I live, write, and garden in the PNW with my husband of 27 years, disabled daughter, college-aged son, and my 84-year-old mother. We have paid off $250,000.00 worth of debt (if you include the interest) in the last fifteen years and as of 6/12/2020 are 100% DEBT FREE!!!!Just skip this one if you don't want to hear about my kid's upcoming surgery or what new thing I'm facing with my health.
My son has a surgery scheduled on Valentine's Day with an ENT at Virginia Mason to try to rebuild the part of his nose where the cartilage has collapsed. I can't remember if I talked about this before or not, but depending on whether the doctor can harvest enough of his own cartilage to transplant or if he has to use artifical cartilage he should see a 40% to 80% improvement. Even 40% will be such an improvement. So his surgery will probably hit the 2/3 of the deductible right there as well as the out of pocket max for regular and specialist, although we will probably have another $1000 we have to max out for one of us because the family max is $3000, but the personal deductible max is $2000. It's a weird system.
At least $3000 of that will be covered and I'm hoping we can save the rest in the medical fund between now and then. Right now I've only been putting enough in to cover our monthly output, because we've had so much monthly output. DH and his crowns, DD and her cavities. Our dental sucks. Vision isn't is pretty good unless you are nearsighted and farsighted and have an astigmatism. Raise your hand if you are me. And we were wasting so much money over the summer and early fall while I was too sick to cook or shop and the guys were pretty much unwilling to and I was too weak to reorder their thinking.
But I'm well now. Or am I? (Cue unsettling move music here.) Dun, dun, dun. I got my fasting glucose results back. 139. It should be between 70 and 100 mg/dL. Now last time it was 124 which is the high range of 100 to 125 where they try to monitor it with dietary changes and exercise, but of course between my fall and being sick I could barely get out of bed for more than half an hour and on the days that I could it was to walk outside and tell my son what to pick and what to water and then sit in a chair to get some sunlight if it wasn't a scorcher. I couldn't do much else before crawling back into bed. And I certainly didn't eat right with all that takeout. At least my choelesterol is really good.
So now that I have finally kicked that miserable illness out the door, I'm really facing diabetes. I found out yesterday when my labs came back and I'll see the doctor again on the 23rd where I will start tracking my blood with a monitor. I may not be diabetic, but I've had some symptoms for a while, so I could be. This is the thing that is motivating me. I have watched people die of this. I don't want to die of this.
So I got off the phone with the receptionist, finished making dinner, and I had my spaghetti dinner, only instead of having 3 cups of noodles, I took 1, and had 4 meatballs instead of 3. There was a diced zucchini in the sauce, maybe 2 cups worth, and I also made broccoli and there were salad fixings, so I had both of those. I felt hungry around midnight, but I drank a bunch of water and it passed, so was probably just thirsty, then went to bed at one. I'm trying to get to bed earlier, but I was going to bed at 3 before the time change, so I've progressed by an hour. I am getting up earlier. Maybe no caffiene, very little sugar, and eating right will help.
Today I carefully planned out my food. There are two methods of eating for diabetes. One is almost completely vegetarian, which I know makes me binge because of fruit, and also I am allergic to lectins so beans, lentils, and almost all legumes are out of the question, which really limits you on protein, and one is controlling your carbs, but making sure you get just enough of them. The second is the only one that I have ever lost a substantial amount of weight on.
I used some of the sausage from our pig (no sugar) to make two small patties for breakfast, each 3 oz on the food scale. I had one soft-boiled egg, and half an English cucumber.
For lunch I had 5 oz of ling cod fish brushed lightly with melted ghee (because I can't stand oil on fish), seasoned with salt, pepper, and sazon and put in a foil packet with zucchini and sprigs of thyme, some sage leaves, some flatleaf parsley, some oregano and some finely minced garlic (home grown) and a couple tbsp of water, and placed in the oven to steam. It was so good.
Then dinner was where I got the majority of my carbs for the day from. I had two 4 oz beef kielbasas from this really clean brand Kiolbasa, 1 yellow potato diced, seasoned with salt, pepper, and thyme, and tossed with 2 tbsp of filtered bacon grese since I was cooking at 400°F (205°C). I was planning to have some of the leftover broccoli but I ended up knocking it on the floor. My hands just let go sometimes. I have twitches. I decided screw it, and made a big, big salad instead. I had 3 tbsp of ketchup on the potatoes and 3 tbsp of 1000 Island dressing on the salad. So I had 63 grams of carbs not counting the salad and the other green vegetables. I was told to aim for 60, so if I had only done 2 tbsp of salad dressing I would have it. But close enough.
I am steaming some hard boiled eggs tonight in my little cooker so I will have them if I need to snack or even if I don't feel like making breakfast. Just having an egg or two to eat will wake up my brain. I can't afford not to have regular meals anymore just because I don't want to eat breakfast in the morning.
I have gotten into some really bad habits. Pepsi first thing in the morning, when I'd been off it for so long. That alone probably has driven my glucose up, even with fasting that morning. Eating way too many empty carbs, junk food, doughnuts, chocolate. The only thing I wasn't eating was potato chips, because ever since Lays started using oil other than sunflower oil (Ukraine/Russia war) their chips don't taste the same and I don't like them, so I was off chips completely except if I made pico de gallo, then I'd eat Tostitos.
