Evening! I have been a member of this forum for I don't know how long, but don't think I have ever really posted and certainly haven't been here for some time.
I am desperately looking for advice on what to do to start losing weight. I am an insulin dependent diabetic who has gained 5 stone since I was started on insulin 5 years ago. obviously being on insulin does make it a little harder to lose weight, but I have come to realise that I have been using it as an excuse for far too long! I need to lose approximately 9 or 10 stone to be a 'healthy' weight.
I don't eat fruit or salad and only eat very limited typed of veg. I have a lot of carbs in my diet and don't know where to start.
Is there anyone who can offer some advice?
Written by
sparklestar
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Welcome to the Weight Loss NHS forum. I am wondering whether you might find the Diabetes and Wellness forum helpful with regard to your specific queries about your diabetes, as an adjunct to losing weight. The link to that community is here, and I think there are some resources there relating to diet as well for people with diabetes. I hope this link is helpful:
Regarding this Weight Loss NHS forum, I would like to recommend you have a read of our Welcome Newbie post - which is in the Pinned posts area. Many of us follow the NHS 12 week plan which is a healthy weight loss resource, and I think it is really good. You could maybe have a look to see what you think, and discuss it with your health care provider regarding its relevance to your medical needs.
We have a weekly weigh-in session, and you are very welcome to join in with that if you'd like to. We also have several Challenges going on in the forum, again in the Pinned posts area.
Wishing you success with your goals, and I am sure others will reply with any suggestions too. I hope some of the things I've mentioned might be helpful to you.
I am not trying to wimp out of an answer here or indeed pass the buck. You are, I imagine, measuring your blood sugar regularly and then giving your body an amount of insulin and you are familiar with this routine. I would be loathed to give you advice and then your blood sugars go off track. Why don't you discuss this with your GP, practice nurse or diabetic nurse first so that you can get proper medical support and maybe even a diabetic friendly diet to follow. This probably wasn't the answer you were looking for but I really want this to work out for you. Good luck. Xx
I agree with slim pickings, I don't feel that those of us without that condition can very easily suggest stuff. Maybe there are some other diabetics on the forum who can say what they do to lose weight?
But hopefully your GP or diabetes nurse will be delighted that you are going to lose weight and will be able to advise you and support you.
From what you've said about eating a lot of starch, though, that would appear to be an area to concentrate on. Also, you say you don;t eat much fruit and veg. Can you try and make yourself eat more of these healthy foods, esp the veg? Don;t assume you won;t like them, at least try them first? Sometimes people like cooked veg and not salad veg, or vice versa, so it's worth trying both cooked and raw before deciding that you really don;t like it.
I hope that's of some help. I am sure that if you can lose the weight it's going to help your health generally, even if you can't get rid of the type 1.
If you are eating a lot of carbs, try to make them high fibre and low GI. Foods like porridge, brown rice, and pulses, rye bread rather than processed white bread. Perhaps have a look at things like flax seeds and chia seeds.
Hopefully you can talk to a diabetic nurse about this. Good luck with your weight loss.
You've probably received or looked up lots of useful information recently. The attempt to redress the balance away from sugar, high carbs and back towards eating healthy fats is hitting a wall of disbelief - it is a slow process to reverse all the advice we have been bombarded with for over 40 years. My experience as a diet controlled diabetic is that the diabetic nurses are often still pushing a high carb low fat diet, which causes sugar to spike and makes weight loss hard work. I have spent years following medical advice and getting nowhere.
I have in the last couple of years discovered the Low Carb High Fat diet and have found it works very well for me, makes weight loss easier and lowers my blood sugar readings. From July 2015 to March 2016 I lost 21 kilos and my HbA1c reading went from a regular 45-ish mmol/mol down to 35 mmol/mol. I rarely feel hungry and enjoy tasty meals and found my appetite seems to have limited itself. I would recommend having a look at dietdoctor.com which gives you a lot of information and advice and is free unless you want to subscribe to see their videos. There are some interesting cookbooks out there, and I would particularly recommend Dr William Davis "Wheatbelly 30 Minute (or Less) Cookbook" and Monique le Roux Foslund's "Low-carb Living for Families".
Over the last 8 weeks I've been doing Michael Mosely's "The 8-week Blood Sugar Diet". It is quite extreme, being 800 calories a day, and I added in other stuff to make it between 900 and 1200 calories a day. My blood sugar results from a daily morning fasting test whilst on the diet went down from above 7mmol to mostly under 6.5mmol with several 5.9s. However this diet is quite severe, and I would recommend discussing it with your healthcare team before adopting it. This is particularly the case as you are on insulin - you may need to adapt your doses considerably if you are not getting the same sugar spikes, etc, and you may need some assistance with this. During this diet I did find that I seemed to be spending huge amounts of time working out menus and shopping lists and prepping food and cooking it, to the point where it seemed that I was constantly thinking about food - something I try to avoid when attempting to lose weight! The eight weeks finish next Tuesday and I will have lost the 7 kilos I put on over the year since March. At that point I shall be returning to the LCHF diet which I found a lot easier, but taking a few of the recipes with me.
Along with the dieting I have been doing exercise, trying to fit in 10,000 steps a day, running 3 times a week since completing the Couch to 5K 9-week learn to run programme, swimming twice a week, a 2 hour Tai Chi class, and doing a set of press-ups, planks, ab-crunches, squats and bicep curls most days. I don't manage all these things every week as real life gets in the way, but it's good to have a plan. All these things started slowly and have been slowly built up over weeks and months, and added to over time as I got fitter. I should be 100 kilos by Tuesday. I'm 51 and I'm 5' 4.5" tall, so I've quite a distance to go before I even get to just fat instead of obese, but we can all get there if we try.
I hope some of this helps. Good luck with shedding those pounds. You can do it. Keep in touch.
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