I’m not one of those people who can jump out of bed and eat breakfast. In fact, I’m lucky if I’m feeling hungry even 2 or 3 hours later. I would gag if I had to eat before my brain was in gear.

Morning basal tests are never a problem. In reality most mornings are basal tests for me. And I know for sure that my basal is exactly right.

Note: Basal is the insulin I get 24 hours a day – the background insulin that is needed all the time, without food. If you do not have diabetes, specifically Type 1, your pancreas does this for you automagically. The most important reason is that your brain needs glucose to function. If your blood glucose is low this is one of the reasons you end up in a kind of brain-fog, unable to function.

Back to breakfast. Often, however, I don’t eat anything at all for many hours after I wake up. Yeah, that’s supposed to be bad for you. Breakfast is the most important meal of the day, they say.

If I end up having a reasonable breakfast within a few hours of waking, then I can forget about lunch. I’m just not hungry.

So why am I carrying around all this extra weight? No idea! Most of the time I do reasonably low-carb. All that falls over in the evening. Doesn’t matter what I do during the day – eat, not eat, snack, have big meals, the evening is the deal-breaker.

If I ever had to do lots of little meals a day (they say that’s better for metabolism), I know I couldn’t cope.

Unlike breakfast, in the evenings, I can eat when I’m not even remotely hungry. It’s a real struggle to tell myself I don’t need that snack and I’m not hungry. My brain tells me I am. Maybe it’s something to do with leptin not functioning at that time of night? I don’t know. Sometimes I’m successful at resistance and sometimes I’m not. (Yes, resistance is futile!) Even so, everything’s easier with an insulin pump. I can bolus in the middle of an extended bolus with anything I add to dinner, like desserts or snacks, or even more dinner. It’s so easy!

I think it’s the evening snacking that is playing havoc with my weight, but even if I don’t have them, I’m not losing a single ounce. It’s sooooo annoying! I think having a desk job doesn’t help either. And truly, I hate planned exercise, but I know I have to do it. I just keep putting it off. Lupus and arthritic pain doesn’t help. Any exercise I could actually do, probably wouldn’t make any difference. It never has before.

Exercise doesn’t really burn off calories… well I guess it does when you do enough of it. Figure out how much exercise you’d have to do to burn off a Big Mac! I don’t think anyone has THAT much time on their hands, let alone the effort-value. Exercise helps your cortisol levels, which in turn helps a whole bunch of things in your body. That should be the primary reason to do exercise, not the calorie-burning part of it but the cortisol part.

One time I always lose weight. When I have to move house! Something to do with skipping tons of meals, not snacking and moving bits of me a great deal (like 12 hours at a time) while packing boxes. If only I could do that every day! Moving house is coming up for me in the next few months. Something to look forward to in terms of weight loss!

As Jenny implies in her latest post: Shameful Research: Poorly Conceived Metastudy May Cost You Your Feet and Kidneys, scientists can make research papers sound quite amazing. The problem is, that not many of us can get into the actual research and poke holes in it. Jenny always does.

The underlying issues with many of these studies has to do with the economics of diabetes. Drug and medical equipment companies want to sell their products and go to great lengths to do so. Insurers want to pay for as little as possible and so they set rules. For example: only so many testing strips allowed in a month, or, you can have the insulin pump if you’re Type 1, but not the CGM.

All of this makes the expensive process of looking after your diabetes, totally impossible for some.

I know this is a whole big political issue about the economics of health care and I could write pages about it, but that’s not really the purpose of this post.

Into the bargain, the major diabetes organisations and educators are still not touting the benefits of a lower-carb diet, particularly for those people who are finding it difficult to manage diabetes. It’s getting better… certainly better than several years ago, but the medical community has a long catch-up to what some of us know works.

To have good control, you need a CGMS or lots of test strips, and often some expensive medication. Thankfully, many doctors are now realising that starting Type 2s on insulin much earlier, has boundless benefits. But for those who don’t many Type 2s are not only being given high carb diets, but are left in nowhere-land when their diabetes control is out the window.

To have better control, many people who don’t have good HbA1C results, could benefit from cutting their carbs to make their diabetes easier to control. How much you cut your carbs depends on what works for you.

I’m not saying that if you have diabetes, you can’t eat whatever you want. If you have appropriate medications and your BGL spikes after food are within your target range, and your HbA1C is under 7% (under 6.5% if possible) then by all means, enjoy!

If you can’t achieve this, then cutting carbs will definitely make your diabetes easier to manage.

Note, I’m not saying low-carb. That’s a choice, and low-carb – well, there’s no denying it, I do it sometimes, but it’s very restrictive. Really depends on how motivated you are.

You’ll see results by keeping your carbs under 120grams a day, 100grams if you can (better), 50-80grams if you can (best, but difficult for many), that’s with counting all vegetables – even the ones you were taught have no carbs (eg a green salad – it does have some carb, tomatoes have carbs etc).

