Over Halfway

It's been several weeks since my last blog post here, mostly because I've been on vacation, plus consumed with getting ready for vacation and then recovering from vacation once we got home! Also because things have pretty much leveled out on a plateau. A plateau that I'm not satisfied with, but have to accept nonetheless.

I had some difficulty getting my new prescription of thyroid medicine, so I'm still on my six-weeks trial of the new dosage.

I've given up any hope of getting any real success stories from the NEWSTART® Insights Facebook group, except for what the admin Ron G. says about his own experience. They have discontinued their monthly conference calls due to lack of attendance, which is not surprising given their lack of promotion for that endeavor. When I suggested that maybe "attendance would have been better if the event had been promoted extensively," Ron's campy response was, "You can lead a horse to water but you can't make them drink." To which I replied, "But I think most of the 'horses' didn't even know there was water!" I am continually amazed at the lack of technical savvy within the Weimar bunch. What does it say about an organization who cannot attract personnel who are adequately qualified to meet their need for a credible web presence?

Well, on the personal front, I have passed the seven-month point in my Year Without Carbs; so it's time to reflect and evaluate a bit. I have pretty well established a dietary daily protocol with 100g of fat, 30g of carbs, and 45g of protein. Within 1200 calories per day, that's 75% of calories in fat, 10% in carbs, and 15% in protein. While I was admittedly disappointed that my A1C has not decreased, I am more than pleased that eating low-carb high-fat has definitely positively affected my weight loss. In seven months (from January 4 to August 2), I have lost 17 lbs. I am no longer obese! According to my calculated BMI, I'm now in the top end of overweight. Another 20 lbs. to go and I'll be in the top end of normal. Woo hoo!

Some of my diabetic low-carb high-fat colleagues say that I should decrease my daily carb intake to no more than 20g per day, but I get migraines whenever I go below 30. And I have decreased my twice-daily insulin dosage to less than half, so that's something.

I still need to ramp up my exercise program. My current excuse is, "When the weather gets better." Other "excuses" include things currently happening in my personal life that are impacting all the luxurious "free" time I had the first few months of the year to spend on just taking care of myself and my diabetes.

But life must go on!

Increasingly Disappointed with NEWSTART®

I've pretty much given up on NEWSTART® being any source of information on reversing diabetes. The admins of the NEWSTART® Insights Facebook group are totally clueless as to how to run a successful Facebook group and the members are just as ditzy. There was no mention of the supposedly scheduled conference call on the third Wednesday of June, no event created in the Facebook group, and no email as I've gotten in the past. Today I asked in the group if the conference call happened and if anyone attended, and someone answered, yes, it did, though the scheduled speaker didn't show up so "faithful Dr. Lukens filled in and answered questions."

I have totally given up on getting any success stories from any of the 194 members of the Facebook group. They are presumably mostly alumni from a NEWSTART® program, which includes the famous "Reversing Diabetes." The Weimar website promoting the reversing diabetes program claims that 50% of people who go through the program are successful in reversing diabetes and maintaining that status. Only 50%?!? Why is that? Does "applying the NEWSTART® principles" only work for 50% of the attendees? Or is the lifestyle so unsustainable that 50% of them just can't maintain it and give up? I suppose I'll never know the answer! However, I will not leave the group, though I don't have any more plans to post there—especially since the admins have changed the settings so that every new post has to be approved by an admin before it is made public!

Conversation on NEWSTART® Insights

Me: Tom, you said in a recent newsletter, "50% of type II diabetics who adopt the NEWSTART® Lifestyle are off their insulin and medications in as little as 18 days." I'm wondering about the other 50%. What challenges did they face that prevented their success, and what advice and encouragement would successful Reversing Diabetes alumni give to help them?

Tom: Jacqueline, alumni face many challenges upon departure, that is why the primary focus during the NEWSTART® Lifestyle program is setting a routine for everyday after graduation. In addition, many alumni take advantage of the ReStart program which offer discounts for returning to a portion of the program so they can focus on what need areas.

Me: Do you ever have anyone (after they go home) complain that their blood sugar goes higher (instead of lower) when they stop counting calories and carbs? If so, what advice would you give them?

