Giving up on your addiction.

48 hours ago,  I shared a diet Dr Pepper with my wife.  I haven't had one since and that sucks.  But my sugars are down to non diabetic range.  I'm seeing 102s and similar numbers that's what we call winning.

Which brings us to an obvious but painful point.  Chances are,  you didn't get type 2 diabetes only by losing the genetic lottery.   More than likely,  you helped it along by eating junk and/or being sedentary. Read lazy.  I denied it.  Stop it.  Admitting that you have a problem is always step one.

I love food. A lot. Ice cream, cheese burgers, fried chicken,  cheese steaks.   At one time it was a coping mechanism. I got past that long ago.  Now,  I jut like to eat. But no magic pill exists let me do that and not die of this damn disease.  So here I am, choosing to sacrifice the joy of eating some foods instead of my life.

But here's the deal.  It's really not that hard to cut the junk out.   I eat steak almost every day.  I eat chicken, ribs, bacon,  eggs, sausage, shrimp,  crawfish, pickles, okra,  mushrooms,  cheese and on and on.  In reality,  the hardest thing to let go was Diet Dr Pepper.   Caffeine is a drug.  Don't believe me?  Try going without it after prolonged use. But that's not the only reason to give up cokes. Obviously the sugar I'm regular stuff is bad for you,  but the diet cokes are just as bad,  and some say worse.

Don't ask me for a scientific explanation. I can't give you one.  What I've noticed in me has been sugars 20% higher constantly. Contrast that to higher spikes with regular cokes for a much shorter duration.  My experience may not be universal,  after all,  we're all different.  But from my research,  it's in line with the majority.

Now,  for the lifting for today.  I'm driving at my side job today, so no trip to the gym for me. But my most hated enemy rides with me in the truck. A 25lb kettle bell.  My wife has a ten pound kettle bell.  You don't need a big one. The workout alone will stomp you.   Again,  controlling diabetes is about burning energy.  You don't have to chug protein shakes and take supplements while deadlifting twice your body weight.   Though that will obviously work. You're simply trying to burn energy.  A kettlebell workout will absolutely do that.  And it will strengthen almost every muscle in your body.  Search on YouTube for "Jeff Martone kettlebell swing".  Jeff came  recommended to me by a friend named Rich, a man for whom my respect cannot be measured.  Every time I pick that kettle bell up, I think I'll never forgive either of them.

Do you have to use a kettlebell? Of course not.  If you have 2 arms, do pushups. If you can only do 4, that's ok,  do 4. In a few hours,  do 4 more.  A few hours from then do it again.   In a day or two,  do 5.  In a few weeks,  do 40.

Do what you can with what you have.  the two things you can't do, make excuses or fail.  Get on it.



I apologize for any typos, I'm typing from my phone.

Excuse me while I roll out of bed....

     I'm smoked. I pushed hard yesterday. I had the intention of just sticking to a leg day, but I'm half retarded at times and like to push myself rather hard, if not too hard.   Before I go too far, let me make something clear:


   Working out for control of diabetes and working out to lose weight and build muscle aren't exactly the same thing. Don't think for a second that you have to work out to the point of being sore. 


    To burn sugar out of your system, you simply need to burn energy. And here's the thing.  To help, all you have to do is burn more energy than you have been.  Everyone has a routine. You get up, you go to work, you come home, etc etc.  For the most part, most people burn the same amount of energy just about every day.  You have got to change that if you're diabetic. Walk 30 minutes. If you can't do that, walk 15 until you can walk 20, do that until you can walk 30. Then walk an hour. Then walk ten run 3, walk ten run 3 and walk it out. Then step it up even more. The point is, you're burning energy, and you're burning more than the life style that either lead to your diabetes or made it worse. Burning more energy will make it better.


    Now, here's something you have to keep in mind. If you're just discovering that you're diabetic, you probably have a very high A1C. You need to knock your daily glucose readings down a good bit first. If you start working out while it's over 200, you run a very high risk of spiking your glucose instead of lowering in it. While you're still burning that build up of sugar out, it can happen. Get morning readings under 140 or so before you start working out. It's not hard to do.


    Now, all that being said, we have two important things to think about beyond just burning a little energy. Fat, and Muscle.   Muscle at rest burns 3 times more energy than fat.  This will obviously go way up with exercise. Muscle also takes up about a third of the space for the same volume.  It's not hard to see that more muscle and less fat is a good thing.  To help you in your drive to drop weight, think of fat as sugar, and we all know that diabetics need to get sugar levels down. It also helps that it's true.  Ketogenic diets have proven it to be true. Go to a zero carb intake, and your blood glucose will NOT go to zero. Where it will go depends on the individual, (mine hovers around 150 without exercise or meds).


