Progress Update #3

The great yoghurt and beetroot experiment

I had two annoying blood glucose spikes on Monday. It was particularly annoying as Sunday had been the perfect day and I was all excited to continue with that progress throughout the next week. Both breakfast and lunch sent me higher than I'd normally expect and rather than immediately just go for the fish and sprouts, I decided to do a bit of an experiment to see what was the most likely culprit for these spikes over the next couple of days. I carefully weighed out the ingredients so there would be no variation in the volume of each food item and the only non-intentional change was I ran out of chicken on Day 3 so swaped in some tuna and cottage cheese.

Day 1 - Yoghurt, nuts and berries - Salad with beetroot

My usual go-to quick and easy breakfast appeared to let me down with a glucose rocket up from around 6 to 9.2mmol/L. Then a chicken salad lunch with beetroot delivered the kicker.

Breakfast - Net Carbs 14g | Protein 21g | Fat 32g

Lunch - Net Carbs 28g | Protein 58g | Fat 26g

Total Net Carbs for the day - 57g

Day 2 - Nuts and berries (no yoghurt) - Salad without beetroot

Same meals and exercise routine but missing out the suspect ingredients of my new yoghurt for breakfast and beetroot for lunch.

Breakfast - Net Carbs 8g | Protein 9 g | Fat 26g

Lunch - Net Carbs 12g | Protein 57g | Fat 26g

Total Net Carbs for the day - 75g
(ended Tuesday with 11.18 units of alcohol so that increased my usual carb count so will see if that has any major impact on levels for Wednesday).

Day 3 - Same as Day 1 but with a walk before eating

Normal rule-of-thumb for lowering glucose around meals is to have a walk after eating, but I wanted to test having a big walk before breakfast as that's what I normally do but couldn't on Day 1 as I was in the office so didn't get my walk until after arriving in Manchester which was much less distance than I normally do.

So this is what a big 3.6 mile walk does for blood glucose control...

Breakfast - Net Carbs 13g | Protein 21g | Fat 32g

Lunch - Net Carbs 30g | Protein 40g | Fat 24g

Total Net Carbs for the day - 65g

Conclusions

Net carbs were acually higher on Day 2 and 3 but I still had a better glucose response, so I think it's safe to say the breakfast and lunch situation on Monday has something to answer for.

I think the biggest contributor was the lack of walking in the mornings on Day 1 and Day 2. Even though I had dropped the yoghurt (and net carbs down to just 8g) for Day 2, I still had a breakfast spike to the top end of my 7.8mmol/L target. I also think Monday morning stress of getting to work had a part to play on Day 1.

The next big contributor is the beetroot. I haven't had it for a while and didn't really think I'd added too much for my lunch on Day 1 but on reviewing it, that was around 18g of very sugary carbs in just one component of a meal. My lunch on Day 2 didn't include any beetroot and didn't spike me above the pre-meal level. On Day 3, even after a decent 1 mile walk before lunch, the beetroot took me from a nice 5mmol/L to 7.8 which is my upper limit.

Alcohol didn't seem to have a huge impact on the following Day 3, if anything it seemed to have a stabilising effect. As I've mentioned before, alcohol increases blood glucose in the long term due to its blocking of liver tissue with fat but in the short term (overnight) it will generally lower glucose levels if it's not mixed with sugar as in beer, cider, cocktails or soft drink mixers.

Overall, yoghurt is mostly off the hook, morning walks are going up in priority, and beetroot, despite all its polyphenol superstardom, is going to diabetes jail until I'm having better glucose responses. It's a member of the sugar beet family so type 2's beware. Have more berries instead.

I've signed up for the 1 Million Step Challenge

I've been contemplating this for a few weeks, and have been working on my walking routine to see if I'd be able to realistically take on a million steps in three months. Starting from my usual twice-daily 20 minute shuffle to and from the car park, aiming for around 5.5 miles per day seemed a bit ambitious but I'm managing a couple of days a week of planned walks over 6 miles and combining that with my normal daily steps I've gone from an average of 10,000 to 13,400 steps per day so around 11,000 is going to be acheivable even with a few off days for illness, blisters and really bad weather.

I've lost some weight

Since starting with my new food logging app, MyNetDiary and starting to prepare myself for the million step challenge by walking more, I've lost more weight than I'd initially expected to. I'm finally under 15 stone after not making much progress on that front in a year or two after initially shedding around five stone just by incrementally removing UPF from my diet over a few years. I've got a bit more strict with the UPF devil, having finally given up ketchup and rarely having any kind of bread, but the main reasons for my recent weight loss is more walking and reducing my carbohydrates to an average of 51 grams per day (my target was 50 so that's not a bad effort). That's put me into nutritional ketosis which is actually making me feel great. At first, trying to do this was a bit daunting, but once I tried a deconstructed sausage butty with roasted tomato instead of ketchup, I honestly haven't missed the bread/bap accompaniment. I try to have greens with cooked meals as well to help with adding fibre and micronutrients.

Blood glucose down slightly

I had a gradual slip back upwards on my 7-day average last week from 6.0 to 6.2mmol/L by the end of the week and I've brought that back down to a steady basline of 5.9mmol/L which is good, but I still want to break the 5.5mmol/L barrier because that's the diagnostic threshold for pre-diabetes so next week I'd like to see some 5.7 readings registering. Long term, I'd like to get to 5mmol/L or less as that's well within the healthy range.

I've also updated my daily targets on macronutrients to:
Protein 120g | Fat 100g | Net Carbs 50g

Alcohol

I've managed to get into a routine of only drinking on Tuesday nights and weekends. I did cheat and have a whisky and soda on Wednesday as the thought of another acrid syrupy lime cordial growing fur on my teeth is putting me off any kind of soft drink pub option, but that was my only slip up this week.

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