The Beetus Part 2
Oct. 20th, 2022 09:25 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
msconductSo, to recap: according to Prof Roy Taylor, what to do about diabetes and prediabetes is lose weight so you get below your personal fat point and free the pancreas from the fat stopping it from working properly. How exactly was I supposed to do that?
Well, that bit wasn't easy. For a variety of sciency reasons I won't get into here, Prof Taylor thinks it's important to lose the weight fast. The participants in Prof Taylor's studies were therefore put on very low calorie diets (800 calories a day) for 2-3 months. For the sake of consistency, they were given meal replacement shakes so the calorie count couldn't be futzed with.
Meal replacement shakes. Yuck. Fortunately, Michael Mosely's book The 8-Week Blood Sugar Diet translated this into an 800-calorie regimen of real food, based on the Mediterranean diet. This seemed definitely more doable. I wasn't exactly looking forward to the 800 calories a day for a minimum of two months: I'd done that before for only two days a week when I was doing intermittent fasting, and believe me, two days a week was tough enough. However, I didn't want to be prediabetic either, and even less did I want to progress to full diabetes. 800 calories a day it was.
One of the hardest things about a calorie-driven regimen is counting the calories. I found it a total nightmare when I was intermittent fasting. So to avoid going completely insane, I decided to subscribe to a food bag service. Their diet range had dinners of under 450 calories. I added a 300 calorie lunch (and a single 50-calorie mandarin - the highlight of every day) and I was set.
Was this an easy eight weeks? Not going to lie: far from it. It was much easier not having to count my dinner calories myself, but on the other hand, the food bag service saved money by adding things I wouldn't (like oils, which aren't very satiating) because they were cheaper than the things I would have chosen (like extra vegetables, full of nice filling fibre). I was hungry a lot of the time. As in hours, every day. That was bearable as long as I could force myself to sleep despite the hunger. Some nights that was easier than others. (My experience isn't necessarily typical: a lot of the people doing the diet have said that they ceased to be hungry after the first few days. Lucky them.)
Weekends were particularly difficult. With work to distract me, weekdays weren't too bad, but weekends were both horrible and endless. I was glad when the working week rolled around again, which is a pretty ghastly situation to be in. It all felt like a bit of a prison sentence.
I also ran into a problem with protein. My diet is normally almost totally vegetarian, and I never think about protein levels. However, it turns out that it's very, very difficult to get enough protein on an 800-calorie vegetarian diet. Michael Mosely mentions casually in his book that you might find that because of a lack of protein your hair falls out, but not to worry, because once you come off the diet it will grow back again. Easy for him to say, because his hair's only a few inches long. My hair comes down almost to my waist and takes years to replace. When it started disappearing down the plughole I was not impressed. I therefore had to switch to mostly meat (and fish) meals, which night after night was hard going for this herbivore.
Having said all that, in many ways embarking on the diet was a relief. Ever since the HbA1c, my prediabetic status had been on my mind basically all the time. Every time I ate something, no matter what it was, I was wondering whether it was making my condition worse. I could see that being diabetic or even prediabetic was a life sentence, in that it was something you had to take into account absolutely every day. At least on the diet I knew I was actually doing something about it and, hopefully, at the end getting out of this situation.
So nevertheless, I persisted. I did eight weeks of this, then another five weeks of five 800 calorie days a week (skipping, you guessed it, the weekends). I also used some of the methods Jessie Inchauspé recommends in her book Glucose Revolution: having a small salad dressed with vinegar at the start of a meal, eating carbs last in a meal, not having carbs by themselves, and doing some exercise immediately after eating (squats or hand weights for me rather than anything aerobic because of the rosacea problem). Jessie, a biochemist, gives the scientific reasoning behind all of these, and they all reduce glucose spikes. According to Jessie, most people eating a Western diet have damaging glucose spikes even without an abnormal HbA1c reading, and I see no reason to disbelieve her. Her hacks were easy to do, so I did them.
And how did I get on? Tune in tomorrow for the thrilling conclusion!
Well, that bit wasn't easy. For a variety of sciency reasons I won't get into here, Prof Taylor thinks it's important to lose the weight fast. The participants in Prof Taylor's studies were therefore put on very low calorie diets (800 calories a day) for 2-3 months. For the sake of consistency, they were given meal replacement shakes so the calorie count couldn't be futzed with.
Meal replacement shakes. Yuck. Fortunately, Michael Mosely's book The 8-Week Blood Sugar Diet translated this into an 800-calorie regimen of real food, based on the Mediterranean diet. This seemed definitely more doable. I wasn't exactly looking forward to the 800 calories a day for a minimum of two months: I'd done that before for only two days a week when I was doing intermittent fasting, and believe me, two days a week was tough enough. However, I didn't want to be prediabetic either, and even less did I want to progress to full diabetes. 800 calories a day it was.
One of the hardest things about a calorie-driven regimen is counting the calories. I found it a total nightmare when I was intermittent fasting. So to avoid going completely insane, I decided to subscribe to a food bag service. Their diet range had dinners of under 450 calories. I added a 300 calorie lunch (and a single 50-calorie mandarin - the highlight of every day) and I was set.
Was this an easy eight weeks? Not going to lie: far from it. It was much easier not having to count my dinner calories myself, but on the other hand, the food bag service saved money by adding things I wouldn't (like oils, which aren't very satiating) because they were cheaper than the things I would have chosen (like extra vegetables, full of nice filling fibre). I was hungry a lot of the time. As in hours, every day. That was bearable as long as I could force myself to sleep despite the hunger. Some nights that was easier than others. (My experience isn't necessarily typical: a lot of the people doing the diet have said that they ceased to be hungry after the first few days. Lucky them.)
Weekends were particularly difficult. With work to distract me, weekdays weren't too bad, but weekends were both horrible and endless. I was glad when the working week rolled around again, which is a pretty ghastly situation to be in. It all felt like a bit of a prison sentence.
I also ran into a problem with protein. My diet is normally almost totally vegetarian, and I never think about protein levels. However, it turns out that it's very, very difficult to get enough protein on an 800-calorie vegetarian diet. Michael Mosely mentions casually in his book that you might find that because of a lack of protein your hair falls out, but not to worry, because once you come off the diet it will grow back again. Easy for him to say, because his hair's only a few inches long. My hair comes down almost to my waist and takes years to replace. When it started disappearing down the plughole I was not impressed. I therefore had to switch to mostly meat (and fish) meals, which night after night was hard going for this herbivore.
Having said all that, in many ways embarking on the diet was a relief. Ever since the HbA1c, my prediabetic status had been on my mind basically all the time. Every time I ate something, no matter what it was, I was wondering whether it was making my condition worse. I could see that being diabetic or even prediabetic was a life sentence, in that it was something you had to take into account absolutely every day. At least on the diet I knew I was actually doing something about it and, hopefully, at the end getting out of this situation.
So nevertheless, I persisted. I did eight weeks of this, then another five weeks of five 800 calorie days a week (skipping, you guessed it, the weekends). I also used some of the methods Jessie Inchauspé recommends in her book Glucose Revolution: having a small salad dressed with vinegar at the start of a meal, eating carbs last in a meal, not having carbs by themselves, and doing some exercise immediately after eating (squats or hand weights for me rather than anything aerobic because of the rosacea problem). Jessie, a biochemist, gives the scientific reasoning behind all of these, and they all reduce glucose spikes. According to Jessie, most people eating a Western diet have damaging glucose spikes even without an abnormal HbA1c reading, and I see no reason to disbelieve her. Her hacks were easy to do, so I did them.
And how did I get on? Tune in tomorrow for the thrilling conclusion!
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