Posted on August 6, 2024 by admin
I’ve got a long but spotty history with Low Carbohydrate diets over a couple of decades.
I was a fairly thin kid although I thought of myself as fat. I remember weighing 160 when I was a HS sophomore. I went on a diet and lost weight down to 128. Everyone told me I looked great, but at 5’10” that was way too light. That was my first experience with dieting. Of course, I regained the weight over the next few years.
When I graduated college in the early 1980’s, I was about 208 lbs. When I got married a year later I was a lighter 185 lbs. Within a year I had gained all of the weight back and was even heavier at about 235 lbs.
I gained more weight in the mid 1990’s – getting up to around 260 lbs from eating a lot of pizza and working a lot of long hours. A work friend, Chris, also was putting on weight from the same work schedule and diet. Chris told me about this crazy diet that he had tried in the past which helped him lose weight pretty quickly. The diet was by a guy named Atkins and for the diet you eat eggs and bacon but not toast.
Chris lent me a copy of Atkins book, The Diet Revolution which had come out in 1981. We both started the diet together and I went from about 260 lbs down to around 225 lbs without any real effort. I followed the Atkins protocol which was a 20 grams of carbohydrates induction phase (2 weeks long) and maintenance at less than 50 grams of carbs a day.
I did the diet for about a year and a half until I started having irregular heartbeats so I stopped the diet (I didn’t know anything about electrolytes which I now know was the issue with irregular hearbeats).
By the middle of the 1990s I had gained weight up to around 260 lbs. My MD suspected I was a diabetic due to a high fasting blood glucose. He ordered a Glucose Tolerance Test (GTT). The results came back that I was not a diabetic but one day the Physician’s Assistant (PA) in the office took one look at me and said I was Diabetic. The doctor argued with her from the charts that I wasn’t – after all I had just passed the GTT.
The PA recognized the symptoms (High Blood Pressure, weight in my middle, Etc.) of Metabolic Syndrome. I think it was because she was younger and freshly out of school and my MD was an older guy. In hindsight, she was right. I was definitely on my way to diabetes.
The doctor sent me to a dietician who trained me to eat the standard diabetic’s diet which contains a lot of carbohydrates (at least 20 grams at each meal). Fortunately, I remembered from reading Atkins that some people had success in dealing with their diabetes using Low Carb diet. I did some lower carbs (but not Atkins induction levels) for the next few years and kept passing the tests for not being a diabetic -although now I realize I wasn’t really getting too much better.
Fast forward to early 2000’s. I lost weight from the 280’s down to the 230s – a loss of around 50 lbs without any effort. I was drinking a lot of water and going to the bathroom four or five times a night. I didn’t know that I had tipped over from being pre-diabetic to full blown diabetic.
Around that time I took on a summer job as a hospital chaplain and over the course of a summer started drinking sodas at lunch which I now know added a large amount of sugar to my diet. I felt like it was OK since nothing I could do would put any weight on me. For some reason I was no longer gaining weight and I could eat pretty much as I wanted. Atkins went out the window although I had only partly been doing Atkins.
I got a call from my new MD who seemed very worried about my latest blood test. He told me that my HbA1C number (the test of my blood sugar in the past three months) indicated I was a diabetic. The number was 12.6 which says my Blood Sugar had been around 300+ for the past few months. A normal number is 4.8 to 5.2. All of a sudden my thirst and bathroom use made sense.
The doctor started me on Metformin and my blood sugars quickly came under control. My HbA1C reached “normal” range for a diabetic (between 6.0 and 7.0).
Over the course of the next few years the “honeymoon period” came to an end and my prescription strength needed to be increased. Around 2007, I went in for a routine blood work and my HbA1C number was 10.4. Doctor put me on Byetta (shots), took me off Metaglip, and put me on Metformin. I always tolerated the Metformin pretty well with minimal side effects. I also took Avandia which has now been shown to cause other damages and have been restricted.