Day 4

Hi,

My eyes are sure being opened to my own bad habits. I am now having to acknowledge those places and circumstances where I have been eating sweets. I was going to say "unconsciously" but I knew what I was doing, I just decided to ignore what was best for me and fulfill my lust for sweets. I really did not do it every day, but often enough that it was keeping me from lowering my blood sugar. Usually I ate candy on Sunday and Wednesday -- church days. If I went to a buffet restaurant I always had a little carrot cake or soft ice cream because, you know, what could it hurt? But it does seem to have been hurting me.

The candy man at church is back. My information must have been wrong, but I was able to refuse his offer of a handful of candy last night, thank him (he is very much a friend) and explain that I am not eating sugar for the next 10 days (although there are only 6 days left on that initial commitment.) When I went to lunch with a friend at a buffet restaurant yesterday I ate veggies and protein, with half of a small sweet potato sprinkled with cinnamon, as I should. But it was a real temptation when I walked past the dessert bar, two or three times. I had to keep turning my head away and saying to myself over and over, "no sugar, no sugar, no sugar." I made it through. I have to remember to turn the head away, and not look at it. If I indulge first in the sight of it, it is much easier to indulge in the consumption of it. So turning the head away and vehemently reminding myself, "no sugar" over and over, really helped me get by without indulging in them.

Oddly enough the thing that has been a hard temptation (which I have also not succumbed to) is xylitol gum which I had just started using. I still have the print outs that say that it does not cause an insulin spike and is low on the glycemic scale, which is why I had started to use it, but a commitment is a commitment. So for the 10 days, at least, no xylitol. The info I have on xylitol is conflicting and I will sort that out later. I liked the way it cleans the mouth and kills dental decay germs, too.

I went shopping last night and got a lot of fresh salad fixings like two kinds of lettuce, cabbage, green pepper, and avocado, so I would have good food to eat today. I also bought cheese and nuts, which I am sad to say I binged on. I ate a small package of cheese and half a can of Spanish peanuts after I got back from shopping. The eating machine is still on, but at least, those items will not keep it primed, being mostly protein. I stayed up late last night watching a movie (I am also kind of compulsive about a movie, if I start it, I finish it). So I got up late this morning, but do not feel too awful bad. Just a little slow and only slightly groggy but with a bit of a gloggy throat.

I examined my breaded fish labels and found that Gorton's brand not only has corn syrup solids (whatever that is -- reminds me of the high fructose corn syrup) but monosodium glutamate, too, which I believe also raises blood sugar. The Aldi's brand seemed a little better not having the MSG (at least in a name that I recognized) but it contains sugar. I checked the turkey sausage and it too has sugar in it. Wow. I feel reluctant to throw these out because of the expense, but I am not going to be buying any more when these are gone. I guess I am going to have to try the real fish once again (meaning unbreaded), but maybe I can find a way to make that work.

On to Day 4 which is about adding healing beverages into the diabetic diet. "Diabetes causes dehydration." This happens because of how the body tries to flush the excess sugar out of the system through the kidneys and urination. A diabetic needs to drink plenty of good sugar free liquids if you want to keep your electrolytes balanced. My belief is that if you are taking magnesium, calcium, zinc, and potassium you will add in this electrolyte replenishment. You have to be careful with potassium and obey your doctor's orders. I am taking a potassium sparing diuretic for my HBP so I don't take a potassium supplement. But back to the liquid drinking.

One thing I have been doing for a long while is drinking my water out of glass bottles. I gave up on the plastic drinking bottles when I read that the plastic will leach unhealthy stuff into the body. At the time I was buying a few bottles of water in plastic bottles and then when they ran out I would fill them from my filtered tap water, throwing them out after a week or two and getting fresh ones. Then when I read somewhere that reusing the plastic bottles makes them even worse as they begin to degrade, than the initial water consumption I just decided to go to glass and found that it saves on the expenses, too.

