Confessions of a diabetic
March 29, 2005 | 12:00am
Six years (1998) ago, I was diagnosed with diabetes.
I was so tired in the afternoons that it wasn’t safe for me to drive.
Four years later, in September 2002, I rode a 49cc motor scooter 2,000 kilometers from Lands End, at the southernmost point of England to John O Groats, at the northernmost point of Scotland in 10 days.
Each day, I rode the scooter for about seven hours, and won a trophy awarded annually by the Lands End – John O Groats Association.
How did I transform my life, and how did I get rid of the perpetual tiredness?
The doctor who diagnosed my problem made it very clear that diabetes has NO cure.
However, he said I could significantly improve my condition if I accepted patient accountability and responsibility.
His message was "change your lifestyle or face the possibility of blindness, kidney failure, limb amputation, stroke, and heart disease!"
I left the surgery in a state of shock.
What comes first? Body or soul? "If you don’t take care of your body, where will you live?" That was the question.
I immediately accepted that both amount and type of my diet, and exercise were the two most important factors.
So where to start?
My body weight was the first consideration – I had to get rid of some fat from my waistline.
It’s mainly abdominal fat (visceral), which creates "insulin resistance," and it’s the body’s resistance to insulin, which causes diabetes, and subsequently the life-threatening conditions.
I soon found that losing weight and increasing my level of fitness, was definitely worth the effort.
I used a calorie counted low GI/fat controlled diet, in combination with a structured exercise program.
GI stands for glycemic index. The GI is the measurement scale which defines the rate of conversion of foods containing carbohydrate into blood glucose.
My diet is carbohydrate controlled, and restricted in fats – both in type and quantity.
I use many and varied carbohydrates in recipes, but I combine the higher GI foods with the lower ones, thereby averaging down the GI factor.
I mainly use mono fats, and try as much as I can to avoid saturated fats.
I eat breads containing whole grains such as wheat, oats, and barley, and pasta in all its forms.
I eat high amylose (+25 percent) varieties of rice, with vegetables – mainly carrots, all types of beans, peas, onion, tomato, young corn, mushroom, capsicum, sweet potato, yam, and garlic, and all greens such as spinach, broccoli, cabbage, and cauliflower.
Fruits in my diet include grapefruit, apple, cherries, plums, apricot, peaches, grapes, orange, pineapple, papaya, and banana.
Fish, chicken (without the skin), lean pork, tofu, and some shellfish are also included regularly.
My beverage intake is mainly water, grapefruit juice, tomato juice, green tea, and chamomile tea.
Occasionally, I drink coffee, and with my dinner, I usually have a glass or two of red wine.
As the body ages, muscle mass decreases, so an extra effort is required to hold on to it.
Exercise reduces tiredness, which converts to increased energy levels.
That leads to increased personal productivity. And that’s a wonderful feeling.
I was born in England and have a mixture of Scottish and English genes.
My first job was a trainee journalist in a newspaper based near London.
Two years later, I switched to the world of finance and went to the London Stock Exchange to work as a trainee stockbroker. That was in 1959.
In 1963, I moved from England to Australia, to work for a major broking firm based in Melbourne.
For more than 40 years, I worked in the world of stocks and shares, banking, and finance – in England, Australia, and Hong Kong.
I served for several years as a non-executive director of a bank, HSBC Australia, and some other Australian public companies.
Travel has always been a big part of my life.
On one journey from England to Australia, I worked my passage on a Dutch cargo ship by looking after 200 pedigree pigs from London to Shanghai, China, and ended up staying in Shanghai for a week in January 1967 when the Chinese Cultural Revolution was in full swing.
My crazy lifestyle, of irregular meal times, eating, and drinking anything and everything regardless of content, had been a major contributor to the damage inflicted on my body.
Very high work-related stress levels, eating, and drinking far too much in one day, and doing the opposite the next created the major negative impacts on my health.
However, to get it right every time, you need to know how many grams of all carbohydrate you are consuming, as well as the individual GI blood sugar conversion rates.
Scientists at Harvard University in the US developed the term glycemic load (GL), and this is a much more accurate determinant of the effect on blood sugar levels as it is the rate of conversion (GI) of a carbohydrate, multiplied by the actual amount in grams of carbohydrate (divided by 100) contained in a given serving of food or beverage.
