A while back we moved some stuff around the house and someone set my old scale on it's side and we left it there for a while. That is not the way to treat a measuring device, even a bathroom scale. It was fun to use though because you could easily lose 10 lbs. However, you could also gain the same amount. Well I stopped weighing everyday, so that meant I could eat whatever I wanted. Everyone knows that when a tree falls in a forest it makes no noise unless someone hears it; well that means that if you don't measure weight gain it doesn't happen right? Well that's how I see it. Then I caught my annual bought with bronchitis/walking pneumonia so then not only did I not weigh but I decided that I could eat as much comfort food as I wanted. Now an intelligent person could see that this is not a good situation.
Well Gooey is intelligent and knows how much I liked to weigh everyday, so for Christmas she bought me a new scale. It is a very good scale that measures body fat and water percentage. Gooey also programmed it for Mom and I to use. However, I did mention that you only gain weight when you measure it right? so I didn't start using it for a while.
Then I had an appointment with a Nephrologist. They had me do a 24 hour urine test and when I went back to talk to the Nephrologist the report said that my blood glucose was 170! Yikes! That was very bad.
I knew that I had to start weighing again and so I was going to use Gooey's gift that she gave me. The first time I used it it said that I weighed 260 lbs and 44% body fat. Oh my gosh that was terrible. Gooey made me fat, very fat. 44% body fat that was unbelievable but not really that much worse than 170 mg/dl blood glucose, so I decided that I'd just accept it and start trying to improve my diabetes control.
Teda called Mom and I started talking with her and was complaining to her about how fat Gooey had made me. Teda couldn't believe how fat Gooey made me. Well we both knew who to blame...Gooey.
Then I used the scale again and noticed that there were two readings, body fat and water percentage. I had missed the body fat reading and was looking at the water percentage. Oops. Well my body fat was still unacceptably high at 35%, but that's way better than 44%.
I hope everyone can see how Gooey has made me fat, by getting me a scale, and made me stupid by getting a scale I can't use.
Blood Sugar is Getting Better
I went to my doctor about the bronchitis and the blood sugar since it was after the nephrologist appointment. They gave me a blood sugar test and it was 196 mg/dl. That was terrible. Awful. They also did the first HA1c test I've ever had. When I first started controlling my diabetes the HA1c wasn't being used and since I had my blood sugar mostly under control I've never had one. The HA1c gives an average of your blood sugar over about a 3 month period but it is geared towards the last couple of weeks. Well my HA1c was 7.6. You can get a quick reading on what that means by multiplying by 21 that's a 159 mg/dl average. However, that 21 number really works best if you're blood sugars are close to average. If you're really interested you can see the real formula here. If you run through the equation my actual average was 171.42. That sucks even worse.
I needed to get things under control. However, I still had a lot of comfort food around so I decided to eat it before I started getting the blood sugar under control. That makes sense right!? Right. I also had a new glucose meter, but I decided to put off using it until I figured out which strips my new insurance company would cover. Eventually, after a couple of weeks, I started monitoring. The first reading was 196 mg/dl. OK that depressed me but what depressed me even worse was that I kept getting readings that high, one was 206 mg/dl. So I then started taking my Metformin as well. It is an insulin sensitizing agent, which means that it makes your body more sensitive to insulin and helps you get the blood glucose under control. That helped quite a bit.
Here's a funny story in an ironic kind of way. I bought a pound of shrimp from Wal-Mart. Breaded popcorn shrimp. I know that I shouldn't eat stuff like that but I really didn't know how bad it could be, because I'd never measured it before, thank goodness, because it was 282. That's the last time that I do that.
I started measuring my blood sugar and the first week the average was 156 according to my meter. After a while I realized that I should really start logging everything so that I can see what is happening and start really getting a grip on what is going on. I'm also trying to make sure that the stupid bronchitis thing doesn't kick back up. I started exercising again, very slowly. The first week that I started was also the week that it got bitterly cold. My BG (that stand for blood glucose) was 169 an hour after exercising, and then I measured it again after walking to work and it was 177. That's terrible. My BG used to shoot up immediately after exercising and would return to near normal after about an hour. However, that was very vigorous exercise and this exercise hardly broke a sweat. Then I got sick again, so sick that I had to take another day off even though I didn't want to. The next week I felt pretty good by Monday so I started exercising again, and was adding pushups. I got sick again, but didn't have to take off work but I did stop exercising the next week and stopped walking to work. Mean while my diet was greatly improving and my BG was going down. This week I started to exercise again and while I started to feel sick at the beginning of the week I kept it up and felt better towards the end, and today.
I kept thinking about the BG readings and I realized that I needed to start logging them so that I could correlate what was going on when I ate different things. When I first got diabetes and kept a log, I did it in a little note book. This time I realized that I could probably find an iPod app that would do it and I found a really cool app called LogFrog. The ratings on the app made it sound like it was an app for kids. They said that the way the entries are made made it fun for kids, but it looked easy and like it kept track of everything that I needed it to do so I got it. It has a really cool graphing feature that I like here's picture of it the graph. The app is very fun to use, and pretty ingenious. I like it.
The graph is pretty cool. You can expand it just by using the reverse pinch motion on the iPod. I've squeezed everything down so that all the reading show and you can see the trend. You can also see the shrimp meal spike.You can see by the graph that the readings are trending down. It also highlights the target range which I have set at 80-120. Wednesday was the first day that I had readings all in the normal range. Thursday I almost had them all in, but I had the morning exercise increase so I had a couple readings above 120 but it wasn't too bad. I've been working to try and figure out how to keep the morning readings down. Strangely enough I do it by eating. On the last fast Sunday my first reading was 126, then it was 145 a couple of hours later, then right before church it was 122 and then 115 after church before dinner. I noticed that the metformin bottle said that it should be taken with food, so I decided that I would try taking the metformin with a snack at the same time before exercising, but I was going to experiment with it by not eating any food with the medication at the first of the week and then try it with food at the end of the week.
It doesn't seem to really change the morning readings that much, but I started eating a little snack and taking the medicine right before I'd walk to the bus stop in the afternoon and the first time I did that the reading was 83. That's the lowest reading I think I've had in ten years. The next day it was 92. Thursday someone gave me a ride to the bus stop and then the reading was 115. Seems like exercising in the afternoon works great.
Right now my weekly average is 115 so that's much better. My monthly average is 130, but it still has to deal with the 282 reading. Once that falls off it will probably improve greatly. I'm supposed to be going in for the next check up in another month or so where I'll get my next HA1c. My weight and body fat is down as well. Getting my weight down will help with the BG so I'm getting serious about losing the weight once again. I'll keep everyone updated.
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