I have not been blogging related to my Diabetes and lifestyle for nearly 2 years. Meanwhile I switched job. that allows me to take care of my health. This was a important choice I made to get out of lifestyle disease. But I did nothing to attack diabetes. Diabetes and issues of tiredness have always in the back of my mind , but more or less during last 1.5 years I continued sedentary lifestyle, though I am not sure why. I controlled diet , but however hard I tried I could not get myself off a tasty sweet or high calorie food. In parallel I kept on updating about diabetes through Internet and Ayurveda practitioners.
I woke from my lifestyle slumber when my sugar levels climbed above 250, I started getting boils in the lower part of my body ( inner thighs) and urination increased. My psoriasis which was subjugated to my lower legs by good Ayurveda consultations from Vaidyamadom, Thrissur also started getting back on me. My family advised me to take more insulin after consulting Doctor, which I resisted ( for what reason I do not know). I also dozed off at office or while travelling in a car ( when I was not driving). My colleagues started giving me advice, which I knew well but would not myself follow for reasons unknown. I call it my nature or bad upbringing. In my upbringing, we got the best of foods but rarely had the culture of exercise.
I started with long low-intensity walks of just 20 minutes and within a week I was feeling better. Then in a TV show there was a heated debate about obesity and bariatric surgery. One of the Doctors, Dr.Vinod who ran a program called Qk Slim was very impressive the way he was talking about reducing weight through exercises and food-control. I watched all his videos in YouTube and collected information from his website, which clearly said, how much less food we required. I increased my treadmill to 45 minutes, reduced food and brought about changes to quality of my life. Dozing reduced and Energy levels were climbing back.
My sugar levels after this was always within 180. I wanted to do my treadmill/cardio better and I stuck upon videos of Yuri Elkhaim ( google for him) and he is such a wonderful and logical guy about exercise and fitness. Since my fitness levels were extremely low, I started doing the free exercises and advices he has openly shared with all. So more exercises and my energy levels were improving day after day.
Since he gives lots of tips about Cardio free of cost I followed him so much that I ended up doing interval training for about 20 minutes and I devote remaining time for whole body exercises. His exercises are the best and they are worth trying / buying whatever fitness level one may be.
Around the time I started interval training, I was also toying about the idea of using dumbbells for exercising my hands. I searched Internet to see if this was beneficial and I ended up with heavy hands (
http://www.heavyhandsfitness.com/content.aspx?idx=55), who already had a story to tell. I have found heavy hands technique extremely useful , since it is really a quality exercise. I use a pair 0.5 Kg wrist weights.
After these practices, I decided to work on diabetes once again. After collecting information from 30-Day diabetic cure, information from Dr.Gabriel Cousen's programs and local Indian literature on Naturopathy and , I decided to follow a ten day diet which avoided rice, wheat and other grains. In spite of my best attempts earlier at controlling eating rice , I would many times loose myself on rice and curries and particularly so for dinner. I have also come across many friends of mine who have this addiction with rice and that too at night. The plan was if I had a craving for "carbivorous" diet I would just eat a baked potato. Potatoes are starchy but I felt that is OK, as long as I don't get an addiction on it.
So my meals would include raw vegetable salads, cooked vegetable curries, baked potatoes, fruits, yogurts (sweetened or otherwise) , boiled beans and lots of water. I also took snacks that had no grains. so I would snack ulli vada and tea, or baji and tea , but not a snack that had rice/ wheat in it. Also I drank Triphala water as the first thing to do every morning. My energy levels have really gone up.I am on the ninth day. No problems and in fact no craving. My family support was excellent . I ate ice creams from Baskin robbins as well , in fact 2 cones in one of these days.
I will put the blood glucose measurements in the next blog for day nine.