Some foods contain widely varying percentage amounts of carbohydrate vis-a-vis other things, such as fiber.
Obviously, the lower the glycemic load of a meal, the less effect on raising blood sugar levels and consequently, smaller amounts of insulin are produced. And that is very good!
The website www.Food2live.com offers a free program which calculates the glycemic load of recipes.
F2L is an online, interactive, glycemic load calculator, which I conceived, and had been built by computer technicians in Cebu, Philippines.
The analysis data produced by the F2L program also show the values of all significant nutrients such as carbohydrates, proteins, fiber, cholesterol, sodium, fats, and others, as well as the number of Kcals and/or kilojoules.
The F2L site also shows what the experts say about the GI and the GL, insulin resistance and diabetes.
Another major contribution to the development of the Food2live site came from Rocco DiVencenzo, senior dietician of Melbourne’s Swinburne University Hospital, and member of the Post Graduate School of Integrative Medicine.
Dr. Ludwig’s studies suggest that GI is important in partitioning calories between fat (which raises insulin resistance), and muscle (which reduces it).
In other words, GI affects body composition.
High-GI foods as an independent factor can cause obesity, and increase risks of diabetes and heart disease in animals.
Use of low-GI diets in prevention and treatment now has a mechanism to explain how it works in human disease.
The Food2live program was recently demonstrated at an Obesity and Insulin Resistance Symposium, held at the Peninsula Medical School in Plymouth, England, by invitation of the Professor of Medicine Wilkin, a world leading research endocrinologist. He is currently conducting a 12-year study into insulin resistance in 300 schoolchildren.
More about that study can be seen at www.earlybirddiabetestrust.org
From the moment insulin resistance starts, processes that work unfavorably on our bodies will also start.
Professor Wilkin says, "It’s no surprise then, that by the time of diagnosis, half of all type 2 diabetics have complications."
Professor Wilkin says, "It is the combination of high blood sugar and high blood insulin – but particularly the high insulin levels – that wreaks the most damage to the body, in fact, potentially catastrophic damage."
Insulin resistance drives individual metabolic disturbances, like spokes emanating from the hub of a wheel. The major effects are:
Diabetes – high blood cholesterol – stroke – pancreatic disease – poor circulation – blindness – kidney failure – amputation – thrombosis – high blood uric acid.
The ravages of insulin resistance do not stop there.
In the mid ’90s Polycystic Ovarian Syndrome (PCOS) was recognized as yet another spoke of the metabolic wheel.
Individually, any of the foregoing can promote coronary heart disease, but when they occur together, the outcome is catastrophic, and this is known as the metabolic syndrome," says Professor Wilkin.
Here is a summary of the bad news:
• Obesity is the cause of 80 percent of all cases of type 2 diabetes.
• There are more than 360 million people in the world with serious problems caused by insulin resistance, and the epidemic is raging like a bush fire out of control.
• No country is immune or quarantined.
The World Health Organization has just recently forecast that the Philippines will soon join the list of the top 10 most badly affected countries in the world.
• More than 65 percent of all US citizens are affected by obesity.
• The cost of caring for people affected by insulin resistance-caused diseases in the UK has now exceeded the combined total cost of care for both smoking and alcohol-related diseases.
Some positive things to be done:
• Start with a balanced diet of carbohydrates (55 to 60 percent), protein (15 to 20 percent), and fat (less than 25 percent), combined with a tailor-made exercise program. Your diet should be made up of low-glycemic load meals.
Money is not an issue. A good diet costs much less than a bad one.
• Expensive equipment is not required to measure performance. Only a cheap tape measure is required to measure the waist over the navel. Scales are not needed.
Check with an expert to find out what your waist measurement should be.
• Exercise is a must – walk briskly and continuously for a minimum of 25 minutes a day.
• Never get hooked on fad diets. They only work short term by kick-starting weight loss, and this can be very damaging.
Your brain, and body must have an adequate amount of carbohydrates on a daily basis.
Insufficient fruit, vegetables, nonfat dairy products, and whole grains can increase blood pressure because of associated reductions in essential electrolytes like potassium, calcium, and magnesium.
Fad diets have a tendency to increase sodium (salt) intake.
• Never eat or drink anything without first knowing the glycemic load, the calorific and nutrient values.
Otherwise, your relatives will be punished mentally and physically by your irresponsibility and inaction.
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