Teri: We don't teach our guests to count calories or carbs, it isn't necessary. Once they've come off the SAD (Standard American Diet) and start making healthier food choices along with implementing the other Newstart principles, the body beautifully responds in turn. Anyone who does not continue with their healthy lifestyle choices will, of course, find their blood sugars creeping back up.

Me: I understand all that, Teri. My question was whether or not anyone ever complains that their blood sugars went up when they ate whole fruits, whole grains, and legumes with wild abandon. And, if the answer is no, then why are we not seeing more members of this group telling their success stories with reversing diabetes on a high-carb diet?

Ron: You've asked a very important and critical question and the answer is simple. Many people of the 50% you are asking about continue on their new life style and reverse this terrible disease. While others decide to go back to their old ways and don't want to talk about it. As far as more members not reporting success stories, they do not join groups or like we have on Facebook or other social media sights, or are just to busy.

Me: Yep, I guess they're too busy maintaining their NEWSTART® lifestyle to be bothered with sharing their successes. I suppose I would be, too, if I walked 5 miles a day. So what you're saying is that the 50% unsuccessful were not motivated to continue doing what they learned in the on-site seminar. I would think that the potential effects of out-of-control diabetes would be motivation enough!

Ron: I'm not saying that at all. Of the 50%, many continue on and are successful in reversing their diabetes, while others simply go back to their old life styles. I do agree that reversing diabetes, which I have done now for nearly 10 years, is motivation enough to keep one going.

NEWSTART® Insights Update

Three things have just happened with NEWSTART® Insights. The first was that the creator of the group and original admin, Spencer Freed, said he is getting off Facebook but he created a "fake" Spencer Freed account that he said could be used to contact him "only in this group." I'm not sure how that was supposed to work. Apparently Spencer Freed wasn't either, because his new "fake" account is not showing in the members list nor anywhere on Facebook for that matter. So I checked the admins list and only Tom Baril is listed as a group admin.

Then I noticed that the nice banner graphic Spencer had used for the group is missing. There is, instead, just a collection of random profile pics of group members (what a group header defaults to when there is no banner graphic). Very unattractive and unprofessional, in my opinion.

So I wrote a post asking what happened to the nice banner graphic, and I got an immediate message that my post had been "submitted for approval by the admin(s)." I suppose I should not have been surprised, as earlier I had suggested to Spencer that if they were concerned that someone would post something that was inappropriate they should change the settings so that all posts had to be approved by an admin. I guess someone finally figured out how to do it!

Hardly anyone is posting in the group now, possibly because the group description is very vague about the purpose of the group and what posts are acceptable and what posts are not. At least now people will know whether or not what they post is acceptable by whether or not an admin approves it!

Well, I must say I am very disappointed with the group. I initially was hoping I would find alumni who had succeeded in reversing their diabetes through this Weimar program (high-carb low-fat strict vegan diet) and were successful in maintaining this reversal over a long period of time. But out of the current 194 members, only two have come forward as having reversed diabetes through the NEWSTART® program.

Of the 3 "success stories" on the NEWSTART® website, they are all white males (one is possibly Latino), no women, no people of color. They were all extremely obese, had severe health problems and nearly at death's door, and had been eating a very unhealthy Standard American Diet (junk food, high-sugar, highly refined, etc.). No one was represented as being a more "normal" kind of diabetic, like the majority of Adventist Vegetarian Diabetics group members, who were trying to eat a reasonably healthy diet but just needed some tweaking!


Update [June 10,2015]: It looks like the header graphic is back. And a "new member" named Spencer Jonathan has been added and made an admin. In my opinion, they should have figured this out before they started making public changes to the group! Guess I can't expect Weimar people to be all that tech-savvy. *sigh*

May Conference Call

What follows are notes that I took in real time during the NEWSTART® conference call today. I'm presenting my notes pretty much as I took them, except for making two observations: First, it is totally erroneous to describe low-carb approach as "low-carb, high-fat, high-protein." Dr. Atkins may have been high-protein in the beginning, but a true LCHF (low-carb, high-fat) recommends moderate protein. The second thing is that Dr. Bivens lumps saturated fat and trans fat together--again, a serious error! LCHF are just as against trans fats and hydrogenated fats as NEWSTART®, but recommend butter (especially grass-fed) and coconut oil, as well as olive oil. NEWSTART® prohibits all processed oils, allowing only avocados, olives, and nuts.

