CPAPtalk.com

Thanks,

As I said Im currently not dxed with type II diabetes, but if I keep going the way Im going its just a matter of time I am sure, unfortunately. I did seem to have things much better under control (in everything) when my OSA was full pressure and fully under control.

I will say this, when I started that bariatric program in mid 2014 (one of the best things Ive done medically besides get treated for sleep apnea, btw), they gave me a ton of high end bloodwork. Cost a lot of money. It was a battery of bloodwork way beyond what even an aggressive Internal medicine will do for you when you first see them.

I was given some blood test that tests your body's inflammatory level. Mine was off the chart, unreal high. I might have mentioned that here in the past I cant remember. But the inflammation can be caused by a bunch of stuff. I learned that the bariatric doctors and science people believe obesity and morbid obesity AND sleep apnea create bad inflammation in the body. And its this inflammation thats what causes all this damage to the body, they dont understand the inflammation process yet. They are studying it like crazy. But its the inflammation that these diseases create that kills.

The scientists are even starting to believe that clinical depression is related somehow to inflammation. I mean immune type inflammation, not inflammation like you get if you injure a muscle or joint.

Janknitz wrote:McGrumpy,

Required reading for you is Dr. Bernstein's Diabetes Solution. by Richard K. Bernstein. You can start at their website until you get your hands on the book: http://www.diabetes-book.com/read-onlin ... -solution/

And if you are waiting for the official diagnosis, your reading this should help you understand why that's a very bad idea. Besides, the professional advice is ridiculous--they will tell you to eat lots of carbs and take lots of medicine.

Also highly recommended: http://www.phlaunt.com/diabetes/ (based on Bernstein's principles)

And if you are more visually or auditorially oriented: Dr. Bernstein's YouTube Diabetes University https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WFNGdKSXx64

When you are done there, go to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mAwgdX5VxGc

As I said Im currently not dxed with type II diabetes, but if I keep going the way Im going its just a matter of time I am sure, unfortunately.

It does NOT have to be "just a matter of time". Come on, you took charge of your health by getting the gastric bypass and reining in your diet. Do you remember how it felt to be in control of your health, and to make your self better? You can do this again, instead of waiting for the inevitable.

The inevitable is about as terrible as it gets. Amputation, kidney disease and eventual dialysis, heart attack, loss of vision, stroke, and dementia. Who wants to be chopped into little pieces then die in a puddle in a nursing home bed????

You CAN stop it before it gets there. And don't rely on the conventional medicine's "eat up and shoot up" approach--it does not stop the inevitable. But taking charge of your health with a careful diet that reduces hyperglycemia and hyperinsulemia CAN and WILL stop the progression (and possibly even reverse it). You know the drill, you've already been almost all the way there before (enforced by your bypass). You can do this, don't give up on yourself and choose the terrible end.

Six years ago I was dying, and I had given up all hope. But one day I woke up to the fact that I wasn't going to see my youngest graduate from school or see my grandchildren, and my poor health was going to take down my entire family. I took positive steps to help myself. I feel so empowered by what I have accomplished. I'm healthier today than I had been in many decades. I can do the things I want, my health and my body no longer stand in my way. I feel so GREAT! And especially because all this is MY accomplishment, not something a doctor or someone else told me I should do. I get the credit for staving off the "inevitable".

Julie wrote:Just a reminder... alcohol is pure carb.

That's a complete and total lie. Alcohol has no carbs in it whatsoever. It's just alcohol. Vodka, rum, scotch, gin.....no carbs. Please don't spread misinformation. The mixers that you mix with it has carbs, beer and wine have carbs. Alcohol does not.

Janknitz wrote:McGrumpy,

Required reading for you is Dr. Bernstein's Diabetes Solution. by Richard K. Bernstein. You can start at their website until you get your hands on the book: http://www.diabetes-book.com/read-onlin ... -solution/

And if you are waiting for the official diagnosis, your reading this should help you understand why that's a very bad idea. Besides, the professional advice is ridiculous--they will tell you to eat lots of carbs and take lots of medicine.

Also highly recommended: http://www.phlaunt.com/diabetes/ (based on Bernstein's principles)

And if you are more visually or auditorially oriented: Dr. Bernstein's YouTube Diabetes University https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WFNGdKSXx64

When you are done there, go to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mAwgdX5VxGc

Hi Jan, I am glad to hear this is working for you.

