system.

Enough already.

In an attempt to get away from keto junk food, I bought a colorful 6-pack of Costco bell peppers. Turns out, yellow and orange peppers have twice as many carbs as green bell peppers: 8 versus 4. Red ones split the difference at 6. Guess which are my favorites?

So, as far as carbs go, 1 orange bell pepper is the same as 16 keto bombs. However, there is a 920 calorie difference! Keto isn’t about counting calories but that doesn’t mean that calories don’t count! And, while I would never eat 16 bombs (she says, wondering if …); that would be 88 grams of fat versus the sweet little pepper’s zero.

I also bought a bag of avocados and find that 1/2 is satisfying. Compared to a snack attack of parmesan cheese crips (19 = 1g of carbs, 13g protein, 10g fat for 150 calories), one-half of an avocado is 3g of carbs, 3g of protein, 15g of fat for 182 calories … plus 9g of fiber. While that makes the crisps sound like a not bad deal, they are highly processed and feel like a cheat instead of a healthy food and it’s much easier to eat crisps mindlessly.

Somewhere, I find a guiding idea: 

Carbs are a limit.

Protein is a goal.

Fat is a hunger lever.

After analyzing my data for the first 17 days, it’s clear that carb intake on one day directly affects the blood glucose reading the next morning. My carb limit needs to be taken down a step if I want to get my glucose readings into the ideal zone.

Metrics: Ketosis .2; blood glucose: 8 days over 110, 3 days under 100, weight loss: 0. Energy good, sleep excellent, dreams exceptional, motivation wavering but recharged.

Sweet Peace #39: Is Diabetes Reversible ... my 30-day low carb experiment

Poison Oak ... a recognized poison

Five years ago while I was in Mexico, a woman introduced me to Keto. She was a well-meaning woman who desperately wanted to be a healer, and maybe she was. However, her approach was not grounded in science and it didn’t take long for doubts to arise and the idea to fall aside.

Since then, I’ve taken on a bias of “it doesn’t work for me,” and latched onto every anti-Keto story, avoiding a whole lot of “it worked for me” stories. Five years pass and my blood sugar numbers are still in the slightly-high range, and nothing that I do seems to make a difference, including doing a 66-day sugar fast and continuing to maintain sugar as a rarity.

It seems as though my blood sugar has a mind of its own, and I’m beginning to believe age may be a contributing factor and that this just may be “it.” After all, diabetes is all over my maternal bloodline and my mother died in a nursing home with diabetic related dementia. As far as I know, my grandmother and most of my aunts also had this disease. One thing that came out of seeing my mother inject herself with insulin was that I started monitoring my own blood sugar almost 30 years ago. However, now it seems like I am being overtaken by the family disease.

Then I came across a snippet of a Dr. Peter Attia podcast with Dr. Sarah Hallberg, a researcher and practitioner focused on reversing diabetes. Everything she said made sense and gave me new hope. The following morning I woke up determined to find out more about Dr. Hallberg only to find out that she died a few months ago after years of battling stage-4 lung cancer.

For some reason, I felt real grief and took her loss personally. I spent most of the day watching her videos, including a gut-wrenching one made when she was given an award only a few weeks before she died. She was a pioneer and a champion of the possibility of reversing diabetes. Her research and other extensive research in this area all come to one conclusion: diabetes is a carbohydrate tolerance disorder.  Low carb diets can reverse diabetes and many of the other related diseases.

The bottomline of this is that I am now on a 30-day low carb challenge … basically following a Keto program … it only took five years to circle back to this point.

For any of you who are interested in finding out more about low carb and diabetes, here are the videos with Dr. Sarah that I recommend. And, fyi, I am using Carb Manager as the tracking app for this 30-day period. Today is Day 4.

This podcast with Dr. Hallberg and Dr. Attia contains a statistic that shocked me:

Over 50% of Americans are diabetic or pre-diabetic. And to make it worse, 88% of Americans are NOT in optimum metabolic health … that additional 38% could be considered pre- pre-diabetic. This is based on the 5 criteria for metabolic disease and anyone with 3 of the 5 would be classified in the 88%.  Here are the criteria that marks the presence of metabolic disease.

• Blood glucose over 100 
• Blood pressure over 130/80 
• HDL cholesterol UNDER 50 (women) 40 (men)
• Triglycerides over 150 (Drs. Hallberg and Attia recommend under 100)
• Waist circumference over 36” for women; and over 40” for men:

Dr. Sarah Hallberg TEDxPurdueU, 9 million views

And the gut-wrenching video that made me love and appreciate Dr. Sarah even more:

If anyone wants to join me on this 30-day challenge, email me at jwycoff at me dot com.