Hi all, I’m just starting out on my BSD journey.
I’m 38 years old and was diagnosed with Diabetes on 13th January this year – my HbA1C was 110!! My head is still spinning a bit with it all and I have to say my anxiety is pretty high!
Just prior to getting my test, I’d restarted Slimming World on 4th January and was doing the Extra Easy SP (which is really a low carb diet), and had been doing 16:8 fasts since 7th January.
My GP advised me to switch to a 900 calorie diet which I started on Wednesday and I started the BSD properly on Saturday after a trip to the supermarket. The family have been very supportive and have bought me the BSD recipe book and the Fast 800 recipe book! I’ve gotten myself an exercise bike and picked up a blood sugar monitor too.
So far since 4th Jan I’ve lost 9lbs (losing 1lb a day since Wednesday) and since I started testing my Blood Sugar 4 days ago, I’ve been averaging 6.6mmol/L. Sadly today was the first day I’ve stood on the scales without weight loss, which I’m hoping isn’t a plateu already!

Still not quite over the hunger and my legs are feeling pretty weak I think from the exercise – I’ve been averaging 2500 steps a day since lockdown, went for a 7500 step walk yesterday and Saturday – but I’m hoping it all keeps going in the right direction and my GP will take me off metformin at my review in 8 weeks if I can just kick the weight!

Any advise and wisdom from those of you more experienced with the diet is welcome 🙂

Hi Scott, and welcome to the start of your new life. You are in a very good position to get your BG right down to a non diabetic level if you can keep the carbs very low whether or not you lose the weight. Ideally both should happen but the BG should come down fairly quickly. Shout out to your doctor for putting you on this track and many dont approve, although more and more are seeing the benefits in their patients.

I guess that is one day without weight loss rather than one week. That is not a plateau, which normally comes around week 3 or 4 and can last a couple of weeks when lots of people give us. Just dont. I suspect one day is not long enough and you will see some more loss – well done on that too.

Hi and welcome. You’re on the right track. GP put me in the direction of the 800 which I started a year ago with great success (for me it was high BP although I have no doubt T2 or pre diabetes was just a matter for time…).

My advice. Plan a week’s meals. I wasn’t too strict about 800 cals a day I’d plan a week and just make sure that I averaged 800 cals a day over 7 days.

I stuck to the BSD recipes and recipe book initially. You may notice the Fast 800 is slightly less strict about pasta / flour / carbs. I stayed off the booze for my 800 calorie period as well.

Don’t weigh every day during the 800 cal phase. Twice a week is fine (I’ll admit now I’m in maintenance I do weigh most days).

Well done for getting some exercise in. I am a very keen cyclist but didn’t really feel like it for the first few weeks. I remember my first ride after starting the BSD I felt like I had 40 miles in my legs before I’d even started the ride…

The hunger pangs do ease. For me a cup of green or black tea (no milk) quell the pangs.

On the odd time the hunger did get too much I snacked on plan – a handful of nuts.

Good luck and well done.

Hi Scott
I’ve just read your post and thought I’d add my experience in as I started in a similar place to you.
I was diagnosed with T2 diabetes in 2016. My hba1c on diagnosis was close to yours – 106 or 112 (I can’t quite remember). I started the 8 week Blood Sugar Diet pretty much straight away and, like you, I bought a blood sugar home monitor and started testing so I could monitor what was happening.
I read some posters on here and on a diabetes site who kept their carbs very low so I kept mine at around 20g carbs per day (but others have also normalised their blood sugar with higher daily carbs, often e.g. 50g per day). I’d done no exercise previously so I started walking each day building up to 10,000 steps a day and three months in I joined a gym and started exercise classes.
As sunshine-girl describes my blood sugar levels started going down pretty quickly – within days and certainly within a couple of weeks – and continued falling as I went. My daily test numbers did bump up and down a bit but the weekly trend was pretty much always downwards (like a few past posters, I did have a couple of weeks at about week 5 or 6 when the numbers went up and stayed up for a couple of weeks so if that happens don’t worry, they do go down again). My first post-diagnosis hba1c 4 months later was 35 – so back in the normal range. They’ve stayed at that level ever since
When I started the BSD I was 5ft 3ins (still am!) and weighed just below 15 stone. At the point where my hba1c was back in the normal range I’d lost about 2 and a half stone so my hba1c was back in the normal range well before I was at my healthy weight. This diet’s great and it does work. Also, lots of people come off Metformin.
My first tip would be to keep track of your daily carbohydrate intake (you can use one of the free food trackers e.g. fatsecret.co.uk or myfitnesspal which do it for you). Then, if your next hba1c number isn’t as low as you would like, you know how many you’ve been having and can try reducing your daily carbs intake a bit. (Apologies if I’m teaching granny to suck eggs, but carbs convert really quickly into sugar in the body so that’s why reducing your carbs is so important).
My other tip, if your GP does it (I know many in England do now) , is sign up to access your medical records, including your hba1c test results online. You can access your results really quickly (often next day) For me, it’s so helpful to get my results this way because it means I’ve got time to look at them and work out any questions I want to ask before I have my meeting with the GP (well, practice nurse in my case).
As well as Michael Mosely the other person I came across really early on and I’d recommend searching out is a guy called Jason Fung. He’s a nephrologist who treats people with Type II Diabetes. He has a book called The Diabetes Code but he is also on YouTube which is where I came across him. His thing is Fasting but it was really his explanation of Type II diabetes, its causes, and how you can reverse things which really helped me when I was first diagnosed.

Sorry, I didn’t mean it to be such a long post but hope it helps. Brilliant start by the way.
Jennie xx