Anyhow today is day one with no Pepsi, very little sugar, only what's in the ketchup and dressing and those are 5g and 3g per tbsp respectively. I'm sure I'll be going through withdrawals, but since I am already having painful symptoms from my pneumonia vaccine, and where the lady who did my labs left a massive bruise where she blew the vein in my arm trying to get into my vein and then blew the one in my hand with an even worse bruise and then had to call someone else to find a vein in my other arm which took her five minutes, what's one more? I can handle it. Just call me a pincushion.
I am not worried about fat. The doctor said not to worry about fat, just carbs. He said that animal sources of fat were actually better for me than plant derived fats, but olive and avocado oils have other health benefits and should always be included in one's diet according to the most recent studies. I mean, I'm not to go eating a cup of butter or anything like that, but lard, or tallow, or bacon grease in one or two tbsp increments is fine. And no deep frying anything. I've always felt that way about animal fats, though. I've been reading anecdotal stuff on it for years. Plus all Eskimos survived on was whale blubber and whale meat and they were healthy.
I feel better, though, after one day of eating right. My brain felt less foggy today. I wasn't wanting to eat constantly, only when I'm hungry, which is at meal times. I didn't feel like my blood sugar is crashing. I didn't feel dizzy or light-headed at all today. I feel a lot more tired at the end of the day, like I'm ready to go to sleep at a decen time and not late.
I don't know if my insurance will cover a glucose monitor or even how much they cost. If they cover it, it won't cost anything. And if I can drop it my number down to where it belongs and get a good start on getting my weight down, maybe we won't have to do anything more. I hate having to get shots every 4 weeks. I don't want to do it daily. I have no idea how much insulin costs, but I know it is expensive even though it shouldn't be. I know there is some sort of pill now, too. But maybe I won't need anything if I do this right. It's just going to monitoring for now. Hopefully, I can fix this.
I'm not telling my mother. I don't need her to be twitting me about my weight, just like she and dad used to do when I put on the freshman fifteen in college, or didn't lose my baby weight after giving birth to my second kid, or her alone in later years after dad died. I don't need any negatives from her. She's the reason I stress eat so much. That and all the medical issues that arise in my family.
November 13th, 2022 at 02:53 pm 1668351236
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I mean, doctors used to say smoking was good for you, even while pregnant, calmed your nerves, and kept you slim. Yeah, except the heart disease and lung cancer they didn't know about then, or the lower birth weight babies. There was a lot they didn't know about the low fat/only plant fat, high carb, low protein diet when it started. They didn't know it would lead to more heart disease, more diabetes, and skyrocket morbid obesity AND vastly increase the rates of dementia and not just among old people, but early onset as well, as even more recent studies have shown.
My daughter's nutritionist gives the same advice as my doctor and she graduated 3 years ago and it is what they were taught. That the old info has made people just get very sick and not be able to lose weight and keep it off, not be able to sleep, not be able to have full proper brain function, sometimes not even proper eye function which needs 20g of fat a day just by themselves. The brain needs significantly more, being an organ made of 60% fat. That balance must be maintained. It needs much more fat than the 57g to 87g of fat per day recommended on a low fat diet, high carb, low protein diet. If 20g are already taken by your eyes, that doesn't leave much for the brain, or maybe none is left for the eyes and still not enough for the brain. And the rest of your body needs fat to function, too, like hormone production and cellular repair. You cannot get that from a low fat diet. And the amount of plant oil you would need to eat daily would make you sick and so might the number of avocados (either in price or in amount) compared to eating it as animal fat, in milk, eggs, cheese, meat, butter, an avocado and a tbsp or two of olive oil. The worst possible fats are hydrogenated like margarine or any used in deep frying, like shortening or partially hydrogenated fats like nut butters you don't grind yourself. Those do no good to your body at all and plenty of bad, so you couldn't use those for your fat intake.
Outdated information proliferates on the internet and even in doctors' offices. It's been proven cholesterol levels have nothing to do with dietary cholesterol and that it actually improves greatly when people start eating more animal fat, larger amounts of animal protein, and far less carbs. They've known this for at least a couple decades, but the myth that eggs are bad for you still persists, and that was just a commercial smear campaign by a cereal company that had paid for a study that started that whole thing, because eggs were outselling cereal at the grocery store by a huge margin.
I have a friend who went vegan whose cholesterol went through the roof, even after eating as spot on nutritionally as one can eat as a vegan, with all the proper variety and making the proper amino acids and taking the right supplements, all of it. She gained 30 pounds despite walking every day and could not get it off. I saw her food. It was varied and beautiful. All of the standard advice said that her numbers should be great, but they were awful. Before she became vegan she ate fish and eggs and ghee (butter oil), didn't eat grains except rice, never had beans, soy, or tofu, and her cholesterol was perfect. On the advice of her doctor, she decided to return to that way of eating since she only became vegan because her son did, and he'd moved out. 6 months after becoming pescatarian again, mostly oily fish like sardines, herring, and the like, but also salmon, cod, trout, and tuna, and shellfish in season, she had lost 20 pounds and her numbers were back in range of where they should have been. 9 months out and she had lost all 30 pounds and at 12 months her cholesterol numbers were even better. It's been about two years. She's kept the weight off and her numbers are still good. She told me so when I told her my news.
December 1st, 2022 at 10:32 pm 1669933943