Real-time NOTES:

This is the third conference call that NEWSTART® Insights has initiated. I don't know if it would have happened if I had not urged Spencer and Tom and Ron to promote it more. Ron even gave me permission to create an event in the discussion group. It's 5 o'clock and the call is beginning.

Dr. Bivens is talking about a "success story" from a current NEWSTART® program. A 64-year-old who has spent two and a half weeks in the program. Said if you get your cholesterol under 150, you are at 0 risk for heart attack. His blood glucose is 101.

Now he's going to give a half-hour lecture on "Carb Fraud." Starting with Dr. Robert Atkins, describing it as low-carb, high-fat, high-protein. Talking about paleo diet (2002), the "caveman" diet. Said Dr. Atkins died of a heart attack. Not true! He died from a fall on an icy street in New York.

No diet works. Diets are counter-productive. Must be a lifestyle. Relating a study that examined a low-carb diet vs. plant-based diet (does not call it "vegan"). Claims low-carb diet "will kill you."

Type 1 and Type 2 diabetes are two separate diseases. Type 1 diabetics have a pancreas that does not product insulin.

Now he's explaining how blood glucose gets into the cells. In Type 1, there is not enough insulin to assist the blood glucose in getting into the cells. Type 2 diabetics have high insulin. But the insulin does not work well to let blood glucose into the cell. Called insulin resistance. Claims that when fat, especially trans fat, is reduced, patients will become hypoglycemic if they are taking blood-lowering medications. Recommends 8-20 servings of fruit a day.

Emphasizing that a low-carb "diet" is a fraud and will kill you. T. Colin Campbell authored a book called The Low-Carb Fraud. Claims low-carb allows only 30% of calories as carbs. Not true. Very low-carb is 30 grams carbs/day, not 30%. Claims low-carb diet mandates too much protein. Again, not true! He says vegans do not need to worry about getting enough protein.

How much protein is needed? He said 26-45 grams/day. Says meat analogs are not much better than flesh foods. Says many contain trans fat.

Talking about trans fats and saturated fats as if they are the same thing. Talking about coconut oil being a saturated fat. Says saturated fats are made by adding hydrogen to unsaturated fats. Does say that partially hydrogenated oils are trans fats. That part is true.

Goal is to get fat down to 20% to be low-fat. Dr. Bivens' definition of low-fat diet is 10%. Recommends 70% of diet be what he calls "complex carbohydrates."

Talking about their summit in June. One guest is Neal Barnard (another high-carb no-fat proponent).

Now it's Q&A time:

Rachel: Could you talk about gall bladder disease and fat?

Dr. B: Strong genetic component. Gall bladder stores bile, 97% cholesterol. Bile used to digest mainly fats. Gall bladder disease caused by diet high in fat, stimulates liver to make more bile. Gall stones made of cholesterol. When gall bladder is taken out, you don't have enough bile to digest fat. Thus must eat a low-fat diet.

Cherline: I'm on Dr. Esselstyn's diet. I eat 1 T. of ground flaxseed a day. How much fat am I getting? Is it too much oil?

Dr. B: You are doing the right thing. That much flax should not be detrimental. Walnuts are cardiac-protective, most heart-healthy.

Brenda: What about celiac?

Dr. B: There truly is an actual gluten sensitivity. Gluten makes them really sick, but that's a very small portion of the population. Farmers hit fields with Round-Up before harvesting. People who claim gluten sensitivity have been taken off gluten for 3 months then re-introduced to organic non-GMO wheat and have no problem. True celiacs will not respond this way.

Cherline: Would Ezekiel bread be safe? Is it organic?

Dr. B: I don't know the answer, because we make all our bread ourselves. I don't think Ezekiel bread is organic, but I don't know.

Carla: What if you are deficient in everything--vitamin B-12, vitamin D, iron, magnesium, etc.?

