Adhering to my low carb diet. A pot roast and asparagus followed the salad.

Hello Kevin,

I am a type I diabetic and have been for 28 years now. I have been having rather strange battles with my BS for a couple weeks lately and was looking for answers and I ran across your page and blog and saw info about the book on your Endo post. I checked it out on his website and agree with a lot that he states but it doesn’t give a lot of information on the diet and meal plans he recommends. I was curious if you have found that part easy or hard and what you found with using his plan. Thanks for any information you can provide and thank you for having this blog, I find it helps me to not feel alone as I can see you have dealt with many of the things I have.

Anonymous,

I started following the diet Dr. Bernstein recommends back in January after passing out and ending up in the ER due to a low blood sugar.  I had to make a change.  I had been following a relatively loose diet recommended by my endo and the ADA.  I watched my carbs here and there, but I had little restrictions on what I was eating.  I lived by the philosophy that I could pretty much eat what I wanted as long as I shot insulin to compensate for it.  I was wrong, and the high and low blood sugars I had been having for years had been the proof.  I had to make a change for the sake of my wife and myself.

My mom had actually read Dr. Bernstein’s book four years ago.  She liked it because he was a doctor who actually had Type 1 diabetes himself and had reversed several of his complications.  I ignored what my mom told me about his book and his diet, telling her, “As long as I shoot insulin to compensate for the carbs I eat, I can eat what I want.”  Deep down, I think I knew I was wrong.  I just wasn’t ready to do what it would take to truly manage my disease.  However, I’m now married and in January my wife had to watch me lying on the bed hallucinating, convulsing and yelling at her to get away from me because I couldn’t even tell who she was.  My then way of life wasn’t working.

My wife ordered Bernstein’s book a few weeks later.  She read it first and kept telling me everything that she was learning.  So much of it made sense.  It was everything that I had never wanted to hear but always knew was true.   The diet he advocates is not easy.  It’s a strict low carb diet that helps me to adhere to the law of small numbers (in my opinion, the most important point in the book).  The law of small numbers basically says that the less carbs you eat, the easier it is to manage your blood sugars, resulting in less high and low swings.  It might seem obvious, but it’s amazing how few diabetics actually follow it.

Basically, I avoid carb laden foods, including all pastas, potatoes, breads, cereals and most fruits.  I also avoid cake, other flour based pastries and nearly all sweets.  I used to drink milk with every meal, but I no longer do so due to the sugar content.  Was it a tough adjustment?  Yes, it was.  After all, my favorite foods are lasagna, spaghetti, homemade cake, and ice cream.  I had avoided salads for the most part and now they are one of my new best friends.  I also eat more fish, chicken, vegetables, egg whites, cheese and other foods with very few carbs.

If you are reading this and thinking to yourself that there’s no way you could follow that type of diet, I implore you to try it.  In fact, if there was one piece of advice that I could give any diabetic, it would be to read Bernstein’s book, experiment with the idea of small numbers and give the diet a couple months.  Yes, you’ll want to cheat and there will be times that you will, but when you do, you’ll see what happens and it will only become clearer that the diet is working.

I plan on writing more about my diet and Bernstein’s approach in my blog.  You might also want to check out Alissa’s blog.  She is also a fan of Dr. Bernstein’s book and the approach he advocates.  She doesn’t adhere to the diet quite as strictly as I do, but she does follow many of its principles.

There is also a group for the book on the TuDiabetes.org social network (searching that site for his book will also yield forum topics about it, etc.):
http://www.tudiabetes.org/group/drbernstein?commentId=583967%3AComment%3A1931739

If you need someone to talk to, don’t hesitate to contact me.  The diet can be an adjustment, no matter to what degree you attempt to adhere to it.  It is a change both for yourself and your family and it definitely takes some getting used to.

Best of luck in your diabetes management efforts,
-Kevin

It’s no secret that cakes and other flour-based desserts are treacherous territory for diabetics, especially when they’re prepared by someone else and there is little or no knowledge as to the amounts of each ingredient.  While my wife and I were on vacation celebrating our birthdays and anniversary (May 13^th is my birthday, May 14^th is hers and the 15^th is our anniversary), I decided to have several bites of her strawberry shortcake.  I figured that since I had been going low from walking around Key West all day, a few bites of cake would give me some lasting carbs that wouldn’t send my sugar too high while I was sleeping.  I figured wrong.  After all, sleeping isn’t the best time for a large dose of lasting carbs, but in this case, temptation clearly beat out logic.

After enjoying five or six bites of the dense yellow pound cake that had been further moistened by melting vanilla ice cream and succulent strawberries, I tried my best to ignore the sense of guilt that was slowly engulfing me.  It was my wife’s birthday and at the restaurant I had subtly told the waiter to bring her a piece of strawberry shortcake, despite her request that I not tell them to do so (she wasn’t hungry for it and she didn’t want it to tempt me).  I just didn’t want her to be disappointed later because she didn’t have cake on her birthday, and to be honest, the idea of a taste or two of her dessert was enticing to me as well.  By the time the dessert came, she was full, so we took it to go and headed back to our hotel.  Roughly an hour later, I realized my blood sugar was going low, so I figured it would be a good time to have a few bites of her cake to raise my sugar.   After all, she wasn’t hungry for it and the mini-fridge wasn’t getting very cold.  I couldn’t let it go to waste, could I, especially after not having dessert on my birthday which was the day before?

I should point out here that my wife did surprise me on my birthday by requesting that a candle be put in my shrimp side salad.  It was a thoughtful gesture, one that in hindsight I should have appreciated more than I did at the time, but all that I could think about was the promise of something sweet.  It had been quite some time since I had deviated from my diet.

For several months I have been following Dr. Richard Bernstein’s strict low carb diet, which he outlines in his book Dr. Bernstein’s Diabetes Solution.  I haven’t wavered much, other than a tiny taste, a lone lick, or a solo slurp here and there when my wife gets something sweet, such as ice cream, a milkshake, or a piece of pie.  As a result of my new low carbohydrate diet, I’ve lost nearly thirty pounds and have kept a pretty consistent blood glucose level that has been free of dangerous highs and lows.  However, this was my vacation and trying to follow the diet’s strict guidelines felt almost unbearable, especially with so many new and tantalizing foods all around me.  It took enough self control just to resist Florida’s staple dessert, key lime pie.  Throw in strawberry shortcake, chocolate gonache (with crumbled pretzel), rich vanilla ice cream and icy summer smoothies, and the temptation begins to feel overwhelming.

In the middle of the night, I woke and tested my blood sugar.  It was 283.  I gave myself a correction bolus and went back to bed.  It was still high in the morning when I woke and it took nearly half a day to get it back under control.  Temptation definitely got the best of me that night, but it also became clear that my diet is working, as long as I adhere to it.  I guess the proof was in the pudding, or in this case, the cake.