Healthy Actions Breed Healthy Habits

The more I fast, the more I get used to it and discover what works for me, which makes perfect sense. 

Diabetes, on the other hand, doesn't make perfect sense. 

I'd been having my usual basal insulin on fast days, now that my body is more used to it. I might go a little low by mid-afternoon if I've been more active than usual, but generally have few problems. Today, though, I'm hypo at 10:45am... Not feeling at all hungry and, being slightly under the weather, not really wanting to eat anyway, it was very annoying having to have food. I chose to have a cup of tea with sugar, and half a cereal bar (at 42 cals). I keep in mind the calories I've consumed to treat hypos, and might have a few cals less for tea, but generally don't count them into my fasting allowance because it just makes things far too hard as a diabetic.

Generally speaking, though, I've been enjoying fasting. It opens your eyes to the extra snacking and picking you may do, too. As a mum, I'm always having to go into the kitchen for things, which means that it's frightfully easy to pick - a piece of chocolate here, some blueberries there, even a sliver of butter... fasting reminds me that today I can't do this (and shouldn't too frequently on other days either), and means that even on non-fasting days I'm much more aware of this. 

Fasting also enables me to make positive changes, so for example I will more often evaluate whether I really am hungry - and if not, I don't eat (at least, try not to). I'm also finding it much easier to choose fruit or other healthy snacks for when I am hungry. The more healthy food I eat, the more healthy food I want to eat, which is great. Cakes and other sweet treats are far less appealing nowadays. I still have a weakness for chocolate, though!

Another tip for anyone trying fasting is that, while drinking a lot is essential, I would discourage, for example, drinking loads of coffee to fill you up. If you're hungry, wait for it to pass. Yes, have some water. Yes enjoy hot drinks throughout the day. But I was drinking far too much, and my stomach wasn't getting used to being empty because I was constantly putting liquid into it. It's good to drink, but don't go over the top like I did! Your stomach will get used to being emptier, and this will help you with your portion control on non-fasting days too.

Eat Well

It's interesting to see how my body responds to new regimes or diet changes. It always takes a little while, but sooner or later, it seems to get used to it. This is really good news for me, because I have often been quite despondent about feeling as though I am fighting diabetes. The truth, it seems, is that I can 'train' my body to get along with the changes I make, as long as I do it regularly enough. Two or three times a week is a good schedule for exercising - just often enough that it recognises something and remembers how to cope with it (for want of a better description).

I have also felt very good about eating my normal amount of food today. Sometimes, a day or two after fasting, I have felt like I'm eternally hungry, or just want to eat loads even when I'm not. But today is probably the first time I really did just want my usual salad lunch with yoghurt afterwards. (Not forgetting the vital one piece of dark chocolate with my cup of tea.) I'd been eating extra healthily for quite a while, though, and so it didn't surprise me that after first starting the 5:2 I wanted to eat more calorific foods, simply because my calorie intake was already fairly good - according to NHS guidelines, anyway, which stated that I should be consuming between 1492 and 1918 calories per day. My usual intake is somewhere between 1600-1900. Nice.

Eugh, it's raining very heavily outside. I need to go collect my son from nursery soon. Usually I look forward to the exercise - not today!!

24 versus 34

Yesterday (well, technically, this morning) I finished my first 'proper' fast. By that, I mean one that fit almost exactly with the primary examples in the book. I felt my body had adjusted fairly well to the version I was doing (very few hypos) and might be able to cope with a more hard core version, i.e. getting through the night without an extra snack or meal before bed.

Interestingly, the book says that it's fine to start and end your fast at any time of day, but it seemed to me that unless you fasted from breakfast to breakfast, it was never quite right. Thinking of the hours involved, though, that actually makes sense, because a fast from, say, 8pm to 8pm is 24 hours, and a fast from 8am to 8am is also 24 hours, except the latter, if you think about it carefully, actually includes two nights. (Unless you get up at 7 and have a massive breakfast before your fast begins - who does that?) So really, fasting from 8am is a fast from the last snack eaten the night before - in my case, usually between 8:30 and 10pm, making the total fast time at least 34 hours.

This extra fast length, and the lack of evening snack, was reflected in my sugar levels this morning - a nice 4.2. I felt a little bit wobbly but nothing too bad, so I'm not worried about this because, I'm assuming, my body will continue improve as it gets used to these changes.

Interestingly, this morning has been the first one since the beginning where I felt lighter. All of a sudden, you understand, not some gradual change from the last week or two. I've been weighing myself quite a lot lately (I tend to do this out of scientific interest when starting a new regime of any kind), and I had actually put a little weight on since starting the 5:2. But this morning, I weighed in at about 6lbs less than I had been weighing the previous few days (and 1/2 a pound less than before I began). I wondered at the change a few more hours made to the fasting process, and whether sleeping off a fast was part of the sudden change.

As I should have guessed, doing the longer fast affected my blood sugars the following day. As is quite typical for me, I half-forgot about this, and should have reduced my bolus insulin slightly but forgot! As a result, I had a few hypos and felt pretty hungry for much of the day. 

Hopefully my body (and I) will get used to the slight change to my fasting nice and quickly. I think it's going pretty well so far. 

Some Days Work, Some Days Don't

Some days just 'work' as fast days. Others, it would seem, don't. In the fasting book it does advise you to give in gracefully if it is one of those days.

My body seemed to be getting used to fasting, in that the increased insulin sensitivity had levelled out. Yesterday though, being an extra fast day technically, was obviously just a bit too full on for my body (at least for now). I breakfasted as normal, but only an hour or so afterwards I started to feel unusually hungry; by 11:30am I felt starving and my sugar level was quite low (5.1), and by half 12 I decided that to skip lunch would just cause more problems that it might solve, since I was starting to pick at food to try and feel better. In the end I had a slightly smaller lunch than usual and that was okay, but then by 2:30pm I felt desperate for food again (my levels were hovering around the 5 mark most of the day, dwelling on the verge of dipping). I decided to forget fasting altogether. I had a snack at 3pm and then still felt the need (diabetically) for more food at 4:30pm. I ended with a good tea at 6pm with my sugar levels finally feeling stable.

Of course, nothing is that easy with diabetes, and despite being a perfect 7.3 before bed, I had a sky-high reading of 20.9 at 5:30am. Thankfully I am a slightly more acceptable 12.9 this morning. It is also the first sunny day in AGES, so I shall end this here, get up and enjoy the sunshine!