I’m with you. I’m slightly overweight, but run three times a week and walk on the days I don’t run, so I usually work out about 6 or 7 days a week. I eat healthfully and have lost that pregnancy weight and am working on the last few before my goal weight. Yet I still have borderline high cholesterol (70 points lower than when I was 25 pounds heavier, though). Before I had my baby, I ran three marathons in as many years. And even when I was running those marathons I still had borderline high cholesterol.
My mom and dad, on the other hand, are overweight and obese respectively, don’t exercise at all and eat tons of saturated fat, yet both have very healthy cholesterol levels. It’s extremely frustrating - I’m doing what I can to be healthy, yet I have high cholesterol; they all but take bacon fat shots and have very healthy cholesterol levels.
Sometimes you just can’t win. Still, it sounds like you’re already off to a good start, so the healthy habits shouldn’t be as challenging for you as they might otherwise be. Good luck!
I was diagnosed as Type II about 3 months ago – two days after being put on meds for hypertension. (I’d always been one of those people who only went to the doctor for birth control – I can’t even remember the last time I had the flu – so that wasn’t a good week for me. ;))
I’m pretty surprised that your doc would just say “you’re diabetic, here’s someone to make an appointment with” and not tell you Type I or Type II. Though, as the others have said, if you’re starting with Metformin you’re definitely Type II. Though my mother went from Type II to Type I (over a period of many years of not taking care of herself) and now takes Metformin in addition to insulin, so it’s not just for Type II.
Anyway, I, too, have had luck with Metformin (500mg twice a day; no smell), and I only had to make minor changes to my eating habits: in 1.5 months my fasting blood sugar went from 139 to 93, without any kind of exercise. My A1C is still a little high, at 6.7 (down from 7.1), but I’m hopeful about that, too. The main change I made was eating healthier at work, because my SO and I eat at restaurants all of the time (neither of us cook) and it’s so hard to choose anything remotely healthy at those places. So I focus on having a healthy lunch and healthy snacks during the day, and not allowing myself to have any sugar (again, just during the day: I can still have dessert every now and then), and it seems to be working quite well. I still need to add an exercise regimen to the mix, but that will come eventually. I even still drink beer: my doc said just to be smart about it, and not have, say, 3 beers the same day that I had pasta for dinner.
I have not been to a diabetes educator, and don’t plan to go to one: I grew up with a Type I grandmother and a Type II mother, so I’m pretty well versed in the subject. My doc said she’d only recommend it if I had trouble getting the fasting glucose under control, but so far so good.
In short, don’t freak out! Having diabetes means that you need to be more aware of what you’re putting in your body than someone without it does, but it doesn’t mean a life of restriction and denial.
I think they probably did, but I missed it. I was shocked when the nurse called me, to say the least. She told me a lot of stuff that I’m sure I made her repeat several times over the past 24 hours because I can only process so much at a time.
This is what I need to hear. I’m trying to stay positive and assume I can control things.
I’m a bit bummed because I can’t get in to the diabetes educator until Monday, but I did call the nurse enough today that she finally talked to the doc and are getting me in for a glucose reading and A1c and a face-to-face with doc tomorrow morning. I’m happy about that - I just about burst into tears when the educator told me Monday because I simply can’t imagine waiting that long to get all that info. I’m just not wired like that, I wanted the glucose monitor NOW so I could just get on with it!
Thanks everyone for the responses - it’s been really good to hear all the stories and commiserate
Athena, I expected to be diabetic sooner or later (family history) but was still a bit stunned when it actually happened. When I passed my 100-day mark I gave in to that inevitable feeling of “Aaaa - I’m being deprived of all the things I love” and I started “cheating” so to speak. Of course, that hurt no one but myself.
Then, someone on the American Diabetes Association’s message board brought up a good point: exercise can frequently offset those “slip ups.” So I’ve toned down that deprivation panic over the loss of my beloved carbs (mmm bread!) and try to increase exercise when I simply must have that extra roll at dinner. It’s worked so far! I’m now at 219 days and still rx-less… but who’s counting?
So I went and talked to Doc this morning, and things may not be as bad as I originally thought.
First off, he indeed didn’t tell me that I was type 1 or type 2, because he’s not sure. Heck, he’s not even sure I’m really diabetic. My symptoms/lab results don’t easily put me into either category, nor does my lack of family history and exercise/weight/eating habits. To quote him, I’m a “quirk.”
Doc said there’s a chance that this is something that could be temporary. It also could be related to the birth control pills I just started taking, so I’m stopping those to see if it does anything. He told me to not worry overmuch about what I’m eating, other than to eat healthy, which I already do. I’ll probably not gorge on sweets or anything over the next w
Overall, there’s not much to do other than take my Metformin, monitor my blood glucose levels, and wait and see what happens.
I was diagnosed on my birthday this year. (and that’s not the worst birthday related diagnosis I’ve ever received. the worst was endometrial cancer which came after an emergency hysterectomy 3 years ago. but anyway…)
My glucose was 228 (not fasting) and the Doc called me at home. It’s NEVER good when the Doctor calls you herself. I got my meter and RX for metformin that same day. Went to my first DE appointment a week later and had my second appointment 2 weeks ago.
During my first DE appointment, the Nurse suggested I look into getting Byetta, an injection you take twice a day that helps slow the digestion of food. My problem was that I was ALWAYS hungry. I could eat 4 huge helpings at a Thanksgiving dinner and be HUNGRY (as in stomach rumbling hungry) an hour later. No matter what I ate or how much.
The Byetta is a miracle drug. G The needles are so small and thin that, if someone else is giving you the shot, you’ll never know the needle is in there.
So, now, almost 2 months after the dx, I’ve lost 17 lbs and my sugars have gone from 180+ to 93-98 or so.
I have a history of both types in my family. Huzzah.
About a year and a half ago I noticed things like cuts and scrapes were healing a lot slower than they used to. I’ve always had a pretty high metabolism and get shaky quickly when I don’t eat, and I’m always drinking something; so I couldn’t put those in the symptom list. I went to my GP, he ordered the glucose tolerance test and then refered me to an endocrinologist for more testing.
She drained about half my blood volume, or so it seemed. A couple weeks later she called me in to review the results. Everything was normal except for one antibody level (GAD- or GAT-25, I don’t recall). It’s normally around .5. In diabetics it runs higher, like around 1.0. Mine was 3.2, which she said was the highest she’d seen in 22 years of practice. Don’t you always love to hear that kind of thing from a doc?
With that antibody level, which she re-ran twice more to confirm, she gave me a 100 percent chance of developing Type 1 (insulin dependent) diabetes if something else didn’t kill me first. I took the results to another endo and he said it was crazy to make a statement like that. He wouldn’t put my odds at any worse than 99 percent. :rolleyes:
I check my sugar regularly and log the results. I’ve kept a low carb diet and generally taken decent care of myself for years; so I’m already doing pretty much everything you’re supposed to. The doc says that may help stave it off for quite a while. When my numbers trending upward for a month, I’m supposed to go in for additional testing to see if it’s manifested.
So far, so good.
Best of luck with your lifestyle changes. It may be hard at first, but it’ll be manageable and won’t have to significantly impact your quality of life if you don’t want it to.
Having diabetes means that you need to be more aware of what you’re putting in your body than someone without it does, but it doesn’t mean a life of restriction and denial.