Dr. B: John McDougall says he can't identify any reason why anyone should take vitamin B/D? If you are eating organic whole foods, there's not much reason to worry. Especially if eating right, getting enough sunshine, etc.

Ron: What about someone who is deficient in iron?

Dr. B: Uterine fibroids cause a lot of blood loss. Have uterus out! Also, girls start menses at age 13.2, whereas a century ago it was age 17. This all would not happen if children were vegans.

Unnamed: Said she took blackstrap molasses and was able to drop iron supplement.

Next month third Wednesday will be the next conference call.

May Day

April was a hard month in many ways. I started out on Easter Sunday with a horrific cold that lasted a week. I had 11 days of migraines for the first 15 days of the month. I felt under increasing pressure to get the tax returns done in time. And of course I had all the usual web client work, including three email newsletters that I had to get out during the week that I was so sick! Then Linda had her oral surgery on the 15th and I needed to be available for her as needed.

My daily average glucose readings fluctuated a lot but did not essentially change from the first of the month to the last. My fasting blood glucose also remained pretty much the same. I stayed within my goals for calories, carbs, fat, protein, and fiber. My macronutrient percentages held steady. I've been able to increase my daily walking time for the last two months. The only thing that has changed significantly is that I've lost 5 lbs. over the past four weeks! And I'm really jazzed about that.
Still, I'm adjusting my goals for May to 1200 calories a day, 100 grams of fat, 30 grams of carbs, 45 grams of protein, and 20 grams of fiber, for fat-carb-protein ratio of 75%-10%-15%. Sounds reasonable to me.

Another significant occurrence was that, after some suggestion and research, I began taking herb capsules of butterbur on April 16 and, to date (16 days later) have been migraine-pain-free. Keeping my fingers crossed.

I've done a lot of thinking and reading and researching this past month and more work on my Adventist Vegetarian Diabetics blog, to supplement the Adventist Vegetarian Diabetics Facebook group. I'll go into more details about that on said blog.

I've also kept up with the other Facebook groups: NEWSTART Insights, Reversing Diabetes, The Vegetarian Low Carb Diabetic Healthy Diet Society, The Vegan Diabetic, and a few others which I check infrequently.

Last but not least, I've become better friends with Judie Lee Fizer who I "met" in the NEWSTART Insights group in February. And this is all part of my diabetes journey, my Year Without Carbs.

Easter Sunday

Last week I began my fourth month of serious low-carb high-fat lifestyle. During March, I lowered my average blood glucose from 139 to 127, and my fasting blood glucose from 138 to 128. I lowered my average daily calorie intake from 1470 to 1375. My average daily carb intake went from 49 to 36 grams. My weight decreased from 171.2 lbs. to 168.8 lbs. Not great but every little bit is encouraging.

Based on these numbers, I have set new goals for April of calories 1400, fat 117g, carbohydrates 35g, protein 53g (maximum), and fiber 30g. Percentage goals are 75% fat, 10% carbohydrates, and 15% protein.

I still have frozen shoulder. I still get migraines approximately 15 days out of every 30.

My biggest challenge is still exercise. I only averaged 21 min. daily, where it should be a minimum of 30 minutes. Now that the days are longer, I really have no excuse! Except today when it is raining.

In mid-March, I "attended" a conference call put on by Weimar NEWSTART with the topic of exercise. The presenter confirmed Weimar's belief that 10,000 steps (or 5 miles of walking) daily is required for optimal health. I asked what would be the equivalent of bike/trike riding in either distance or time, and I was told that was not an appropriate question for me to ask. I think because no one really knows for sure! My internet searches on this question have brought me answers just as nebulous. So, if/when I can remember to attach my pedometer on my next trike ride, I'll note how many "steps" get recorded on my usual trip of two times around the mobilehome park. I already know that my typical walk with Barley around 4 blocks is only about 1500 steps and takes 15 minutes. Sure, I know I should double that to get in 30 minutes, but my feet just won't go any farther! My highest steps day was 2888 steps on a Tuesday when we went to Farmers' Market and then shopping at the mall.

