I was recently diagnosed with elevated blood sugar, which is a euphemism for three and a half times the normal level and an A1c of eleven. It required a radical change of diet, as the prospect of having to go on insulin is not an option. The diet is basically the caveman food of the Atkins Diet, of which most people have a wildly incorrect perception, 'cause they never bothered to read the book. It's natural foods, not invented foods (turkey bacon), not processed foods (refined white flour), mostly in "God's packaging" along the perimeter of the grocery store and not in the cardboard and cellophane packaging in the inner aisles of the store.
Stay away from anything "white", like flour, white bread, potatoes, rice, corn starch, sugar. Also stay away from liquid corn sweeteners (although corn oil is good for you). Eat whole fruits and vegetables rather than drinking them. Eliminate soda sweetened with sugar or liquid corn, and dramatically limit soda sweetened with aspartame. Evidence suggests that while aspartame won't elevate blood sugar, it prevents it from dropping to appropriate and natural levels. In other words, if you sugar is high, aspartame will keep it high. Thanks to using a ridiculous number of overprices test strips for close monitoring, I have also found this to be at least anecdotally true. While I haven't yet completely eliminated Diet Mountain Dew, I've cut back to 3 or 4 cans a week, from 5 or 6 a day. Nowadays it's mostly water, unsweetened tea (sometimes sweetened with Splenda or tevia), or Powerade Zero.
The only real deviation from the Atkins Diet is to avoid or limit high fatty meats, especially cow, as high saturated fats interferes with insulin sensitivity by changing the fatty acid composition of membrane lipids. Unsaturated fats on the other hand improve the fatty acid composition. About the only cow I've eaten in the last 6 weeks has been in Wendy's Chili, which is low in carbs and has most of the fat already rendered out of the meat (the meat that goes in Wendy's Chili is literally overcooked meat off the grill, I used to work there and know how it's made).
For many years now I've been eating essentially one meal a day, a second one on occasion, despite knowing that skipping meals is the surest road to obesity. It reduces metabolism to a slow crawl, converts carbs to fat and stores it, and wrecks havoc with insulin production, which is exactly the position that I'm in currently. It's a classic position that many people are in. I haven't quite mastered it, yet, but I'm getting there. I'll try and eat something every 3 or 4 hours, even if it's just an apple or a banana. It keeps the metabolism going.
Wendy's Chili is good. They also have a BLT Cobb salad that's very good is you are watching carbs and blood sugar. Made with field greens, the small amount of hard boiled eggs and the strip of bacon is offset by the fiber of the field greens in the salad. The Avacado Ranch dressing has almost no carbs. It's topped with a sliced up skinless chicken breast, but don't let them use a breaded, deep fried chicken breast. It's supposed to be grilled. Subway salads are good, but get it made with mostly or all spinach, as iceberg lettuce has almost no nutritional value whatsoever. Newman's Own Olive Oil and Vinegar dressing doesn't need to be refrigerated. Use that on your salads. Don't be fooled by the marketing hype, Subway 9-grain wheat and flarbreads, despite the fiber content, is something you simply cannot eat if it spikes your blood sugar, and for most people it'll spike it just the same as plain white bread will.
In the 5 weeks since the diagnosis and the change in diet, I've lost 4 notches on my belt and 33 pounds. I admittedly have not increased my exercise activity from it's current level of "non-existent" at all. I need to do something about that. Also, an interesting side effect of relatively steady blood sugar, and not drinking the caffeine in diet soda, is that I no longer wake up every 90 minutes like clockwork to pee. I can sleep 6-8 hours uninterrupted.
Maybe all this rambling will help someone. Or not.