I showed this to my husband who is a retired doctor as well as a diabetic. He says this "normalizing blood sugar" thing is an interesting concept and was massively tried over 50 years ago. He was involved in some of the research. It was abandoned because in a large population, it was impossible to make the theory work. Most people simply find it totally impractical to test their blood sugar to this extent. So this is not new news, it is a protocol that has been already tried on large populations and has not worked. Now some can make it work, but doctors and researchers are looking for some way to control blood sugar successfully on large populations. This obviously doesn't work for that because it is totally impractical for large populations. It is kind of the same thing as CPAP. You have to be really dedicated to make it work - it simply does not work for the majority of people. Not because the theory does not work, but it is simply not practical and most people will not do it.

We did buy Dr. Bernstein's book because there may be something my husband can get out of it.

bambiying wrote:

Julie wrote:Just a reminder... alcohol is pure carb.

That's a complete and total lie. Alcohol has no carbs in it whatsoever. It's just alcohol. Vodka, rum, scotch, gin.....no carbs. Please don't spread misinformation. The mixers that you mix with it has carbs, beer and wine have carbs. Alcohol does not.

This is completely untrue. ALCOHOL is a CARB.

PEF wrote:

bambiying wrote:

Julie wrote:Just a reminder... alcohol is pure carb.

That's a complete and total lie. Alcohol has no carbs in it whatsoever. It's just alcohol. Vodka, rum, scotch, gin.....no carbs. Please don't spread misinformation. The mixers that you mix with it has carbs, beer and wine have carbs. Alcohol does not.

This is completely untrue. ALCOHOL is a CARB.

Please show me scientific proof of that. I want science to back up what I feel is wrong. I have already googled, so I know you are wrong, but prove it anyway.

bambiying wrote: Please show me scientific proof of that. I want science to back up what I feel is wrong. I have already googled, so I know you are wrong, but prove it anyway.

You need to learn how to Google apparently.

https://www.dietdoctor.com/low-carb/alcohol

Depends on what type of drinks you are drinking.

Krelvin wrote:

bambiying wrote: Please show me scientific proof of that. I want science to back up what I feel is wrong. I have already googled, so I know you are wrong, but prove it anyway.

You need to learn how to Google apparently.

https://www.dietdoctor.com/low-carb/alcohol

Depends on what type of drinks you are drinking.

Hold it right there. In my post above, I specifically said that vodka, gin, rum and the like do not have carbs. They are alcohol. Alcohol has no carbs. I then also said that beer and wine have carbs. Beer and wine are not alcohol. They are drinks that have both carbs and alcohol in them. Want to get me a better source?

Oh, here's some!
https://www.verywell.com/alcoholic-beve ... et-2242503
http://www.healthline.com/health/food-n ... #Overview1
http://www.livestrong.com/article/43653 ... ave-carbs/

There has been some confusion about whether alcohol is a carb. Logically speaking, since alcohol, even pure vodka, has got energy (calories), it must be classified as something and it can only be classified as a carb. That is the simple explanation.

I would caution you about "GOOGLING" and then posting whatever you find. There is a wealth of highly questionable, misleading, outdated, and just plain wrong information on the internet.

Krelvin wrote:

bambiying wrote: Please show me scientific proof of that. I want science to back up what I feel is wrong. I have already googled, so I know you are wrong, but prove it anyway.

You need to learn how to Google apparently.

https://www.dietdoctor.com/low-carb/alcohol

Depends on what type of drinks you are drinking.

He's correct. Ethanol (drinking alcohol) is not a carbohydrate in the chemical sense. Carbohydrates are, by definition, molecules that look like (CmH20n - where m and n vary). They always have an H20 present, or otherwise have a 2:1 ratio of Hydrogen to Oxygen. Alcohols are based on hydroxyl groups (OH). Now there are sugars that are alcohols (and they're called sugar alcohols for that reason), like Molitol, Xylitol, etc. But except for sugar alcohols mentioned, alcohols in general (and ethanol in particular) is not a carbohydrate. The page you mention there is just pointing out sugars present for other reasons (stuff added to the drink).

The wikipedia article on carbohyrdrates (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbohydrate) and ethanol (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethanol) explains this in more detail if interested.

