Hi everyone. I need some advice. I started this diet because my Dr told me I would be diabetic in a couple of years if I didnt clean up my lifestyle. He did not even say I was pre-diabetic. So now I am nearly finishing week 7. I am a 46yr old male and I have gone from 112kgs to 97.7kgs, so a drop of 14kgs. We have stuck to the recipes strictly etc….
BUT… Within 3 days of starting the diet my blood sugars were in the normal range (low 5’s) and have stayed that way, but in the last 7 days morning noon and night they have been in the 6’s and once or twice in the 7’s, so my sugars are currently worse then when I started.
As you can imagine this is demoralising.
One query is. We are Orthodox Christians and have started lent strictly a week ago. Basically this is a strict vegan diet for Orthodox (and no olive oil) untill Easter Sunday. I have googled this and it seems vegan is great for diabetes etc? I am happy not to do lent if it is compromising my health but am flumuxed!

Firstly, well done Orthodoxia, that’s a great result so far. I’m no expert and others will probably respond more fully, but I’m guessing in the changes made for lent, your carb intake might have risen, causing you blood sugar readings to rise. Do you track your daily carb intake? If not, it could be worth doing, to see what it is and if you should maybe modify in some way to bring it back into range.

Since your Lent diet excludes both dairy and olive oil, your fat intake must have dropped significantly. Even if you’ve kept your carbs as low as they were before, they’ve been accompanied by fewer fats and therefore digested and converted into blood glucose faster than they would otherwise have been. Meanwhile, something has to fill in the blank spaces left by the Lenten prohibitions, and if it’s not carbs, it has to be protein. Since you can’t eat animals or animal products, your options for protein are soy, nuts, seeds and legumes, the last three of which are high in carbohydrates and calories. It’s a bit of a tough spot you’re in, I’m afraid.

The calorie and carb counts in the book can be a little off. I think it would be very useful for you to do your own weighing and calculating of your carb intake per meal. That will give you some hard data to match to your blood sugar readings.

Hi Guys
Thanks so much for replying. Showing my ignorance here. I have always thought carbs were in the main things like rice, potato and flour which we have not had at all. This last week the day has been made up of 800 calories of fresh fruit / veges / nuts. I am still losing weight. I also thought that my sugars should be lower in the morning? Does this mean my pancreas is still not functioning well even with all the weight loss?

Oh no, there are carbs aplenty in all kinds of vegetables, and most fruits are very, very high in sugar. The 800 calorie limit is restrictive enough to keep you losing weight, but when your carb levels go up, so does your blood sugar. Diet doctor has helpful at-a-glace charts of the carbohydrate levels in 100 grams of different foods so you can get a better idea of how many carbs you’ve been eating since Lent began.

https://www.dietdoctor.com/low-carb/vegetables
https://www.dietdoctor.com/low-carb/fruits
https://www.dietdoctor.com/low-carb/nuts

Those are basic overviews. To find out the calorie and carb count of all the foods I eat, I use the website and app MyFitnessPlan.

As for your fasting blood sugar, you’re likely experiencing the dawn phenomenon. Read more about it here: https://thebloodsugardiet.com/forums/topic/feedback-please/#post-58165

Esnecca you must tell how to share links, so much better than just telling people to search from themselves as they sometimes dont know exactly what it is they are looking for. Good work girl.

Thanks, sunshine-girl. I’m something of a link hoarder. To get the link to an individual forum post, click on the chain link icon to the right of report post, click in the browser’s address field so the url is highlighted, hold down the Control key and hit the letter “C.” This will copy the address to your clipboard. I then paste it into my offline link list by holding down the Control key and hitting the letter “V.” Do the same thing — select your link from the link, hit Ctrl-C, then Ctrl-V — to paste a link into a post.

Some of them parse on their own, like the Diet Doctor charts which embedded themselves in my above post, but only when you put each link on its own line with a hard return between them. Others don’t parse at all, like links to forum posts. I wish I knew how to make a phrase hotlink to a website, but I’ve tried a couple of different ways and the software doesn’t seem to allow the usual codes that work in other forums.

Oh well, as long as the info is out there, it doesn’t have to look pretty.