OCDiabetic

Low carb living with type 1 diabetes

Below 7: Chicken salad

After eating this meal for seven days straight, I’ve nailed it. To be honest, it wasn’t that difficult to get it right. Meat and vegetables have two things going for them as a meal – they’re healthy and easy to dose insulin for. Salad is good food for diabetics, which is why I eat a…
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Correlation or causation?

When John Yudkin studied the potentially damaging effects of sugar in the 1960s, he correlated things like obesity and a high intake of sugar. What he didn’t have was causation. Proving causation is tricky when it comes to the human body because so many variables play a part. For this reason, we have total polarization…
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Pure, White and Deadly

I spent most of yesterday reading John Yudkin’s exposé on the sugar industry. With Pure, White and Deadly, published in 1972, Yudkin became one of our first scientists to raise the alarm on sugar. Long before the rise of high fructose corn syrup and two-liter soda bottles, he pointed to sugar as the major cause…
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A type 1 diabetes vaccine

It’s all about vaccines these days. Where I live in Prague, the outdoor areas of bars and restaurants just opened up. A condition is that patrons must be able to show vaccination certificates or valid covid-tests in random spot checks by the police. After observing the terraces crammed with happy beer drinkers, I wish them…
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Accelerated aging

Diabetic ketoacidosis is awful. One star awful, would not recommend. When I looked at myself in the hospital mirror, I almost screamed. Overnight, I’d aged ten years, and I looked witchlike. Part of it was down to the severe dehydration from the ketoacidosis and resolved within the next few weeks. But there was something more…
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One year of diabetes blogging

Today it’s one year since my first blog post. It was about how a ketogenic breakfast helps with blood sugar control. I still follow the law of small numbers advocated by Dr. Bernstein with regular insulin and low-carb meals. So what did I learn about diabetes during this past year? First off, I figured out…
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Winning at diabetes

Writer H.G. Wells, often called the father of science fiction, developed type 2 diabetes in his early sixties. He became a patient of the well-known physician R. D. Lawrence, that wanted to set up a diabetes in-patient department at King’s College Hospital. Wells used his literary skills to write an appeal for donations in The…
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Below 7: Chia seed pudding (success)

My blood sugar experiments have been sadly lacking lately. I’ve been on a stable diet of pork chop and salad or grilled cheese and salad. As a result of this boring diet, my blood sugar stayed below 8 mmol/l for the past two weeks. It proves the point that diabetes loves routine. To spruce things…
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Hooked

Variety encourages eating. People eat significantly more if you hand them a bowl with ten rather than just six colors of M&M’s. If you give them a plate of spaghetti, they eat a certain amount and stop, but if you then present them with more pasta in a different shape, such as tortellini, they eat…
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Insulin shock therapy

I just finished reading The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath, which follows a woman’s descent into madness. While in the asylum, the main character receives insulin shock therapy, a commonly used psychiatric treatment in the 1960s when Plath wrote the novel. It was the preferred method for dealing with schizophrenia, and a famous case is…
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