SnowDog2003
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SnowDog's JournalWhen I was in my late 20s, my body became very efficient; able to completely function on only a few calories a day, storing the rest as fat. So I gained weight; up to 280 lbs in December, 1997. That's when I decided I needed to change my diet.
So I became a vegan. On a vegan diet, I lost 27 lbs over the next six months, but something else happened too. I shrank at least 1 1/2 inches. I went from 6' 2" down to 6' 0.5" inches in height. For my entire adult life, I was wearing jeans cut to 34" in length. Now, jeans cut to 32" in length were almost too long. What happened? I looked it up on the internet and found that men, sometimes as early as 35, can start to shrink. So I wrote it off to age. And thus began a pattern of writing all health anomalies off to age, which would later prove to be a serious error.
But I decided to add dairy back into my diet, thinking it may have been a lack of calcium which caused me to shrink. Dairy had other benefits: I could drink milkshakes, eat cheese, and I LOVED milk. So I gained the weight back. Then over the course of the next ten years, I slowly lost around 45 lbs, on a diet that I wouldn't even call a vegetarian diet. I ate everything which was not meat - and I did lose slowly, down to a weight of 236 in August of last year.
Then the shocker. In August, last year, I went to my doctor for a physical. He had my blood tested, (for the first time in my life), and the numbers were terrible. My cholesterol was 315. My triglycerides were 362. My HDL was 39. My LDL was 204, and my Hemoglobin A1C count was 10.9. These numbers are extremely out of whack and it means that I'm diabetic and at serious risk of cardiovascular failure, nerve damage, blindness, and death. What a shock!
I never knew the basics of digestion, and never knew how important it is to have your blood checked each year. This test was my first blood test ever, and yet, knowing now how important it is, I am baffled that I could have kept myself unaware of something that everyone seems to know, for so long. My blood sugar level has probably been rising for years, and I believe that if I had known a couple of years ago, what I have learned since, I would have avoided such a dangerous disease. Now, it seems, I am allergic to carbohydrates -- or rather -- I have Diabetes Mellitus Type II.
My doctor is a general practitioner and wanted me to go immediately to an Endocrinologist. I went to another doctor, instead, who wanted to put me on oral medication, which I understood to be insulin, (but now know it was something to promote insulin from your pancreas). She scared me and told me that I might be dieing; that my pancreas might be shutting down -- and I didn't even know what a pancreas was. I argued to be allowed to have 3 months to research the problem, and try to solve it by diet. I thought that I had heard somewhere that diabetics might be able to control their diabetes through diet, but I wasn't sure. The thought of being on medication for the rest of my life depressed me. She relented, and I wasn't going to budge, so she gave me the 3 month reprieve from my sentence, and THANKFULLY, it's true. You don't have to live your life on medication. I found the site of Dr. Mary Vernon, who is a doctor which specializes in treating diabetes through diet with remarkable success. She is a big proponent of the Atkins diet for her solutions. So I went and bought her book, "Atkins Diabetes Revolution", and another book by Dr. Richard Bernstein, "Diabetes Solution". I have learned so much about metabolism since then that I now know it is possible to live a life with Diabetes Type II, without any medication. And the results from my pancreas and thyroid tests were fine.
I didn't think I was eating unhealthy. My meals typically consisted of salads, vegetables, fish, cereal, fruit, soy meats, and I would drink two glasses of milk each day. Rarely would I eat fried foods or french fries. This is my version of a vegetarian diet which brought me down from 280 lbs in 1997 to 230 lbs this year -- about 5 pounds a year. But the one thing I have been doing for the past two years is eating sugar from carbonated beverages. I would drink them all day, and I am now convinced that this is the culprit.
I am a stubborn person -- to my demise, apparently -- and even though people would tell me that sugar is bad for one's health, they could never explain how, so I really didn't believe it. Well, I now know how. Refined sugars and starches, (and all carbohydrates to a lesser extent), are quickly converted to glucose and deposited in the blood stream. The body's immediate response is to secrete insulin from the pancreas which forces the glucose into the body's cells, thereby bringing the body's blood glucose level back to normal. But if glucose is constantly in the blood stream at high levels, as is the case when one drinks sugar beverages all day, two things happen: 1) the cells in the body start rejecting the insulin, over time; and 2) this forces the pancreas to secrete even more insulin since the blood sugar level remains high, to the point that the Beta cells in the pancreas which create the insulin start dieing out. At this point, the blood sugar level cannot be controlled and climbs astronomically high -- and this is where the body is destroyed. The cardiovascular system is destroyed, the capillaries in the eyes rupture, causing blurry vision, and eventually blindness. Nerve damage occurs at various places in the body, eventually causing the loss of the feet, requiring amputation, and also impotence in men.
