Insights into my personal life.

This blog includes the personal details of my experiences as a recently diagnosed Type I diabetic and the impact of that diagnosis on my endurance athletic pursuits.

Please understand that I consider myself to be a work in progress. I am willing to share both my successes and failures, so please do not take my words to be professional dietary or medical advice. This is a blog, this is only a blog. I research my choices carefully, and take my health very seriously. The choices I make are my own, I am doing the best with the resources and support that I have. If you have questions or concerns feel free to comment, but please be constructive and understand that this is my life. I value it dearly.

My goal is to live a happy, healthy and active life where I can balance my internal drive to push my physical limits and the challenge of safely maintaining stability despite the challenges of Type I diabetes.

Thursday, January 17, 2013

Cravings and Influence

They're not nearly as bad as you would expect them to be.  Walking through any convenience store is a gauntlet!  Kwik Trip.  Walgreens.  Even the grocery store.  Locating my favorite almond milk requires walking past the bakery.  Stores intentionally pump the scent of the sweets straight at your face.  It won't be long before the 'cereal' isle has a playland built in.  It's almost evil.


Don't get me wrong.  It's clear and good business.  It sells stuff.  Part of our capitalist society demands that they sell and we consume.  Quantity is king and quality is secondary.  The labeling on food can be intentionally misleading.  The label of "Sugar Free" legally only refers to the presence of sucrose.  Ever drink sugar free milk?  I bet you have.  By definition wouldn't this mean that honey could be labeled sugar free?  Sure could.  Doing so would reveal the problem however.

Sour cream, yogurt, dressings, and stuff I would never eat.  They all have sugar free versions.  Sure, no sucrose.  But then all this other chemicals appear on the label.  If it ends in -ol, it's a sugar alcohol and will still react like sugar in your body.  Xylitol, mannitol, sorbitol.  Seriously.

We are all so afraid of fat.  Fat is bad.  Fat is bad.  Fat makes you fat.  B.S.  Calories in - Calories out.  Optimum nutrition requires a certain balance of carbohydrate, protein and fat.  We need to understand that there are many different types of fat.  Some fats are bad.  Saturated fats are bad.  But wait, is it?  I don't believe coconut oil to be bad.  I believe it is very healthy.  I recommend to do some research and give this delicious fat a try. 

I am consuming a lot of fat in my diet.  Avocados, all type of raw nuts, chia seeds, fish oil, cold water fish, full fat plain or greek yogurt.  I cook my eggs and sautee my vegetables in a blend of e.v.o.o. and coconut oil.  MMmm.  Mmmm.

Exhibit A:
My own god-daughter Mira eating a gingerbread
house and blatantly rubbing it in my face.

On a side note:

Boom!  I nailed my numbers this evening.  I dropped a bit low today despite lowering my basal insulin from 7U to 6U.  As I'm lowing my basal levels, the bolus has to be timed even better than before if I take in even moderately GI ranking carbs.  

I didn't bolus for this morning's breakfast of 8oz yogurt, 1/4 granola, 1/4 dry oats with hemp seeds.  Prior to my 9am workout I started out higher than I had targeted.  I was hoping to be 160mg/dL pre-workout but overshot slightly to 200 (which is the highest I've been in over a week).  The spike didn't last long as 60 minutes later post workout, during which I consumed 15g CHO as maltodextrin.  Shout out to Mike's Mix.  Anyways, immediately post workout I was 125.

I drank my vegetable juice which consisted of a little of everything.  Collards, spinach, kale, parsley, celery, beets, ginger, cucumber, and apple.  With carbs in the beets and apple the juice is sweet and tastier than you'd expect.  20oz of that fills me up.  But even then I still gradually drifted down to 76 - which is low, but still in my target zone of 75-100.

Lunch didn't have much for carbs.  Cauliflower & Kale soup (with stock I make myself), and a salad half the size of a dumptruck.  The other half was consumed yesterday.  To this point I still haven't taken any bolus insulin.  My numbers by the evening dropped as I got hungry.

I ate one small macadamia nut cookie as corrective carbs at 6:45pm and and hour later I was back up to 85 mg/dL!

Dinner:  Burrito!  Energy was getting low so I could tell I needed more carbs.  1 tortilla is 30g of carbs.  Add to that a blend of 1/4cup refried beans with 1/4cup of squash mash (makes for sweeter tasting beans).  Red onion, bed of spinach, salsa.  Ate one.  Packed one for tomorrow.  Also one glass of Original flavor almond milk and dessert!

This might sound weird but it worked for my chocolate cravings.  1 Tbsp of cocoa powder stirred into melted coconut oil then mixed with equal parts of natural, nothing else added peanut butter.  I let it set in the fridge and scraped it off the bottom of a plate with a spoon.  Different, but filled that void where a chocolate bar used to be lodged.

If you read all this food stuff thanks.  It helps me to consolidate the days events to write about them.  I learned a few things today:

1) The cookies that I keep at work work as a nice gradual corrective carb and each will raise me 20 points gradually.    

2) Exercise with my numbers a bit higher at the start felt pretty good the whole time.  I don't have much to compare it to yet, but I didn't suffer from what has felt like an inability for my muscles to fuel themselves after 10 minutes with my output over 280 watts on my bike.  I'm still only 70% of my previous output, but I count this as progress.

References:

http://www.fda.gov/Food/GuidanceComplianceRegulatoryInformation/GuidanceDocuments/FoodLabelingNutrition/FoodLabelingGuide/ucm064911.htm


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sugar_free

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