Today I'm recovering from a 12-hour migraine which has morphed into a scratchy throat, sneezing, and runny nose. Getting ready for a holiday visit with the kids this afternoon!

More About NEWSTART®

Last week the admin of NEWSTART® Insights said he sent out an email to NEWSTART® program alumni, inviting them to join this Facebook group. He must have succeeded, because the group jumped from 30-something to way over 100 members.

Well, a couple of weeks ago I asked about coconut oil and got this response:

"Sorry, Jacqueline, for a therapeutic diet, to reverse disease, no added oil, only what's found in whole foods like, olives, avocados, and nuts and these items should be in the appropriate serving sizes. Coconut oil has been refined because it's been removed from the coconut as an oil. Hope this helps."

That was very disappointing for me. Then, today, I got this response from someone else in the group, someone named Judie Lee Fizer:

"Jacqueline, on oils. There are two types of NEWSTART®: there is therapeutic, for those needing cures for lifestyle-related sickness. And there is just lifestyle NEWSTART®. For therapeutic, they withhold free oils and use avocado, nuts, etc. for oils. For lifestyle you should add in coconut, olive, avocado, walnut, etc. oils. We need these oils, but for obesity wait until you've lost most of the excess."

And yet another response from one of the Weimar doctors:

"Free oils or excess fats are not part of the NS plan." I asked what they considered "excess fats" and got this response from Judie Lee:

"Excess depends upon the individual. Coconut oil has many benefits as you know and avocado as well, but I think your body will tell you. I'd not combine fat and carbs, though, fat and veggies, yes, non-starchy non-carb veggies, like greens. The fats help the body utilize the nutrients in the greens, etc."

Finally! Someone at NEWSTART® is beginning to make sense! She also said in another post, "Some people need more fat and without it lose their energy. Others don't do well with grains, so it's an individual thing, as you probably know."

Quite unlike the doctor, whom I'm guessing is quite old-school, who wrote, "Eliminating all fat in your diet would be good and for sure the pounds will melt away, triglycerides will drop overnight, and cholesterol will also come down." And this was after I had already told him that my cholesterol had been normal since 2001!

My last response to him was, "My total cholesterol at my last test was 129 and LDL was 37. HDL was 43, so it's almost up to normal. Yes, I'm technically obese, with a BMI of 31.1, having gained 15+ lbs. when I went on insulin. Triglycerides vary in proportion to my A1C, so it seems to have more to do with blood sugar than with fat." I can hardly wait to see what he says next. Probably nothing relevant.

Facebook Drama

I have been following NEWSTART® Insights on Facebook for a couple a weeks now. I am careful not to express my own opinions but rather just to ask questions, to try to start (or add to) conversations. There was this person, Terri Gleadell Wallace, who posted, said she had never attended a NEWSTART® session but had put together a syllabus, she called it, on each of the eight facets of the lifestyle. And she wanted to share it.

It was a very complex, organized listing of links primarily to videos that were on the newstart.org website, and some to a place called Amazing Health, and some to a YouTube site on finances. I commented that she looked very organized. Since she called it a syllabus, I assumed she was a dietitian or nutritionist. Nope, she just wrote this for herself. Before I found that out, however, I made the mistake of asking her how she might modify this for a diabetic. Her answer was very cold and clinical, stating that I should ask my doctor about that. Whereupon I shot back that most doctors don't know very much about nutrition.

Well, I kept asking questions and that apparently made her very uncomfortable and defensive. Her answers were brief and terse. Finally, she had had it with me and told me she thought this discussion group was a place to share and not to ask questions. Not to ask questions! Instinctively, I shot back, "Well, it's not like I'm questioning the doctrines of the church!" She became livid and totally removed her long and involved initial post, along with the long and involved thread that had followed it. I then posted a comment below the moderator's pinned post that said, "Are we allowed to ask questions here?" In a few minutes after that, I saw that she had left the group!

It occurred to me immediately how very much like The Church that Terri Gleadell Wallace was being: wanting to "share" what she had compiled but not wanting to be asked questions about it. I wondered if this was a harbinger of things to come on NEWSTART® Insights.

