Progress Update #2

Welcome to the second installment of my regular update series where I review what does and doesn't work on the journey to type 2 diabetes remission.

Two pint's the limit

First, the bad news... I managed to completely screw up my pretty graph showing a steady and continuing decrease in my 7-day average glucose reading by having 3 pints of lager on Father's Day. That set my CGM off like a rocket, hitting 11.6mmol/L. As I've recently had a good response to two pints on a pub outing, I'm now imposing a two pint per week limit. I think having a big meal before hand also helped so no boozehounding on an empty stomach from now on.

What change caused this?

One pint of lager contains around 10g of sugar compared to about 2g in a 175ml glass of red wine. Consuming around 30-40g of sugar in liquid form is going to cause a very steep glucose spike.

I'd had some chicken soup for lunch (followed by a 25 minute walk) about an hour before having my first pint so that's not going to give me enough fat and protein to help slow down the absorption of glucose into my blood.

I was in no condition to cook anything when I got home, so we had Burger King take away. I had a burger (fries and drinks are a no-go) which isn't usually too bad, but having the bun just before bed is adding more glucose to my system that my muscles aren't going to be able to burn off while sleeping. It's generally advisable to eat an evening meal at least 3 hours before bed time. That can be a bit impractical on some days, so I aim to leave at least 2 hours after a meal before going to bed.

Alcohol (and fructose) block the liver with fat which inhibits its normal metabolic pathways and contributes to insulin resistance.

I'm (almost) normal 😅

So now the good news...

This week has been the first time my blood glucose has been in the target range for 100% of the time. That's according to my Libre app anyway - I think it dropped my 11.6 reading assuming it was an error. In any case, being in the green range for most of the time is really good progress. When I first started, this bar chart was pretty much inverted and I was mostly in the orange and red zones.

What change caused this?

My average carbohydrate intake has dropped from around 71g to 69g per day which isn't much, but I have managed 3 days last week where my daily carb intake has been around 30g and those days have helped to put me into nutritional ketosis. At the moment, I'm dropping in and out of ketosis but I'm happy with that as I'm aiming to improve my metabolic flexibility. Having those 3 days of very low carb consumption seems to have helped to drammatically stabilise my blood glucose levels.

I've gone from a weekly average of 7,261 to 11,493 steps per day. That's not taken any huge effort. I've found the more I walk, the more I want to walk. I think I'm getting 'runner's high', so I'm having to walk further to get the same dopamine hit. I need to be careful of getting carried away and overdoing it at this stage so I'm going to aim to keep around 11-12,000 steps per day for the next week or two.

I've managed to cut down to drinking every other day instead of drinking every day which is a bit of a milestone for me. I need to go further on cutting down so the next goal on this front is going to be only drinking every three days instead of just every other day.

A day without diabetes

Wednesday 18th June was the first day I had a whole day of not just being within acceptable target blood glucose range, but amazingly, in the normal non-diabetic range. This wasn't even within a pre-diabetic range. This is what normal looks like.

What change caused this?

All of the above +

Total macros for this day:

32g net carbs | 106g protein | 71g fat

I had fish, eggs and sprouts for a late breakfast so missed out lunch.

Not sure if this was a good thing but I got up later than usual.

General Progress

I checked in on LibreView and my month-on-month progress is looking great; having dropped my average glucose from 8.1 in May to 6.1 mmol/L in June. There is also a flattening of the average curve and narrowing of the overall range. No hypo-glycemia events so far for June. I suspect that's because I've come off the gliclazide medication... which I did last week and I think I forgot to mention it 😅

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