SwitchOff Diabetes2 #3. The diet for the first three days

How to get your head in the right place to do this diet, with the side effect of increasing your self worth.

The diet is based the Newcastle University Magnetic Resonance. That's a 600-calorie-a-day diet with aded powdered food supplements. I don't know, but when you've been injecting yourself with insulin for years, you tend to want to do something without chemicals. So I adapted the diet - (a) to make it manageable and (b) to achieve getting to a point when the doctors could say 'Ok you can stop taking the insulin.'. After three months, I am off insulin. After seven months I am taking one metformin a day to achieve glucose readings of 6.9 and sometimes lower.

*Now lets be grown-up here,  my DNA is not your DNA, so what I eat, what I do, may not have the same affect on you. And depending on how diabetic you are, or what other medical conditions you have, you could be affected by following this diet , so get a doc’s OK, to go ahead with this if you are unsure.   

The diet, not intentionally but was an added bonus - started increasing my self esteem. Knowing I was improving myself also raised my self respect and gave me self worth. I was growing in a way I hadn't expected.

Yes the diet is tough, but for a short while comparatively. I'm going to suggest you do the following for three days. 

There's a mental trick and an eating trick. That's further down. 

The diet

Wait for this...

• No flour, nothing made from a grain especially bread and including rice
• No dairy, milk, eggs, butter, cheese.
• No poultry, meat or fish 
• No fresh fruit, no dried fruit, no smoothies, certainly no fruit juices
• No vegetables grown under the ground – including potatoes - in any shape or form, and forget carrots
• No sugar, honey or artificial sweeteners 
• No bread or pastry or pasta 
• No alcohol, no diets sodas, only water. 
• No fats, butter or oil. 

But it’s not forever. This is a diet to make changes inside your body, to wake up and re-educate the body,  to clean your tubes out,  get rid of the bad stuff out of all your liver, those fine capillaries in your pancreas. This is your 3,000 mile service.  

The first three days are the worst because you're in a time of adjustment, so be patient and give it three days. But one you get through three days, things start changing and things start getting pretty easy to manage - including the ironing. My goal was not to loose weight, my goal was to stop being tired and stop the insulin injection.     

The mental trick

The mental trick is this ON/OFF switch I keep ranting about. You know sometimes when you've had a bad meal at a restaurant and you've said "never again" - or you've fell out with a friend and you've said " I'm never speaking to them again!" - well you've adopted those ON/OFF attitudes because you've been hurt and don't ever want to feel that negativity or pain again. 

So is diabetes hurting you? Of course it is and it makes our lives terrible - you're always thinking about food, and when to take the next shot or the next tablet, then there's all the finger pricking - it's non stop anxiety. Yet you don't feel the hurt or the emotional pain. You just take the tablets or the insulin. With Type2 we are in a lucky place where we can do something about it. We can stop diabetes hurting us. 

Now its time to turn that switch to OFF  in your head. Never again.

So how do you get through the diet mentally?

Don't make any announcements to the family or friends, don't start posting about it on Facebook, just be quiet within yourself and get the job done. You will feel successful to yourself as you make each day a new accomplishment. It will build your self esteem and you will value your self worth.

Get prepared with the right foods in the fridge. Buy as fresh vegetables and herbs as you can. It does make a difference. Try and avoid packaged leaves, some have chemical preservatives coating them, so as much of a pain as it is - start washing vegetables too. It all helps.

Start on a Tuesday, Wednesday or Thursday, or a day when it's not so pressurised for you. And start gently and peacefully. YOU are going to have a normal day, nothing changes in your life except what you eat and drink. And your life is much more than what you eat or drink. Let's keep things in perspective here, thats all that changes.

Don't do the mental food binging the night before you start either."Oh I must have my last piece of chocolate" Just be normal. Don't make this diet mentally bigger than it is, we're just changing what we eat for a little while.

The eating trick

I can hear you saying I don't like green stuff. Nobody does, especially when you like a bacon sandwich or a good  cheeseburger ... but it's not forever, and it's not a punishment. BUT - you'll cook differently and make food interesting - or else you won't eat this stuff.

Some of you might not have  the energy for cooking right? Can't be bothered? That's the diabetes kicking in. Make the effort for three days and after that, you'll want to cook. Trust me, the bolt of energy you get after three days gives you your life back. On the fourth day, I cleaned the whole house, weeded the garden and even did the ironing. His lordship called me a hurricane, but he didn't know what was going on inside me ha! I didn't even tell him about starting the diet! Double ha!

If you haven't eaten this type of stuff before its a challenge, so I'm about to write out the recipes for making these three days more interesting for you on another page. I wrote them down in this blog last night and then this morning they'd disappeared. Must be the Diabetic Demon at work Grrrrr!

The first day

Before you start, have a quick word with your medics to tell them what you are up to. They need to know especially if you have any other medical conditions. Also keep an eye on your glucose levels during the first days of this diet. If they drop  quickly, you may have to alter your insulin intake. Whatever you do, do not stop staking insulin whilst you do this diet. It may be you can lower the doses at a suitable time in the future with the OK form your medics - which is what happened to me - but be responsible to yourself about making this change and being sensible about your body.

In my diet, you can eat as much of the green stuff as you want to, no limits on my version of the diet. We get hungry. If I feel empty then I'm going to eat the wrong stuff . So eat as much as you want. The change in the type of food is enough to have an effect. and after a few days, you're stomach and brain will affect the amounts you eat. It's a weird and unexpected side effect.

So we've started the diet, it's going OK, different - but OK, and we've managed day one. And we're about to go to sleep, haven't noticed any changes, and so before we turn out the lights, we say to ourselves, "You know I've done this for one day - I can do it for two. So tomorrow I'm going to do the second day. I'm going to give myself the chance to do it again. And nobody knows. Ha!