Quick Catch-up Post

 I'll try and make entries more often.... sorry. I mean at this point, no one is reading yet, but still. With all other changes in my life, I need to commit to this. 

January 23...been over a month since my last post. Let's see what's happened since then in bullet-list format, and I'll expand on some of them in this post and others in later posts:

• My average daily fasting sugar has dropped from the low 200s to around 110-120;
• I've not had any fast food since December 6;
• I've not had diet soda since December 7;
• I've not had a sandwich or any bread, really, since December 7.
  
• My weight is now 339lbs;
• My relationship with food has gone through a 170-degree change. Not quite a full flip, but close to it;
• I've gone from taking insulin 5x a day to 2x, and the reason for that will occupy it's own post;
• I've made a bunch of discoveries about myself and how I deal with food and exercise and how I feel about food an exercise, which are two vastly different things.

Kind of hard to figure out which is the most important of these...so I'll pick one at random: Blood Sugar readings. 

Back when I wasn't paying attention to my diet and exercise, I'd try to "watch my diet" in the sense that I wouldn't abuse the rules too bad. I'd take a fasting blood sugar and it'd be 200 or 250. That would be discouraging and after a while I'd go from taking it daily to weekly, and then just randomly. 

"I had a piece of cake last night, I wonder what my sugar is this morning?"

Taking my sugars now is a way I hold myself responsible. I've turned it into a game. Every morning as I get the test strip out of it's little container and slide it in the glucometer, I make a mental inventory of what I ate the day before and guess what my number will be. It's been interesting to see how certain foods that you might think are innocuous actually have a positive or negative effect on your sugars. (Note: Everyone is different, and certain foods that affect me might not affect you.)

Case in point: Sour cream. I had about two tablespoons on a bowl of chili last week and it threw 20 extra points on my sugar the next morning. Annie and I also realized that sour cream is cloying and thick and it actually hides the flavor of what we're eating. We used to put it on tacos and all kinds of food -- I see it leaving our diet quickly. 

I want to repeat that: Testing my fasting blood sugar is how I hold myself accountable. It's important that I do it every single day, without fail, even if I get a high reading. I hit 160 the other day and we looked at what I ate the day before and realized it was something else we had to cut out of my diet. 

I have three glucometers. One in the bathroom I use every morning, one at my desk in my home office and one at my desk at my office. I do spot checks often, just to see where it is. This will be a topic for another post soon, but I also discovered that I've been taking my Metformin wrong. Once I started taking it as I should, the wide swings in my blood sugar after I eat have calmed way, way down.

On Christmas Eve, Annie and I went to a Thai place for lunch and a Japanese place for dinner. I had an avocado and cucumber salad and some yellow chicken curry with brown rice and for dinner it was shrimp, tuna, some asparagus and a tiny bit of ribeye (wrapped around the asparagus). Christmas morning the Sugar Gods gave me a present: a fasting blood sugar of 81. 

I am very, very lucky -- I live in a foodie vacation destination. I am surrounded by fantastic restaurants in a largely health-conscious community. There are uncountable numbers of places I can go to eat to get fantastic-tasting yet healthy food. One of my big fears (and I'll talk more about this in another post) was that eating diabetic meant eating "bland."

Nothing could be further from the truth.