Let me tell you that I’m the first one who can’t walk past a piece of scrumptious chocolate cake made with quality dark chocolate, adorned with triple cream. The problem is that I did it for years, totally unable to stop high BGLs (I wasn’t on insulin then and doctors were still insisting I had Type 2). And the tablets didn’t help – it was a prescribed dose no matter what I ate and they all made me feel sick and did horrid things to my belly .

I’m of the opinion that it’s so much easier to manage diabetes with insulin. I wouldn’t have said that before I mostly got over my needle-phobia.

I’ve been promoting a lower carb way of eating for more than 10 years. Sometimes I wasn’t motivated to do it, sometimes I was. And if I didn’t do it for one meal, I’d do it for another. Even now, I’m not doing it all the time. Yes, I do eat a piece of cake here and there, or have a packet of crisps. Everything in moderation, right? But my numbers have improved dramatically from the days that I wasn’t looking after myself because it was proving too difficult. Little did I know!

I also think that along with lower carb, the Paleo way of eating is a great way to go. Do some research! You might find something about it that appeals to you.

I think people forget that these total changes in diet are sometimes really difficult to do. Who says you have to do it all at once?

Start with one meal a day… or one meal every other day. When you see the benefits on your meter, it might motivate you to try 2 meals a day.

What’s better than having 3 BGL spikes a day for breakfast, lunch and dinner? Two spikes a day! What’s better than that? One spike a day! And better than that, NO spikes!

Take baby steps if you can’t take the really big ones.

If you’re someone who uses food as comfort or as a reward, if you don’t fix that problem, it’s going to be difficult for you to drastically change your diet. Or do you not care enough about yourself? Why? Find out! It’s truly worth fixing. It’s definitely fixable.

This is in many ways, a little gentle motivation for you, if you think you could benefit from lower blood sugars and think you can’t do it. You can, and you will… just give yourself permission to do it the way that suits you best.

Yet again, it’s usually a case of the medical community treating a conditon and forgetting the holistic approach. It’s easy for them to forget they are treating a person, not just a disease.

Speaking of research, which was the start of this post, do read some of Jenny’s other material particularly about diet and managing diabetes. Her web site, Blood Sugar 101, (different to her blogging site) is meant mainly for Type 2s, but much of it is in-depth info that applies to Type 1s as well.

As far as the research goes, every day it seems that yet another expert comes to a seemingly intelligent conclusion, but when you look deeper, the research is flawed in some way. If you’re ever reading a research paper, the first thing to find out is who funded it. Start from there and you’ll have some answers even before you get past the first paragraph.

In 30 years of diabetes, which has progressed, sometimes become better-managed, and has changed over the years, I’ll profess my avid interest in its treatment.

I thought I knew a lot until I started the preparation for going on an insulin pump earlier this year. Since then, I can’t tell you how much more my poor brain has been filled with extra information. Every week it seems I learn something new. Whether it’s about managing the disease, research, reading other people’s experiences, it’s still learning.

My averages had been creeping up over the last couple of weeks. I can put it down to a number of things including another kilo on my already overweight frame (I still manage to just scrape in to the ‘overweight’ category with Body Mass Index (BMI)).

We had visitors and were eating out a lot, in places where whatever was on my plate was sometimes difficult to carb-guess. And the kicker was the extra exercise. Like some, I’m not textbook when it comes to exercise. I don’t do enough of it (knee needing replacement) so I go high during exercise – contrary to text book advice – and have to bolus more. More bolus = more insulin = more weight for me. Going high during all the walking we did meant extra insulin.

So, whatever the reason or combination of reasons for my averages going up, I felt I had to break the cycle. Three days last week, I did very-low-carb. This week, I’m doing lower-carb. It’s done the trick. Don’t take this as advice – it’s just my experience.

Under no circumstances did I want to increase my TDD of insulin, which would put on more weight. What I did, worked nicely for me. I’m back to carb-watch-eating and my numbers are way better. In the process, I also shed a couple of pounds, for which I’m very grateful. The extra weight seems to be super-glued to me, and getting it off is a battle.

In passing, my endo, a few weeks ago, told me not to worry about the extra weight, considering how well I’ve done since I went on an insulin pump. I didn’t think much of it at the time. My thoughts were of fashion and vanity.

In a twist of fate, I subsequently read about some latest studies which suggest that BMIs under 18 and over 30 are associated with a greater risk of death. What was apparently surprising to the researchers was that the overweight category BMI: 25 to 30, was NOT associated with any significant greater risk. And the most surprising was that the underweight category BMI <18, was.

We all thought that calorie restriction was the way to go. Apparently not. From what I’m reading, going into the twilight years with a little extra padding, isn’t all that bad. What is vitally important, is your fitness. If you are normal weight and not fit, you do worse than someone overweight and fit.

If you have the time, watch the video below. It outlines some of the latest research.

Obesity: Ten Things You Thought You Knew

So maybe my endo had seen these same studies.

That still doesn’t let me off the hook as far as off-the-hook fashion goes. And yeah, I’m not all that fit. I hope to change that.