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Facing up to Diabetes


The good news is, diet does make a difference with type-1 diabetes


I loved sweets. So the idea of a disease where they became emergency medicine held a certain appeal when I was 15 and newly diagnosed with Type 1 Diabetes. I soon saw that there was even potential to engineer things to get more sweets by over-injecting insulin. I had no idea about the enormity or the gravity of the task that lay ahead.
 
There began a stretch of addressing food purely in terms of its carbohydrate content. Unwittingly I continued to eat all the same things that had led me to become sick. I kept hearing:
You control it, you don’t let it control you.
In other words, ignore it and carry on as you were. But the stakes with this thing are high and all my decisions were now made on a day to day, moment to moment basis. The goal: to maintain consciousness.
 
I made it through the next 5 years doing all the usual messy teenage stuff but by 20 things were going downhill fast, and at 30 I was in big trouble.
 
Migraines I’d had since my early teens got worse and more frequent.
My skin was acne-ridden, face, chest and back. It was painful and humiliating.
Constant yeast infections, which GPs told me I should expect ‘as A Diabetic’
I looked puffy and my joints began to ache.
My teeth deteriorated, despite my best efforts.
I was in my 20s and needed to take naps in the afternoon.
And my HbA1c was always in the high 7s and 8s, no matter what I did.
I felt like a failure,
I was fearful for my future.
 
Increasingly I was upset about the state of my skin and frustrated that a GPs only response to acne is an offer of antibiotics. I can clearly remember an appointment where I asked about food and was told, not to worry, Its nothing you’re doing, it’s just one of those things. I had an instinct that that couldn’t be true, but it took me a while longer to get to the truth.
I had come to realise that diabetes can be ignored / denied / hidden to a certain extent, but a face full of acne ? there’s no hiding that. So when my skin became considerably worse during a trip away from home when I’d eaten extra amounts of bread, sugar and dairy - I began to see a connection and it was exactly what I needed to start to climb my way back.
 
Eliminating all dairy and refined sugar showed an immediate improvement in my skin.
It was a small accomplishment, but I saw a change and it gave me some hope. I continued to read all I could about why that might be, and once I began to investigate one thread lead easily to another. I was hooked on a journey of discovery that contradicted almost everything I had ever been told about food, yet chimed so deeply with all my natural instincts.  
Crucially, I had caught a glimpse that my miserable collection of symptoms did not exist in isolation to each other, each was connected to the next and they were all connected with my diagnosis of type 1 diabetes. I navigated a tricky, though ultimately interesting, route through many approaches to eating and have arrived at a place of mainly raw, low-fat, whole fruits and vegetables and a few nuts and seeds. I intend to stick with this because it works.
All of my previous complaints are healed and my insulin sensitivity ( the rate at which my body uses the insulin I inject ) has rocketed. I need only small doses of insulin for relatively large amounts of carbs ( from fruit and veg ). I am happy, I look and feel better than I did 10 or even 15 years ago. My recent HbA1cs are under 7.
 
 
That the answers I searched for so exhaustively were to be found in such a simple, compassionate and ethical way of life now seems blindingly obvious. But I suppose you don’t know until you know. And you won’t know until you try, and you won’t try unless you’ve heard a similar story of success.
I intend to stop hiding this part of myself now, I feel some power in moving through the deep rooted feelings of shame and failure, towards being able to speak confidently about it and to fully know that my story has value.
I am quite excited for my future now.
-Kathryn Siveyer
 

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