If job one of a newly diagnosed Type II diabetic is to lose weight, fixing your diet needs to be job two or three, in other words, way, way up there in terms of what you do. Unfortunately, improving your diet is not quite like improving your lungs if you’re a smoker–if you smoke, you can quit (although it’s definitely not easy). You can’t just quit eating.

When it’s time to work on a goal, any goal, I need to figure out where I am, where I want to be, what I have to do to get there, and how long to expect to take to get there. So I started with two things–a food log (a notebook where I wrote down everything I ate), and a trip to the library to do some research on various diabetic diets.

Nutrition–not just nutrition for diabetics–is a subject where the information is controversial and ever changing. While the American Diabetic Association‘s recommendations on diet are generally considered the standard, there’s a lot of room for different opinions. I read. And I read. And I read. On the recommendation of my (since deceased) friend in Rochester, I read Dr. Bernstein’s Diabetes Solution, one of the more fascinating books on dealing with diabetes, but unfortunately for me, it was more of a solution for someone who took insulin (which I was trying hard to avoid). However, it did give a very strong indication that a low carbohydrate diet–like the Atkins diet–would help to keep blood sugars close to normal.

A different diet book, The Abs Diet, was not written with diabetes in mind; however, its contribution to my knowledge base was that there were some foods that really needed to be avoided, in particular those that included high fructose corn syrup (HFCS) and transfat. My guess is that the former has contributed mightily over time to Type II diabetes. The other thing The Abs Diet instilled in me was the idea of a “cheat meal”–one meal a week where you would just go off the diet.

While doing my research, I started writing down whatever I ate. I also started making changes. White rice was out, and a smaller portion of brown rice–much smaller–was in (although eventually I’d give up rice just about altogether). Lunches at work went from cans of soup with white rice or a plain bagel with jam to some low sugar dry cereal. Weekend lunches out became a salad from Subway or Quiznos. I reduced portion size as well as tried to get away from processed food.

I’ve also learned that the “common knowledge” about vegetables and fruits being healthy for you isn’t necessarily true for a diabetic. Starchy vegetables, like carrots, corn, and potatoes, can really send your blood sugar higher. Same for fruits like oranges and tomatoes. Green leafy vegetables are better in terms of your blood glucose level. Heck, interestingly, things which many would consider unhealthy–think beef jerky–actually are fine for my blood sugar, even if they have a lot of salt and preservatives (for what it’s worth, my blood pressure does not seem to be salt sensitive–and about 3/4 of the population is apparently also not salt sensitive).

The changes worked. Weight was coming off, and my pants size was going down, from a 42 waist at my peak to a 36 now. Three sizes doesn’t sound dramatic, and it isn’t totally, but at the same time, many Type IIs (like myself) have the overweight form of the disease, and it’s tough for us to lose fat around the midsection.

If you notice, I didn’t count calories or carbs. Some people do; I think that the former is of about zero value, the latter is of some. But one way or another, it’s a lot of work and not necessarily worthwhile. I believe that while there is definitely something to calories, I’m not convinced calories from all sources are the same–there’s some kind of difference in fat calories, carbohydrate calories, protein calories, and even within types there’s probably differences.

Counting carbohydrates is probably more useful. But that said, for me it gets tedious. Just avoiding sugars is probably more worthwhile than anything else–actually, avoiding any non-fiber carbohydrates is probably among the easiest ways to deal with this.

The other thing here is that it’s not as if my sugars just went down and stayed down. They haven’t. If a “normal” hemoglobin a1c is 6.1 (which is what my lab says is their upper limit of normal), I’m not as close as I’d like to be, typically with a reading around 7 (which is “acceptable” under my provider’s standard). Only once since I’ve been diagnosed have I had a reading that was normal (5.7) and that was very early on; I’ve also had times my reading jumped to 8.

I’m not perfect, and I don’t think anyone else is either. This is still a work in progress. I’m still losing weight, and I still have lots left to lose. And even if I lose every pound I’d like to, I’ll still have to maintain it (which as anyone who has lost weight then gained it back–and there are lots of folks in that situation), but I must also realize that my enemy is not my weight, it’s my diabetes. Diet is going to be part of the story of course, but so is exercise–which we will get back to again next episode.