sorry to hear about that.

A big mistake. Diabetes is a horrifying disease, leading to rapid
aging and early death. Nothing to joke about.

I will mention a few things, in response to your post and to Brad's. I
am not a diabetes expert, but what I will say is a matter of common
knowledge.

Since it became somewhat fashionable to avoid sugar, food
manufacturers learned of some tricks to hide it. For example, they
would call it "sucrose", or "dehydrated cane juice". Other sugar
equivalents are "high frustose corn syrup" or "molasses" or "honey" or
anything "malted".

Some people make a case that carbs such as bread or potatoes are
equivalent to sugar. I am not qualified to comment on it, but it seems
a bit counterintuitive, even though I read a lot about it.

Anyway, if you avoid anything sweetened, you basically avoid a lot of
bad foods. How far to go to avoid it is your decision. Whether you
would ignore salad dressings, for example, is your choice. No one died
from not eating salad dressings. Lots of people die from diabetes.

Onward to diabetes. It is a terrible, incurable, progressing and
debilitating disease leading to early aging and premature death.
Diabetes is a continuum, it starts slowly and the cutoff point for
diabetes that doctors use is somewhat arbitrary. Just because your
fasting glucose is 124 and not 126, does not mean that you are
fine. You simply have not reached official diabetes diagnosis quite
yet, but your body is already not working right.

Read Dr Bernstein's book " diabetes solution" that I mentioned
earlier.

A side effect of diabetes or pre-diabetes is horrible blood lipids and
heart disease. Often times, the first symptom of diabetes is a fatal
heart attack.

You appear to be on that path towards diabetes, not too far from
it. Do not take it lightly.

Diabetes is ssomewhat preventable, in the sense that you can slow down
its progression. There has been an excellent study done about stopping
progression of diabetes. They took a number of obese prediabetics,
split them in half. One half did nothing, continued overeating
etc. The other half received counseling and was kind of forced to,
first, lose weight, and second, exercise every day.

The second group showed 58% less cases of full blown diabetes than the
control group.

So, a simple common sense intervention -- eat less, exercise, lose
weight -- slowed down the progression of diabetes pretty
dramatically. Requires a bit of willpower, but think of it as doing it
with a gun put to your head. You have to.

The intervention group did not exercise that much and they did not
lose that much weight either. I  am too lazy to look it up, but they
lost under 10% of weight and exercised about 40 minutes per day. So,
if you do a little better, your chances at stopping progression of
your diabetes also become better.

Low carbing also is reported to be of big help, if done intelligently
(ie, no eating of fake "low carb" labeled junk food).

Personally, I believe that I am also somewhat glucose intolerant. I
once took my glucose level 30 minutes after a meal, and it was, I
think, 143. Someone let me use their glucose monitor. So my weight
loss exercise etc, probably will help me not to lose more health that
I would lose due to obesity. I am glad that I figured it out at 32 and
not at 42 or 52.

This diabetic woman has an excellent page with common sense articles
on diabetes, low carbing etc.

http://www.geocities.com/jenny_the_bean/

good luck. treat your health seriously.

i

You may be making it more difficult for yourself by not looking at 'hidden'
sugars in things like condiments, etc. If you respond to sugar the way that
I do, things with high fructose corn syrup can really set off day long
cravings for me.  I've spent the afternoon craving sugar before and then
realized a salad dressing had tons of sugar in it causing me cravings.

Also, you may want to choose your fruits carefully.  Apples and berries and
other fruits with high fiber will release their sugar into your blood stream
much slower than bananas and canteloupe.  It helps me to eat a little
protien with my fruit.

Since I don't particularly like fruits and veggies, I usually add berries or
canteloupe to a soy protien shake made with yogurt.   Since both the soy and
the yogurt are very kind to one's blood sugar, the fruit doesn't seem to
have as great of an effect on me and I go for hours without thinking about
food.

Just a few lenten thoughts.....

j

Cp, I will write more later, as I am busy with the kid, but I suggest
buying a book called Dr Bernstein's Diabetes solution. Don't do it by
the soundbite, try to get systematically complete information. It is
simply too important. There is a lot of diabetics and prediabetics in
alt.support.diet.low-carb. You may want to poke your nose there.

i