Day One

Weight: 274

Blood Sugar: 340

Both waaaaay too high, but especially the blood sugar, which is completely out of hand. But I'm getting ahead of myself. First a little about who I am and where I want to go.

Me: 33 years old, soon to be 24, type 2 diabetic for about the last six years, fatass for the last thirty or so. I'm taking Metformin and Glipizide, and should be using insulin. I have diabetes on both sides of my family.

What I'm Trying to do: Not die. More specifically, I'm trying to get my blood sugar down into the normal range. I mean genuinely normal, not just the less 140 thing often recommended for diabetics.

What I'm Doing: Right now, reducing my carbs to near zero. I know from past experiences that my blood sugar is very responsive to carb restriction, so my diet for at least the next six weeks is going to be to eliminate almost all carbs except what I get from green leafy vegetables and incidentals.

Basically my diet looks something like this:

Breakfast

Grilled Chicken
Spinach
Oil

Lunch(ish)

Protein Shake

Dinner

Meat!

I am supplementing (in addition to my normal vitamin mix) with chromium and cinnamon, which may help. They're cheap, so why not?


I may throw in eggs and bacon from time to time if I feel the need to switch it up. Meatwise, you're looking at beef and chicken. At this point, I am not intentionally restricting the amount of food I eat - I do want to lose weight (necessary to control the diabetes) but since this is already a pretty radical change to my diet, I'm just going to see what my appetite does. In theory, the low carbs should cause my food intake to self regulate to the proper level.

In theory.

This is an experiement, so we'll take it as it goes. The six week period is pretty artbitrary; it's the time between now and my birthday, and having that date in mind is helpful. I'm not actually planning to stop doing what I'm doing then, just giving this particular diet plan enough time to actually work or not work.

I would like to get the weight down to 250 by then, but I'm not stressing about it. Yes, that's more than the recommended two pounds or so loss per week, but low carbing generally causes me to drop a whole lot of weight (mostly water) in the first two weeks. But I'm not focusing on losing weight.

In terms of exercise, I'm going to continue to lift weights three days a week. I have altered my routine somewhat, paring it down to just squats, bench press and rows, which hits all the major muscle groups.

I will at some point add in some cardio, for health and insulin sensitivity rather than weightloss, but I want to see how my blood sugar will react before I do.

The ultimate goal is to destroy diabetes or, less catch phrasey, to actually get to a point where, if possible, I am no longer diabetic. Honestly, this may or may not be possible - I'm not sure what the state of my pancreas is. But I'm going to try.

So for the next six weeks, I'm going to update here everyday with, at the very least, my morning bodyweight and blood sugar.