Blog of an average flawed individual

I regularly get asked the following questions.

What did you eat today for lunch?

What time was your dinner?

What was your last HBA1C(3 month average sugar)?

Dont you feel faint?

When do you have your cheat days?

Does your husband also follow your diet? You son?

Let me give you some background.

I have been on a very different journey for the last year. I started last June to take control of my diabetes. And decided that I don’t need to eat grains to survive or feel satiated. Grains meaning I don’t eat rice, millets, wheat on a daily basis. Yes that does include dosa, idly, upma, roti, parathas, puris etc.. I have been a vegetarian who eats eggs all my life.

Now if you read the regularly asked questions you will understand why people ask me these questions.

Now I will tell you why I came to this diet.

I am 48 years old women living in India. I have had diabetes from 2002. You can call it a type 2 early onset adult diabetes and I have managed it with oral medication all these years. I average jog/run/walk about 130 kms with 2–3 times a week yoga. I eat usual ICMR diet of low oil, home made (mostly) wholesome meals.

However, in the last 2 years, things have started turning in a slow but excruciatingly bad way with my memory and my stomach issues.

Initially I thought some level of memory loss is common at a certain age. I will book my tickets in different date, will forget someone’s name. When I started forgetting application names at work, that’s when I realised that this has to be acted upon.

In the year 2023, I had severe stomach issues with absolutely no trigger. I will start having constant stools and vomit for 2–3 days with no way to identify the source of the food poisoning. When I got these stomach issues the 4th time, my BP went to 90/60 and had sever dehydration. This is the point of the prima facie low point that people refer I supposed.

Starting the first week of 2024, I decided that my first point of action is to see my doctor and find what is going on. I have been going to Dr. Mohan’s Diabetes in Chennai from 2010 and they have been one of the best specialist for managing my diabetes. When they saw that my Hba1c is 8.8 I was thoroughly upset. The doctor prescribed me to increase the dosage of oral medicine and asked me to take the CGM. Little did I realise that this would be a turning point in my life. Thank you Drs at Mohans.

Here are some of the screenshots of CGM from the abbot CGM.

CGM in 2024 led to several reality checks

Some major revelations came in

• Having a high calorific meal(such as pasta or noodles) moves my sugar from 120 mg/dl to 340 and stays that way for 4 hours. During this spike, even if I go for a brisk walk it doesn’t go down
• Doing a post dinner walk brings my sugar at least my 20 mg/dl
• Having a black coffee, lemon water, black tea makes no difference to the values
• Having a bowl of salad with feta cheese makes no difference to the values
• Having millet dosa or normal dosa creates same level of spike to my sugar
• Only millet that had reduced spike was using barley grains

To be perfectly honest, my Hba1c in January 2024 at 8.8 should not have been a big surprise. As the previous quarters it has been hovering around 8. While my doctor has been checking rest of my organ function, they were not too worried. I started worrying about my condition when and I correlated that both these conditions with data of my Hba1c over the last few quarters.

Next 3 months using the above data, I decided to do what I know best. Did portion control, avoided fried food, ensured that I slept well, kept stress in control and continued my usual roti chawal with dal and veggies diet. Lo-behold on May 24, my Hba1c is 8.2. I understood that the reduction of 8.8 to 8.2 was primarily due to the increase in dosage of medication and less around the change in lifestyle I have adopted.

My blog is going to focus on what I have changed in my food habits and what impact it has created to me and my sense of self and people around me.