NEWSTART® Insights

I need to just start this day completely over! Woke up with a migraine, could not get into computer for an hour and half, and then discovered that my trusty Joomla editor was not working and the rest of the day was consumed with that! The first re-broadcast of City Church Online failed, and the only respite I had was listening to Dr. Richard Bernstein's webcast for an hour. However, just before giving up for the night, I checked Facebook one more time, and there was an invitation to join a newly created group, NEWSTART® Insights! The admin, apparently who is the face of the Newstart Lifestyle Program Page, took me seriously when I posted on their page earlier this month and suggested they should have a discussion group for alumni. Well, let's see what this brings....

https://www.facebook.com/groups/1541563009464167/

A Short History

My Type 2 Diagnosis

I was diagnosed with Type 2 diabetes in September of 2000, just before going on a weekend campout with a group of women. I remember that when I told Dr. John Duge, our pastor, I bemoaned that I would never be able to have Almond Roca again, and he laughed, thinking that I was very funny. I was working in San Francisco at Degenkolb Engineers then, and I walked around the city streets during my lunch hour on a route that I carved out for myself, and then I came back to the office and ate lunch at my desk, being very careful to pack lunches that met the ADA dietary guidelines of 150 grams of carbohydrates per day. On breaks, I drank Diet Dr. Pepper. For the first few years, I was able to manage to keep my A1C under 7.0 with just diet and exercise.

I haven't dug through my old logs yet to see when exactly I went astray, but at some point I was put on Glucophage (metformin) and, later, Glucotrol (glipizide), with increasing dosages until I was taking the maximum of each. And, later still, I was put on insulin, starting with 5 units once a day until it got to be where I am now, at 40 units in the morning and 50 units at bedtime. It was a wake-up call to me when a Pharm.D. suggested I might want to order larger syringes that would hold more than 50 units!

Weimar Reversing Diabetes Retreat

In the fall of 2004, I attended a 3-day Reversing Diabetes retreat, conducted by Weimar Institute. I was familiar with the Weimar Diet from 20 years before when I had my kids on the Feingold Diet, which eliminates artificial colors, flavors, and preservatives, plus testing for salicylate intolerance. We were living in North Dakota at the time and were not able to find any bread that was suitable so I learned to make whole-grain bread with dates and avocados since Weimar prohibited all processed sugars and oils. But the Weimar Diet was vegan and we still ate eggs and dairy products. (We were not quite ready for translation.) After attending the Reversing Diabetes seminar, I was certain I could follow it if (1) I had all day to spending cooking and (2) I had enough time to walk five miles a day, seven days a week. So "Reversing Diabetes" was something I put on the back burner for when I retired, which I thought would be sometime after age 70.

Looking for Weimar on Facebook

But life has a way of interrupting one's plans. I lost my job when I was just 5 months past age 65, and my whole world turned upside down. We had to move to a less expensive place. I was hysterical, thinking I would now have to do grocery shopping at WalMart instead of the snooty Nob Hill. I found myself on Medicare and Social Security. It took more than a year for me to "get over" this total life devastation (and I'm not sure I'm really "over it" yet), but at some point I had to accept that this is the way it is and is going to be from now on and just deal with it. I had to realize that this is the retirement life I had fantasized about but it just didn't happen on my own terms. Nor with sufficient financial support. But what I lacked in money I now had in time. Time to spend all day cooking, planning what to cook, and cleaning up after cooking. Time to go for a daily five-mile walk along the bay front, on level asphalt, two-and-a-half miles from my new home to the marina and back.

In the spring of 2013 I decided to look for a Facebook support group, should it exist, of people who had attended a Weimar Reversing Diabetes program. None existed, only a Facebook Page promoting the NEWSTART® Lifestyle Program, and I signed up to subscribe to their email newsletter. But, in searching the term "Reversing Diabetes" on Facebook, I found some discussion groups that I could join. I also searched "Reversing Diabetes" on Amazon and found a number of books that looked promising that I downloaded to my Kindle. And so my journey began.