I looked for some juice/tea product that was bottled in glass bottles and then reused those bottles indefinitely, bleaching them every now and then to clean them out. I found some bottled "fancy" juice for about one dollar and thirty cents at the health food store and purchased them. I hated the taste of the contents so I just dumped it out and washed the bottles, then began filling them from the filter on my tap. Make sure the caps are reusable. I like the metal ones that have been coated to prevent rusting because they are long lasting also. If you don't fill the bottles so full that they touch the cap and then keep them upright, they will not touch that coating. You can't always do that when you are taking them with you to work or whatever, but I figure the surface area is so small it is not such a threat as a whole plastic bottle.

I have always considered that when my skin gets really really dry and no creams and lotions alleviate the problem that is the main sign that I am dehydrated because I've been eating too many fast carbs over a rather long period of time. So I need to cut it out. I have been very pleased to notice that over the last few days the skin on my hands is very smooth and soft and there is no flakiness or itching and it was not from adding liquids but from eliminating sugar!

Other signs of dehydration are dry mouth, only very small amounts of urine being eliminated and it being very dark in color. If you are to the point that you don't have any tears and your eyes are sunken and you are vomiting or have diarrhea and lethargy then you need to drink liquids and get to a doctor immediately.

Even just feeling thirsty all the time is a sign of dehydration. I believe that in my younger years I was not able to differentiate "thirst" from "hunger" and would eat in response to a need for water. So if you are hungry all the time and never drink water, you may want to test and see if water will sometimes alleviate those "hunger pangs." You can test it yourself. I had a very painful kidney stone attack when I was in my twenties due to this, and have found that drinking plenty of water really alleviates that problem. Also taking the above mentioned minerals helps to dissolve the deposits that make kidney stones, so you can monitor and help yourself with that problem, too. I have only one time more had a kidney stone attack (a very small one) which I greatly improved by drinking glass after glass of water to help it float out of my tract. I try not to let that happen by making sure I drink plenty of water, even during the night when I get up to go to the bathroom, which happens once every night. I don't drink gallons of water, I just keep my three 12 oz bottles of water full and chilling in the fridge and drink and fill them repeatedly during the day and the night. I don't know how much I drink, but don't think it is a gallon, which seems overwhelming to me.

"The 30 Day Diabetes Cure" book ( http://30daydiabetescure.com/ ) that I am following talks about "healing" beverages and I am impressed with what I am reading about that. They give a whole list of ways to rehydrate yourself and also heal your body at the same time. The two main suggestions were tea and coffee, of all things. I have always been a little proud of the fact that I don't drink either one of them very often. No more than two or three times year, but have discovered that I might have been helping myself if I had been drinking them. It seems that either green tea or black tea is beneficial as is black coffee and decaf is as good as regular for the diabetic. That is good news. I always wondered about decaf because it is chemically "processed" to remove the caffeine. Don't ruin the benefits by adding non-dairy creamers and sugar, though, as that will certainly defeat the purpose. Just plain tea and just black coffee is best, but they said you can sweeten with Stevia and low fat milk if you need to.  They give a whole list of other ingenious ways to get more liquids into your body and improve your diabetes and your hydration starting on page 112 and suggested there are even more at http://www.myhealingkitchen.com/ which is maintained by Jim Healthy one of the authors of the 30 day program.

There was one suggestion that I question, though, and that was low-fat milk. They make the statement that "studies show that it helps you lose weight by burning extra calories."  Good. Great. But then in the same paragraph it says "when whey protein (a byproduct of the cheese-making process) is added to a high-carb meal, INSULIN PRODUCTION IS INCREASED between 35% and 57%, helping to manage that flood of glucose into the system." An increase in insulin?  I thought I was trying to lower my sugar and decrease the amount of insulin my pancreas is being forced to create. I can see that if you are eating a high carb meal even without the whey protein your insulin production will increase. I'm still a little stumped by that one.

But, the goal for today is to take action by not only removing sodas but adding healthy and healing sugar free beverages to the program. I'm going to try tea, as black coffee is a little much for me. But I shall try it out.

Still excited. Be back soon

Love ya
--Marcia