Week 4

Challenge Update: success!

Time in range

I’ve been in range for more than 90% of the time!

Food: calories and macros

Below, the weekly summary from Cronometer.

I increased my daily calorie intake to 2500 kcal on average.
I slightly decreased my focus on protein and shifted towards more carbohydrates, mainly in the form of fruits or any other clean source recommended by the Mastering Diabetes ‘Green Light Foods’ list.

Breaking it down. Some notes

Blood glucose is tamed!

One month of whole food, plant based nutrition done right, and I see the results I was expecting to see.

The main change from before is the reduction of my intake of fats:

I make sure I get what I need to maintain a good balance of omega3 and omega6.
I only get fats from top quality sources. Mostly chia seeds, flax seeds and seeds in general. I also snack on nuts of various types here and there.
I avoid processed fats, like oils.

I also adopted the pre-post bolus strategy to better manage potential spikes after meals: I inject 70% of the amount of insulin at meal time, and the remaining 30% around one hour later. This small trick did wonders to contain my blood glucose after dinner.
For instance, if I know that I need to take 10 units of rapid insulin at lunch, I’ll get 7 right before eating, and the remaining 3 one hour after the meal.

If you do this, just don’t forget your post-bolus! I did one evening, and that caused that 3% ‘high’ and 2% ‘very high’ that you see in the picture (I never went above 260, anyway!). Leaving that mistake aside, I am quite enthusiastic about this strategy, and I’ll continue using it.

Intermittent fasting: great for diabetes

No major updates here. Still fasting on a 19-5 scheme, still feeling great, still sleeping like a baby, still experiencing an increase in focus and in the stability of blood glucose.

I have improved my meal design:

Two big meals a day centred on calorie dense foods (potatoes, lentils, chickpeas and rice for the most part).
For the sides, I just pick a bunch of things from the daily dozen and throw them on the plate.
I then enjoy various fruit snacks in between. And with those, I get all the calories and nutrients I need without too much thinking.

Exercise: still pumping!

My long spin bike and run performances were still fine during my fasting window. Apparently, eating the right stuff in the right amounts during the 5 hours feeding window secures good energy storage for whatever endurance activity I do in the 19 hours after.

Conclusions

This week rounds up the first month of the 90% time in range challenge. I am extremely happy with the results, as each week was a chance to understand what was not working, fix it, and see the improvement seven days after.

I have developed better habits around food, and I feel more in control when it comes to those tasty processed snacks I used to eat previously.

Seeing the health benefits of just removing them from my ingredients list in favour of better items (an apple will always be better than a vegan-mayo dressing!) is a good enough reason for me to not go back. It’s not even a restriction, it’s just that consuming whole plant based food feels better than consuming processed plant based food. At this point, I just crave the good stuff, and see no point in eating the bad stuff.

Also, remember the mental toll and insecurity in our day-to-day that is caused by unstable and highly variable blood glucose (I talked about it in week 2)? That’s gone. And I have noticed a huge increase in tranquillity and confidence overall.

This goes far beyond diabetes itself. This is a real life improvement.

The challenge is not over!

I will not post weekly updates as blog posts from now on.

Instead, I will use this page as my new ‘weekly monitor’, where each week I will post summary visualisation of some key metrics of interest to witness their evolution overtime.

You can still check all the previous posts related to the challenge:

If you also feel ready to take some steps to improve your health, I highly suggest you consider buying the Mastering Diabetes book, or if reading is not your thing, just go through their YouTube channel.

It really made all the difference for me. I now understand the hows, whats and whys of diabetes much better. I feel empowered with the right tools to manage my health long term, and that is invaluable.

Sounds good? I hope so! Thanks for reading, and see you in the next post! 😁

Deep Dive

Everyone (diabetic or not) should watch this, take notes and take action!