Finding a Different Kind of Reversing Diabetes

In the beginning, I read a lot and I "listened" a lot in the groups. I began to get the sense that the real key to diabetes control--and maybe even reversal--was carbohydrate control: greatly reducing carb intake. That made sense to me. What was harder to wrap my head around was the idea of high-fat along with low-carb. I learned that if you lower your carb intake enough, your body will start to burn fat for energy. Now that made sense to me, because excess glucose (from carbs--sugars and starches) had been stored as fat anyway for whenever you didn't have enough glucose for energy. I settled on two Facebook groups that made the most sense to me: Reversing Diabetes and The Vegetarian Low Carb Diabetic Healthy Diet Society, both closed groups. Over time, I discovered that the Reversing Diabetes group had a single focus: that of low-carb high-fat and the recipes containing meat were all kinds of meat, clean and unclean. It was just easier to say I was a vegetarian than to try to explain why I ate beef and chicken and salmon but not pork and shrimp and catfish. The Vegetarian Low Carb Diabetic Healthy Diet Society was pretty esoteric, with a lot of ethnic foods using ingredients that I do not normally stock in my kitchen.

Creating an Adventist Diabetic Community

Then I got an idea to start my own Facebook group and call it Adventist Vegetarian Diabetics, which would include diabetics who understood the Seventh-day Adventist position on vegetarianism and "clean meats." I was hoping against hope that I might find someone who had gone through the Weimar Reversing Diabetes program and could share their success with the group. So, in June 2013, I added a dozen or so of my Facebook friends who I knew were current or former Adventists and were diabetic and put out invitations for anyone interested to join the group.

Experimenting with Low-carb High-fat

In the fall of 2013 I decided to give this LCHF (low-carb high-fat) idea a try, though I was sure I would never be able to get as low as 20-30 grams of carbs a day as the most successful ones in the groups seemed to be doing. I figured if I could get my carb intake down to <100 grams/day, that would be a first step. So in the first several months I watched my A1C go down from 7.5 to 7.1 to 6.8. At that point, that was "good enough" for my doctor, so she stopped having me get the A1C test every 3 months. I convinced her, though, that I needed to test at least three times a day and that I needed a prescription for 300 test strips every three months, and she complied with my request.

Year of Recipe Testing

In the summer and fall of 2014, our vegetarian daughter moved in with us in order to go to a local college, and so I put the low-carb approach on hold temporarily and focused on the vegetarian aspect. We stopped the Hebrew National® beef franks and ate more baked potatoes and Bob's Red Mill ten-grain hot cereal and bean thread with our bok choy tofu stir-fry. But we did have a lot of okra and raspberries and a green salad almost every day that she ate with us. I still cooked "from scratch" and used a lot of coconut oil and olive oil, but I didn't have time to keep a food journal.

I spent most of 2014 experimenting, trying new recipes, trying low-carb foods, trying high-carb foods, and testing to see how things affected my blood sugar. As with Feingold, I seemed to have to make the same mistakes over and over before I could become truly convinced of cause and effect. I asked a lot of questions and posted a lot of opinions on Adventist Vegetarian Diabetics and got very little response, and that was discouraging. I began to wonder if anyone was reading what I was posting. At one point I was so discouraged I fleetingly thought of just deleting the Facebook group, but when I even hinted toward that in a post, I got enough responses of encouragement to keep going with it. However, since it seemed that what people want most was information--especially recipes--and really did not want to have group conversations, I made the group Public: anyone on Facebook could see the posts and the member list, but only members ccould post. After a short time--and a member poll--I changed it back to a Closed Group.

Re-evaluating Goals

Now, as 2015 begins, it's time to re-evaluate not only my personal goals but the goals and purpose of this online community (even if the "community" feels a bit one-sided!). Perhaps my poll questions should not be for the purpose of gaining statistical data about the members, since such a very small percentage of the members even respond to the polls. Perhaps the purpose of a question--whether responded to or not--should simply be for the purpose of getting the members to think about a particular aspect of managing their diabetes. So I will be diligent in presenting a new question weekly and will not be concerned at all how--or if--it is responded to!

Today I'm beginning the food journal, again with a goal of <100 grams carbs per day and 70% of calories from fat. Thus begins my new diabetes journey.