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War on Diabetes Newsletter 28th June 2025

Welcome to the third War on Diabetes newsletter, your weekly tips and ideas from someone who has had diabetes for five years and learned a lot about it. It's a practical and actionable guide to things your doctor might not be telling you about.

War on Diabetes Newsletter 28th June 2025
Me at my favourite walking spot 'The Crow's Nest'

Another week, another bump in the road, Monday started off with a bit of a twin-peaks disaster which I've turned into an experiment to review the potency of yoghurt, beetroot and walking. I go to great lengths obsessing over the details on this and if you think I'm being a bit over-the-top, then this is what life with diabetes is... it's a hundred decisions per day and it's exhausting. For type 2s worrying about blood glucose isn't a case of having to do this because of an accute (short-term/immediate) risk of death through hypoglycemia and incorrect insulin dosage as it is with type 1s, but this means it requires discipline because you do have the lazy option of chosing to ignore it for now and the long term chronic consequences will only come in a few decades so. Both forms of diabetes lay a heavy burden in subtley different ways, but both are exhausting and need to be fought with unrelenting fervour. There are slightly different forms of diabetes that can be even more exhausting as the situation becomes even more complex and managing glucose levels becomes an near-impossible task.

I've learned some more obscure scientific terms this week that have blown my mind a bit. More on that in 'What I learned this week #4'.

Also, I've signed up for the one million step challenge with Diabetes UK. I'm hoping to raise £100 to get a T-shirt and I'm not being cocky yet... I've put myself down for an XL 😂

Giz a quid and then I can't back out 😬

I've signed the formal declaration of war on diabetes and I'll be releasing the first of many exocet missiles next week. First target is #eatlessmovemore. If you have type 2 diabetes, please stop letting people say that to you and fight back. Calorie restriction and trying to exercise before you're ready will set you back in the long term.

What I learned this week

Daily food logging can help you lose twice as much weight, The Protein Leverage Hypothesis, and Osmotic Pressure causes metabolic chaos...

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Flattening the curve with ketosis - see this week's progress update for how to acheive this.

Progress Update

Yoghurt, beetroot, walking, weight loss and fine-tuning glucose control.

Read more

This week's food heroes:

Yoghurt, nuts and berries

We nearly fell out, but you'll always be my no.1 breakfast in a hurry #BFF. The micronutrients in this 2 minute prep bad-boy are worth a bit of a lactose hit. Try it, your brain will thank you.

Just throw the nuts and berries into the top of a large full fat Greek yoghurt pot - saves on the washing up when your'e in a rush.

Sausages, eggs, sugar snap peas and cherry tomatoes

No glucose spikes from this 50-50 protein-fat heavy weight breakfast option. Make sure you select sausages with a high pork content and low sugar. I've found myself munching away before now and suddenly realising "these sausages are incredibly sweet" 🤦‍♂️ Watch out for those sneaky buggers by checking the nutrition labels. "Oh no... oh no... on no no no no no..." - stop fretting too much about processed meats. Nitrites are carconegenic so bacon all the time maybe not, but good quality sausages aren't in the same league as Billy Bear ham and cheap smoked bacon.

Sugar snap peas are the easiest thing to add to sausages or other breakfast meats when you add them to the oven (yes fish is better but I have serious environmental concerns). Just spread some butter on baking paper or tin foil, add seasoning and some decent organic tomatoes in place of ketchup and wrap it up.

Butterflied chicken tikka with broccoli and potatoes

Our local garden centre has a butchers with some very fine looking birds 🙄 Pre-spatchcocked and pre-seasoned chicken made for an easy-going Sunday dinner where I only needed to throw the veg into the oven avec madame, et un grand glug de la creme.

Easiest chicken curry ever

New Recruit Tip

Log your food. After trying to get hold of a CGM, it's probably the most effective tool that will help with controling your blood glucose levels. I find MyNetDiary a good app to monitor this as it has a respectable database of food already available and its AI isn't bad at guessing food items from a photo if you're in a social situation where you don't want to be asking how many grams of every single ingredient has ended up in front of you. If you prefer, you could use a notebook - small A5 or A6 notebooks might be best so you can carry them around with you. Don't sweat too much on the details, don't plan, just start. Make this a habit in whatever format you chose to go with and work on reviewing what works and what doesn't.

See 'What I learned this week #4' for more details on the benefits of food and drink logging

Diabetes Veterans

Can we talk about cholesterol? Your brain and many other bodily functions need it and I'm honestly putting off telling my GP that I've not taken any statins since January because it was giving me dementia symptoms. It comes back to that judgement you get from health professionals being dissapointed in you. I'm fairly confident that LDL totals don't really give an accurate risk analysis for coronary heart disease as I've read a lot about trigliceride to HDL ratio being a much more telling factor and I really can't be bothered arguing this with them. Have any of you ever managed to get a full lipid profile from the NHS? I'm wondering whether to get a paid private blood test to look at things like triglycerides, pattern A and pattern B LDL, fasting insluin level, HOMA-IR and so on.

Join the discussion on the War on Diabetes Facebook group

I struggled to find where to buy non-homogenised milk locally and eventually found The Modern Milkman. Their organic whole milk in my area is non-homogenised so I've been getting milk and eggs from them for two yeas now. Use this link to get 50% off your first two weeks and they'll give me 50% off my next delivery as well. Cheers!

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