Wednesday, August 08, 2018

3 Month Progress on the Mastering Diabetes Program

I have been doing the Mastering Diabetes program - which advocates a whole food, plant based, low fat diet - since April 10, 2018.

My perception was that it seemed to be helping me, but I started to grow discouraged because sometimes it can be more work than I am used to (i.e. cutting up greens and fruit for breakfast instead of a quick bowl of cereal, as well as being mindful of how much fat - that's right, fat - I am eating everyday). Then I went to get my 3-month labs done and holy cow was I encouraged and re-energized to keep this up!

First, here are my biomarker goals:

  • LDL Cholesterol: under 100 is ideal. This is the most important number for determining risk of heart disease.
  • HDL Cholesterol: when you have less LDL cholesterol you need less HDL cholesterol. OK for HDL to go lower! 
  • Triglycerides: under 150 is ideal. This is a measure of how many fatty acids are floating around in your blood stream.
  • Hemoglobin A1c: between 6-6.5% is best for type 1 diabetics. This is an average of your blood sugars over 3 months.
  • Systolic Blood Pressure: goal is to get below 120. Top number.
  • Diastolic Blood Pressure: goal is to get below 80. Bottom number.
  • Vitamin D: goal is to keep above 30. Lower than this is often due to insulin resistance. Things that can help are to get more sunlight, eat shiitake mushrooms, take a supplement. 
  • TSH: is an indicator of how well your thyroid is working. More is not good. You don't want it increasing over time - this means you're suffering from thyroid dysfunction.
  • C Peptide: is the molecule attached to insulin. If you are not making insulin then you won't have this.

Here were my lab results:


 Woohoo! After being at my highest weight, A1c, and cholesterol OF MY ENTIRE LIFE, they all came down significantly after only 3 months! On top of this, I have still been losing weight (although a little more slowly) and my blood sugars have been getting better and better as my body is growing less insulin resistant. If I eat a lot of carbs, my blood sugar may spike a little bit but it quickly comes back down - this never happened before (it would take a long time to come back down to normal).

Basically, a low carb, high fat/protein diet really screwed my body up these past 5 years. In the LONG term, it made me super insulin resistant, spiked my blood sugars/A1c, caused me to gain weight, and increased my cholesterol dramatically. It also made me super constipated. 

I've since learned that the reason a Paleo or Ketogenic diet works in the SHORT term (about 3-6 months) is because people get rid of all the crappy processed food they were eating (bread, cakes, muffins, chips, breakfast cereals, pizza, TV dinners, etc.) and they start to eat more whole foods. Foods in their whole, natural form are the way nature intended them to be and your body knows what to do with them/how to process them for energy. But eating too much fat (or "protein" - which these low carb diets like to emphasize - which is always attached to fat!) overloads your liver. People should not be eating more than about 30 grams of fat per day. An overloaded, fatty liver leads to the LONG term health problems I mentioned previously (weight gain, higher and more difficult to control blood sugars, high cholesterol) as well as heart disease: the #1 killer of Americans. 

Did you know that a whole food, plant based, low fat diet is the only diet scientifically proven to stop and even reverse heart disease (the #1 killer of Americans)? That's right. So eating this way not only got rid of my eczema and improved all of my biomarkers, it also puts me at lower risk of getting heart disease!

Dr. Michael Greger, who started www.nutritionfacts.org, does some great videos about this fact, and gives his sources (scientific studies) as to how this statement can be made.
And here are his sources to back up the info in the 3 videos mentioned above:

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