Updating again it’s been a long time coming

Ok so it’s been several years since I posted here. I really didn’t think this blog would have survived.  Things have moved on a lot since I last posted and I think it’s been pretty interesting. Our club changed affiliations and that was pretty stressful time for me.  My weight skyrocketed to 123.4 kg  and on someone who is only just under 152 cm that’s almost as round as I was high.  Uggg

I still managed to keep training and although I did the best I could my Karate suffered a fair bit.  I had the amazing experience of grading to 2nd Dan with a Japanese Sensei in Qld I really thought he would take one look at me and fail me but as usual the karate community shows respect for people who try and I passed. About 3 months after that I was diagnosed with T2 diabetes which explained an awful lot.

I was devastated.  I knew I needed to follow a low carb high fat diet to keep my blood sugar under control.  It was something I had considered doing to lose weight but one of the very few approaches I had not yet taken to control my weight.

I have said for years that you should ask a fat person how to lose weight most of us have researched and tried for years.  Almost every diet works for a time for monst people but they are often not sustainable.

The Australian Diabetic association sent out their recommendations and I was pretty much horrified. A basic breakdown of Type 2 diabetics is that our glucose system does not work. We are insulin resistant  and because of this our blood sugar levels are elevated.  This causes damage to internal organs and our vascular system so diabetic complications run from blindness to amputations of extremities.  One of the biggest causes of high blood sugar is the highly processed foods loaded with Carbs an sugar that is such a large part of modern diets.

So if you were allergic to peanuts no doctor in their right mind would recommend that you eat peanuts and use an epipen so you could eat them daily.  That sounds pretty stupid to me. That however is pretty much what the Australiab diabetic association seems to be advocating.

Most of the time your diabetic educator/ dietitian and doctor will advise the newly diagnosed diabetic  to eat 30-45 grams of carbs at every meal and 15-20 grams in snacks.  That’s a minimum of 120 grams per day.  That’s ok you can use medication to control your blood sugar levels.  This approach has not been successful for many diabetics who have suffered a host of type 2 complications.

After a fair amount of research I found a Facebook group with over 6000 members using a ketogenic diet to control their blood sugar levels.  The encouragement and support I found there was just amazing.

I have been following a keto / lifestyle for the last 8 months.  In that time I have dropped a substantial amount of weight but way more importantly my blood sugar levels have become close to normal.  I am planning to add to this blog a bit more regularly in an effort to document my results living this way.  I hope this will help someone else who needs to make some changes 😁