Now , this all said, alcohols do have chemical energy that humans can metabolize, so they do have have "calories' - about ~7 calories/gram vs ~4 calories per gram for carbohydrates. Alcohol can be pretty caloric as a result, and this is true even without all of the add-in stuff in mixed drinks and direct carbohydrates that are present in actual drinks.

From now of when I diet, I'm going to leave that Olive and Cherry out. don't want to overdo it. Jim

I think i need a bottle of calories, of the sauvignon type.

I showed this to my husband who is a retired doctor as well as a diabetic. He says this "normalizing blood sugar" thing is an interesting concept and was massively tried over 50 years ago. He was involved in some of the research. It was abandoned because in a large population, it was impossible to make the theory work. Most people simply find it totally impractical to test their blood sugar to this extent. So this is not new news, it is a protocol that has been already tried on large populations and has not worked. Now some can make it work, but doctors and researchers are looking for some way to control blood sugar successfully on large populations. This obviously doesn't work for that because it is totally impractical for large populations. It is kind of the same thing as CPAP. You have to be really dedicated to make it work - it simply does not work for the majority of people. Not because the theory does not work, but it is simply not practical and most people will not do it.

Wow! This makes me very, very sad. What you are saying is that your husband agrees in his own words that “some can make it work”, but not everybody. Nothing works for everybody. Certainly not the standard treatment for diabetes, or we would see vast improvement and there would be a rush to treat people like McGrumpy because he could really benefit from preventing the inevitable. But his doctor knows that’s not true with the standard treatments that doctor has to offer. So he/she doesn’t even bother.

The statistics for standard diabetes treatments are dismal. People get sicker, they may have short term improvement (anything is an improvement over the way people eat before they get the diabetes diagnosis), but the long term stats are terrible. For one thing, the standard guidelines instruct diabetics to eat more carbohydrates than even the recommended daily allowance, when carbohydrate intolerance is the hallmark of this disease (“let’s treat the alcoholic with alcohol—there’s a great idea”). Then they prescribe a host of drugs that reduce but do not normalize blood sugars, and together with the horrible diet patients experience wild excursions from high to low blood sugars—most people do not find this treatment sustainable in the long term so they go back to eating their terrible diets and taking more and more medication to try, unsuccessfully, to treat this disease. I’ve seen it over and over again. Doctors blame these patients for their failure to stick to treatments that DO NOT WORK FOR A LARGE POPULATION. Yet they are prescribed thousands of times a day as the only option for newly diagnosed diabetics.

The reality is that using a blood sugar meter to guide what one eats works VERY WELL for many who are supported to try this approach and for the long term. People who are motivated and have support can and do sustain this approach in the long term. Unlike when your husband was doing his study (this approach, by the way, is more than 100 years old—it wasn’t new even when your husband was studying it) now there is a proliferation of groups on the internet of people who teach and support each other to “eat to the meter” and successfully control their blood sugars—at the very least tens of thousands of people who have had success in stopping the progression and in many cases reversing their diabetes—not just Bernstein’s approach but many successful variations on the theme.

So what you are saying is that doctors don’t bother even telling their patients that this is an option because it “doesn’t work for large populations”??? It doesn’t have to work for “large populations” it only has to work for individuals who are concerned enough about their own health to use it. Eventually 1+1+1+ . . . = a large population.

You could say the same thing about CPAP. The failure rate is at least 50%, not because CPAP doesn’t work, but because people don’t receive adequate support for the therapy and too many people give up. So in essence, “it doesn’t work for a large population”. How would you like it if you were diagnosed with severe sleep apnea, but the doctor didn’t bother telling you about CPAP because “too many people fail at this therapy”? Did that doctor give you informed consent if he/she failed to tell you about a viable treatment option?

If your husband treated diabetics, he surely prescribed statins. Evidence is mounting that statins DO NOT WORK FOR A LARGE POPULATION. Women for example, get no real benefit from statins for primary prevention (before they’ve had a heart attack or stroke), the number of men who need to be treated with statins for 5 years before any one person derives any benefit is a few hundred, but all risk sometimes serious side effects. Yet, I’ll bet your husband routinely prescribed statins including to women, and never explained to them that they don’t really work to reduce cardiovascular risk in women. And I’m guessing he probably didn’t offer them any alternatives except paying lip service to diet and exercise (low cholesterol diets do not work to reduce risk, the evidence is clear).

