A little backstory before we get started

I went to the doctor for a physical in May/June of 2007 because after working a month filled with stress and overtime, I'd often find my heart racing and wanted to get checked out. I made the appointment, and they told me to get my bloodwork done beforehand so we could talk about that during the physical. That was on a Thursday, my appointment was on Monday. I received a call on Friday telling me "not to worry, but we need you to come in right away, like now". Not to worry?

A little backstory behind that, I had gastroparesis about a year before this whole episode. Its basically a nerve disease that affects the stomach and while 40% of the cases are unexplained, the rest are either caused by diabetes or lupus. Tests during this time showed I was neither, but I may have been pre-diabetic. I think the tests showed I was pre-diabetic because I actually was diabetic, but because of the gastroparesis I wasn't ingesting enough calories to actually raise my blood sugar beyond the warning level.

Anyways....

I went into the office and he told me I had diabetes, and given my physical shape, he expected it was type 1. I was told not to eat any carbs and was given a reference to a good endocrinologist. My initial fasting blood sugar was 301. My cholesterol couldn't be measured because my triglycerides were something like 401, which apparently makes calculation something like a divide by 0.

Turns out I wasn't type 1, I was type 2, not sure why. They started me on a low dose of insulin for about 2-3 weeks, then moved on to pills. I was also on lipitor for the cholesterol for a while, but quit that after a while. Primarily by watching my diet, I was off the pills by January 2008 and have been since then. My goal was to get my fasting glucose levels under 100, but I've since slacked a little on that, but to this day they remain under 120. My cholesterol came way down, then went back up (not as high as before), and I'm back on lipitor again. I hate taking pills, of any kind. It was very inspiring to know I could control my diabetes without them, but a little more work may be required on the cholesterol issue with the high fat/low carb diet. I firmly believe all the low fat hype in marketing is ill informed, but I still need to find some sort of balance.

So that's me, I've more or less cured my diabetes solely through a high fat/low carb diet, and being obsessed with numbers. My goal with this blog is to find and post about any other tips and tricks that may help me even more, and hopefully help others as well.