I have developed diabetes!

So how do I manage it?

Management
Managing diabetes is rather a pain in the rear end to be honest. All the things I used to love are now gone. This includes all forms of sugar - chocolate, donuts, sugar in coffee and tea - as well as all obvious carbohydrates - bread, pasta, potatoes (including the sweet variety) rice, and anything else containing starch. As well as all these food items containing sugar, or being converted into sugar or glucose by the body, they are also the products which fill the stomach, avoiding hunger. What I can, and do, eat, include meat, fish, most vegetables (except the starchy ones), eggs, and rice substitutes. The latter includes something I found which claims to contain zero carbs. Unfortunately this product is just slimy and tasteless. Another substitute is made from cauliflower, but I would rather eat a real cauliflower.

Keeping an eye on the glucose levels
There's no point in eating hardly anything worth eating if you don't know what's happening with your glucose readings. To this end I bought a blood glucose monitoring kit:







You can see in these pictures the kit itself, the device, and the lancet plus a test strip. The idea is that you load a test strip into the device, a lancet into the pen, cock it, hold it against the end of a finger and press the button. The needle shoots out and pierces your finger, whereupon a tiny drop of blood will appear. Hold the end of the test strip against this drop and within 5 seconds your reading will appear. I won't say it's a painless business, but it really barely hurts at all. The needle is only the thickness of a hair, and only penetrates the skin a matter of a millimetre or less, and leaves no soreness. The bleeding stops within seconds. You do this twice or three times a day - first thing, [before dinner], two hours after dinner. The before dinner test can be skipped if you wish, particularly if you're doing well. And after several months of piercing various fingers, none remain sore or show scarring of any sort.



I'm here!
If you have diabetes type 2 (not type 1 - I don't know much about type 1) or think you might have it, I'm always here and welcome emails to discuss the matter. You can email me at alansworld at gmail dot com any time.






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