Every person I’ve met who has been smart enough to understand and implement what Dr. Bernstein and others who suggest limiting carbohydrates and replacing them with fat has experienced normalization of blood sugars, reduction or reversal of diabetes complications, beneficial weight loss and marked improvement in quality of life. Is it hard? HELL YES, it’s tedious and frustrating and takes a lot of time and energy. It’s hard to figure out what to eat sometimes—especially when away from home. It’s hard to resist that ice cream or brownie or cupcake. I miss pasta and slurping noodles in my soup. It’s hard to cook from scratch all the time and schlep my food with me to work and on trips.

But I don’t think it is anywhere near as hard as losing my feet to amputation, my brain to stroke and dementia, my vision to retinopathy, etc. I don’t think it’s nearly as hard as coming up with the money to pay for an ever growing arsenal of drugs that fail to prevent those side effects in the long run. I don’t think it’s nearly as hard as being morbidly obese and so sick I could barely walk across a room. I don’t think it’s nearly as hard as being dead.

So I could care less if it works “for a large population”. It works for me, and nearly anybody else who gives it an honest try.

PEF wrote:
Hi Jan, I am glad to hear this is working for you.

I showed this to my husband who is a retired doctor as well as a diabetic. He says this "normalizing blood sugar" thing is an interesting concept and was massively tried over 50 years ago. He was involved in some of the research. It was abandoned because in a large population, it was impossible to make the theory work. Most people simply find it totally impractical to test their blood sugar to this extent. So this is not new news, it is a protocol that has been already tried on large populations and has not worked. Now some can make it work, but doctors and researchers are looking for some way to control blood sugar successfully on large populations. This obviously doesn't work for that because it is totally impractical for large populations. It is kind of the same thing as CPAP. You have to be really dedicated to make it work - it simply does not work for the majority of people. Not because the theory does not work, but it is simply not practical and most people will not do it.

We did buy Dr. Bernstein's book because there may be something my husband can get out of it.

My mother tested at every meal from the time she was diagnosed in the early 80's until she had her first stroke. She completed controlled her diabetes without drugs until the stroke. That was over 30 years of total control. She did this while studying for her masters as well as while working full time and after when she was retired.
If you want to do it you can.

BlackSpinner wrote:

PEF wrote:
Hi Jan, I am glad to hear this is working for you.

I showed this to my husband who is a retired doctor as well as a diabetic. He says this "normalizing blood sugar" thing is an interesting concept and was massively tried over 50 years ago. He was involved in some of the research. It was abandoned because in a large population, it was impossible to make the theory work. Most people simply find it totally impractical to test their blood sugar to this extent. So this is not new news, it is a protocol that has been already tried on large populations and has not worked. Now some can make it work, but doctors and researchers are looking for some way to control blood sugar successfully on large populations. This obviously doesn't work for that because it is totally impractical for large populations. It is kind of the same thing as CPAP. You have to be really dedicated to make it work - it simply does not work for the majority of people. Not because the theory does not work, but it is simply not practical and most people will not do it.

We did buy Dr. Bernstein's book because there may be something my husband can get out of it.

My mother tested at every meal from the time she was diagnosed in the early 80's until she had her first stroke. She completed controlled her diabetes without drugs until the stroke. That was over 30 years of total control. She did this while studying for her masters as well as while working full time and after when she was retired.
If you want to do it you can.

When I first was diagnosed with Type 2 Diabetes in March of 2015 (through my own fault I'd like to add), I decided to take the bull by the horns. Even though the system was against me and I had to fight to get the proper supplies, I tested my sugar upwards of 4-5 times a day, checking which foods raised my sugar and which ones didn't. I found that one of my favorite foods, Chinese, was HORRIBLE. My solution to that was stop eating it. And I did. A family member looked at me like I was crazy and said the solution was to NOT check my sugar after eating it! Talk about denial.

But, almost two years later, I have lost 101+ pounds and have all but conquered the diabetes (still have to watch carefully). I think today, people look for any excuse NOT to be successful. We are a society that likes to blame anything or anyone other than ourselves for our failures.

I am 95% wheelchair bound and CANNOT exercise. But I've managed to lose over 100 pounds AND get my Diabetes under control. Is it easy? Of course not. It's damned hard. But people can do whatever they want to do if they really try. But it's easy not to try and blame others for the failure.