    Now, if you're not eating sugar, how can you have elevated blood sugar? Simple.  You have a liver that magically converts fat to sugar.  The process is called ketosis. Do NOT confuse ketosis and diabetic ketoacidosis (DKA).  DKA can be fatal.  Ketosis will make you a new person.  The problem with ketosis is that you need an intake deficit. People that skip carbs for a meal or two then eat carbs then skip carbs will often feel like shit, and may end up having blood sugar issues. You're trying to avoid that. So if you go down the road of a ketogenic diet, stick to it. Half assing it can be dangerous. 


     On that subject, Keto diets like Atkins are very misunderstood, and maligned diets ever.  If you decide to go down the Atkins road, READ THE BOOK. You need to understand the science behind it. It works. I've now officially dropped 70lbs by cutting carbs and doing Atkins. There are different ones though, so do a lot of research and pick one that'll work for you.

     So, to condense what's I've written so far, work is good. More work is better. Getting in shape is even better. Now, what I'm doing is beyond even that. I'm a firefighter. I may go from sitting on my ass to wearing 75lbs of gear dragging a 200lb hose into a burning building up stairs inside of 5 minutes. Or slinging a 50 lb spreader to open a door. No time to stretch, no time to psych yourself up. You just do it.   This is part of the reason that heart attack is the number one killer of firemen.  I don't want to be a statistic.  I'm already pretty strong, but I carry a lot of fat too, and that's bad. My goal in all this is to drop 58 more lbs, getting down to about 240. The stupid chart says I should weigh 200. Nope. I want to add muscle to my back, chest, and arms. As long as we're on goals, I also want to run a ten k by the end of the year.


     So when I get on here and post about being sore, it's because I worked out really hard. Don't think that you need to do the same to help control your diabetes. While controlling diabetes is what this is all about, I'm going above and beyond that. So when I'm leg pressing 495lbs for reps, don't think you need to do the same.


     Now, for yesterday. I'd done arms the day before, so I wanted to concentrate on legs yesterday. And I did for the first hour I was there. Then, arms being my weakness, I couldn't help but work my already sore arms a bit. Mostly my shoulders as that's where I'm rehabbing an injury.




      So I did that. I shouldn't have, but I did. I decided to do one last set of leg presses, so I head to the machine and go to it. Mistake. Not because I got hurt, but because the gym's personal trainer walked over to me to talk about their program. He wanted to do a fitness evaluation as part of me being a new member. Ok I said. It went downhill. Without getting into complete lack of professionalism this douche bag had, I will give him credit that he smoked me. He took me to the point of absolute muscle failure. I probably shouldn't have done it after working out for almost 2 hours. But I did, and today I'm sore as hell. The problem is, I just want to lay down, and every time I do, I have to roll out of bed. No fun. 


Stop reading, Go work!

Morning goodness.

This is what a trip to the gym can do.  A short term way to see if your diabetes is under control is your morning sugar. It's not foolproof, but morning sugars under 140 without medication are a good sign. Mine this morning was 126 without meds this morning, or last night. I did hit the gym for over an hour last night. You'll see that as a pattern that will emerge.  


      I'm not going to tell you that exercise can replace your meds, (and I haven't stopped taking mine), but at 33 years old, being sedentary sure isn't gonna help. Meds can only do so much.  Lift heavy things. Lots of heavy things. That will do as much or more.

Who I am.

    I was diagnosed with type two diabetes in 2010 after a shoulder injury. I spent several months getting steroid injections in a failed attempt to heal it.  I'd just spent 4 years as an over the road trucker so I wasn't in the best of shape either, sprinkle in some bad genetics, and the combo lead to the disease. 

   I discovered when getting a screening to go back to work from the injury.  My sugar was (as I found out later) so high that my resting pulse was over 110. They checked my sugar after a few questions, and the Glucometer just read "Hi". They only go to 699 generally. I was sent to the ER, where I ended up with severe muscle contraction issues, and had to be given Ativan to relax them. During that attack I ended up with an altered state of consciousness and don't remember much of the next 12 hours.

