The Virtuous Circle

The right diet will give you more energy. The right exercise will give you more lean muscle mass. More lean muscle mass will help maintain your blood sugar level. As you get fitter you’ll need to eat more (and more delicious) food to maintain the new and expanded muscle fibers. When it goes right it’s a virtuous cycle.

But when it goes wrong it can go really wrong. Many people who have pre-diabetes or full blown Type II got it, in part, due to being overweight. Almost everyone I’ve known who is or ever was overweight have spent most of their life on some kind of a diet. Almost all of the diets don’t work at all. Some of them make you fatter. And the few, like low carb diets, that will “work” if you can stick with them would kill you even if you were healthy, which you and I are not.

So if idea number one is that we must combine diet and exercise what is idea number two? Dump the correlation in your head between diet and going hungry. Going hungry when you have Diabetes is a bad thing, and while if you are overweight you must lose the pounds, even if you could lose them for good through starvation, which you can’t, it would turn your blood sugar levels into chaos. We need to use “diet” in the proper sense meaning a plan of nutrition. Simply, when you eat what you eat, is your diet.

The “when to eat” was particularly hard for me. As a child I never had breakfast and often skipped lunch as well, a bad habit that continued through my forties. When diagnosed I started reading and realized that I was alternating crashing my blood sugar through starvation, and then stuffing my face and flooding it. In my own case I believe this was the cause of my Type II since I have none of the regular risk factors for diabetes. I have never been overweight, I had been exercising, strenuously, for five years beforehand, and I have no family members with the condition.

So when do I eat now? I went from one big meal per day to six small ones. I eat something every three hours, between six am and nine pm, to eliminate the big peaks and valleys in my blood sugar levels. I need the constant levels to avoid damage to nerves and various body parts, but as an additional advantage I found that my overall energy level, after less than a week, zoomed off the scale. I found myself not only feeling better than before, but better than I ever have. In turn that made my morning exercise routine a lot easier and I found myself doubling it from two hours a week to four, and enjoying it rather than dreading it.

That doesn’t mean that everyone needs to eat six times a day, if does mean you need to talk to your Doctor or, if you can get one, your nutritionist. So, idea number three, you can’t just eat when you’re hungry anymore.

That still begs the question of what to eat. Again, a proper nutritionist, or your primary care physician, can point you in the right direction for your particular condition, but what worked for me was a surprise. I found the surprise when I started keeping a log of what I was eating. My habit before was to stuff my face with whatever was close at hand when I was hungry enough. Once I started planning I found myself tracking what I found were the two most important elements of food; Calories and Carbohydrates. Keeping track I suddenly found that I had been on an extreme low-carb diet, by accident, for years.

In the days right after my diagnosis I was trying to plan eating and created a simple log of what I ate, when, and the number of calories and carbohydrates. My goal was to get as close as reasonable to 2614 calories with 50% from carbohydrates. The math for carbohydrates is (1/2 of calories) divided by 4 which means 327 grams of carbohydrates is 50% on a 2614 calorie diet. Eating this, in my case newly discovered, healthy food, try as I might I couldn’t figure out a way to get 2614 calories and 327 grams of carbohydrates from it. I finally emailed a friend who is knowledgeable about such things that in order to get this to work I’d need to find some source of food that had a thousand calories and no carbohydrates. Duh; what I was eating before, steak… chicken… etc have no carbohydrates at all and lots of calories from fat. This is how I discovered I’d been on a low-carb diet for many many years.

So, idea number four; use a log to keep track of what you eat and when. In fact, being an Information Technology guy I was determined to find a program to handle the messy details for me and believe I’ve found a reasonable winner with Calorie King. This particular application includes a database with most of the food you eat already in it. The interface is a bit clunky, but the application is reasonably solid and once you get past a few peculiarities it works very well. I’ll be doing a post on the application at a later date.

On computer or on paper, to understand why the log should keep track of calories and carbohydrates and not just calories it’s necessary to have at the least a very simplified understanding of the difference between the two, and how they affect blood sugar levels.

I like to use toilet analogies. Not in the potty mouth, dirty words sense but literal toilets. Carbohydrates are like the water in your toilet’s tank. A part of your pancreas and liver are like the float that shuts the water off once the tank is full. When you flush, your toilet uses the water available in the tank. When you use energy your body uses carbohydrates in the form of blood sugar or “glucose” if you prefer that are available in your blood. As the water rushes out of the toilet tank the float drops, tripping a switch, which starts to refill the tank. As your blood sugar drops, the alpha cells in your pancreas send signals to your liver, tripping a switch to put more sugar into your blood. Once the toilet tank is full again, the float trips the switch cutting off any more water. As your blood sugar levels rise, the beta cells in your pancreas send signals to your liver, in the form of insulin, to stop putting out more sugar. If the switch in your toilet tank is broken, it’ll keep putting water into the tank until it overflows and makes a mess. If your pancreas is broken, or if the insulin it puts out isn’t properly used, your blood sugar will overflow and make a mess. It’s amazing, but almost anything on earth that needs to be understood, can be understood, by using a toilet.

So carbohydrates are short term energy and the non-carbohydrate calories are long term energy. This is why a sudden burst of sugar, say in a 12 oz can of soda, isn’t necessary a good idea for you anymore. To go back to our toilet for a moment, you’ve just done the equivalent of suddenly dumping a gallon of water into an already full tank. That doesn’t mean you can’t eat sugar anymore. Yes, sugars are carbohydrates and carbohydrates are sugar, but how fast you fill the tank counts at least as much as how much you put in it. Pour a gallon in, at a rate of an ounce per hour, and it’s not going to overflow.

So now you need a diet plan, X number of calories with Y grams of carbohydrates spaced over Z number of meals per day. Consult your doctor or nutritionist to change X, Y, and Z into actual numbers and you’ll be good to go. For me, I’m as I said I’m on 2614 (ok, not exactly) calories with 327 grams of carbohydrates spread across six meals, three hours apart, starting at six am and ending at nine pm. Now I’m not going to explode the instant I miss those exact numbers at those exact times, but sticking with the plan means coming as close as you can to your X, Y and Z.

Stick with the plan and your toilet will never overflow.