The natural solution to the problem, is to stop eating carbohydrates,and after I read all this stuff that first week of September, I had a choice to make: I could continue to eat a high carbohydrate diet, as do almost all Americans, and go on medication for the rest of my life; or I could stop eating carbohydrates and begin a high fat/low carbohydrate diet. There are three things that convinced me to try the high fat diet: 1) I read that the people who learn to control their diabetes through medication can remove the damaging effects of diabetes, but their risk of heart failure and stroke does not significantly decline; 2) The people who start eating a high fat/low carbohydrate diet seem to have excellent blood chemistry; and 3) if I went on medication it would take a special waiver from the FAA to ever fly again, and I could never fly for hire. [I am a private pilot and was grounded for two months until I proved to the FAA that my blood sugars were under control.]
So, I bought a blood glucose meter from Walmart, and began the Atkins diet, and it only took me a week to bring my blood sugar level below 100. Moreover, on a low-carb diet, my blood sugar has remained very consistent, typically between 100 and 120, with extremes near 80 and highs near 135. And now, after 5 months, my numbers are frequently falling into the 70s and 80s on a regular basis.
I didn't even know that I was feeling bad until I started feeling SO much better when I brought my blood sugar down. It may have been high for a couple years -- I don't know. My eyesight improved. Some stubborn bruises on my legs healed, and my energy level has risen tremendously, and I have lost nearly 50 pounds in the past 5 months on the Atkins diet, down from 236 lbs to 188. Also, they have some amazing machines out there now. So I bought a machine from Walmart which can read cholesterol, triglycerides, and HDL. In the past 5 months, my cholesterol has dropped from 315 to 210; my triglycerides have dropped from 362 to 78; and my HDL has risen from 39 to 62, and my LDL is now 132, down from 204. My HbA1c was tested about a month ago at 5.7%, down from 10.9%. Not bad at all for a diet that is supposed to kill you!
My current diet is now composed primarily of eggs, red meat, pork, chicken, fish, green vegetables, and salad. By using the blood glucose meter, I have determined that I can handle about 8 - 15 grams of carbohydrates per meal, depending on the glycemic index of the carbohydrate. [The glycemic index is an indication of how fast the carbohydrate will cause a blood sugar rise.] And it's quite possible that I will never be able to enjoy a pizza, beer, or anything sweetened with sugar, ever again.
But I have learned how to live and how to eat. I have learned that our bodies think of vegetation as seasonal, and encourage us to gorge on them, and store them as fat. But we were never meant to live in an endless summer with bountiful vegetation. We were meant to thrive for many months without vegetation, burning the stored fat. Our bodies miss the winter, and we pay for it with obesity and diabetes, and probably the other diseases of civilization, all due to the endless summer.
I am grateful to Dr. Robert Atkins, Dr. Mary Vernon, and Dr. Richard Bernstein, without whom, I am sure, would have led me down the path my doctor laid out, taking insulin and eating 200 - 300 gms of carbs per day to cover it, while gaining weight and then dieing young as did my father and grandfather who also acquired diabetes in their late 40s, and whom each lived only another 10 years afterwards. These doctors, whom I've never met, saved my life.
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jeff
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You now hold the record for the longest intro!!! That's not a complaint at all, either. What a great story. Yours is probably the best testiment to this way of eating that I have ever seen. Congratulations on your success.
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Miriam
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Snow what great results you have had.
Congratulations to you for researching and living the way of eating which is taking you to good health.
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Heather L
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Snow- I loved reading all about your weight loss and health history. Thanks for such an informative intro. That must have been scary to have all the blood test numbers come back so out of whack. It's great to see the amazing improvement you have made through your eating plan. Congrats.
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SnowDog2003
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Thanks everyone. It's a pleasure participating in this forum.
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Dean
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 to Journaland, Craig!
Yes, very good intro. Excellent testimonial to this WOE.
It's great to have ya here! 
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