    

     It took 24 hours of insulin injections to get my sugar low enough to read with a glucometer. Once my sugar was under 400, I was given a couple of prescriptions and discharged with the only instruction of following up with my PCP.  In about a week, I got my sugar down to where it needed to be to pass my DOT physical and go back to work. And other than a few half hearted attempts at dieting, I pretty much stopped caring. My meds made me sick, working out sucked, and dieting sucked. I'd take them sometimes, but pretty much the only real effort I made was no more real cokes. I actually lost 24 lbs from just that.  I was 365 pounds, so it wasn't a real improvement.

   So for just over 2 years, I basically didn't care. A few weeks ago, I got sick. I felt like hell, I wasn't sure what was going on, though I figured it was likely my sugar.  I'd had a dentist appointment, and they neglected to tell me that the local they used, had epi in it. My sugar was over 400 and my BP was trying to match it. 

     Something clicked. I don't know what it was, but if I could bottle it, I'd be a millionaire. I no longer had some weak desire to get everything right. In my mind, getting healthy was a foregone conclusion. I was on the path, and nothing was going to stop me from walking it. It's probably the realization that I was killing myself with sugar. Here's the problem with that. I LOVE life. I love waking up every day, I charge into each day with an unquenchable desire to go do things. I want to experience just about everything, I want to see the world, I want to find all forms of perfection and witness them. I want to shake the hands of all people that don't take 2nd as an option and live their lives as though the only thing that matters is that pursuit of perfection. (Reading Rand's thoughts on this will tell you more about me.)

    So, as it turns out, I don't have time to die. That switch flipped and bam. I was eating right, I'm spending several hours a day at least two days a week cutting a chopping firewood, and I've joined a gym. I went back to the doc, got on my meds again, and I'm cutting weight. My sugars are damn near perfect, but not quite.  I'm absolutely on the right path.

    This blog is your way to walk that path with me. Type 2 diabetes is a disease that can be beaten. It is NOT a disease that can be ignored. It will kill you, and you'll die blind, and in a wheelchair because your feet will have been amputated. Your kidneys will fail, and all sorts of other things that you really don't want to experience. Trust me on this. I've been in Fire and EMS my entire adult life. Diabetes is rampant in my family. Denial is a bastard.

    The Plan:

Simple. Diet and Exercise.  Duh.

The Diet. Atkins. It works, and it'll likely control your sugar within 48 hours of starting it. It's also how I've lost almost all of the weight I've lost. From 365 to 298. It's easily the most misunderstood diet ever.  Without getting into it, I'll just say that if you haven't read the book cover to cover, you probably don't know what Atkins is.

     Atkins alone probably will NOT control your diabetes completely. Keeping it simple, Atkins put you into Ketosis (NOT DKA, Diabetic KetoAcidosis, they are two very different things, Ketosis is safe, DKA can kill you). Ketosis, quite simply, is your liver converting fat to glucose. Glucose is the body's source for energy. You need it, you're going to get it. Your body will make it if you don't feed it. So some people experience slightly high sugars. I personally run in the 150 range steadily, if I don't exercise.

The Exercise. Two things. First, chopping firewood. I heat my home, my shop, and my aunt's home with wood. I say "I" because I'm the work horse out there with a maul, a few wedges, and axe, and a sledge. I usually spend several hours a day 2 days a week chopping firewood. I don't care who you are, I don't care how tough you are. Swinging a maul and hauling firewood is one of the best work outs you can get. It's cardio, it works the hell out of your core, and obviously your arms and shoulders. Between that and the lifting of full logs onto the block and stacking the chopped wood, you're basically working every muscle you have. And you're distressing. Which is also important to gaining control.

The second, I joined a gym (10 fitness for you locals).  It's a very complete set up. I highly recommend it.  Gyms are tools. There are proper ways to use them, there are improper ways to use them. Don't just join and go play on the machines. I suggest finding a friend that knows what they're doing or a personal trainer to help you out. Bad form on many work outs can really increase your risk of injury.  Whether it's cardio or slinging plate, the important thing for fighting diabetes is to get your muscles to work. When your muscles need energy, they pull sugar out of your bloodstream and burn it up. The harder you work, the more you burn.

You should be aware, that in some people, if your sugar is too high, you may actually increase your blood glucose by working out. From my research, that threshold is around 200 mg/dl.

That's about it for an intro. I had blood work done last week at the start of this trip. My A1C was 12.8. I'll post the rest of my numbers later, and update as I get new blood work periodically. Those people not familiar with Atkins will be pretty surprised at the things like Cholesterol.

So here I am, at step 1 on this journey. I hope I can inspire some of you to walk down this path as well. Lace up your Nikes and follow me. . .