DIABETES

Dennis - my best friend, for most of his adult life - was showing signs of blood glucose level change. It eventually turned into diabetes. He was a truck driver. Then his diabetes got too bad and he had trouble seeing at night. He had to eventually stop working altogether.

He went to the movies every weekend where he would eat a tub of popcorn and drink a large diet coke. Some weeks he would go two or three times. Then he would eat at some fast food restaurant. After his meal, he would drive his pick-up truck home, drinking his Diet Mountain Dew or Diet Coke (he thought diet was okay), yet I hardly saw proof he would drink water. Plastic soda bottles were lying inside his pick-up truck and all around his house - dozens of them. One day I saw him finish a Diet Mountain Dew, screw the lid back on, reach over the back of the couch he was lying on and drop it. I later looked behind that couch and again saw dozens of bottles.

As days passed, he slowly became sluggish in his thinking. His memory started fading. His eyesight became worse. He would stumble a lot because he lost all sensation in his feet. Yet the insulin injections continued as well as the soda drinking. Sacks from Sonic which once held French fries and a foot-long hot dog covered with chili and cheese laid all around his room. Too lazy to throw it away, I thought, not realizing the diabetes was zapping his energy and motivation.

He loved eating out. Chinese restaurants, hamburger joints, Mexican restaurants were his places to eat on a weekly basis. Healthy, organic food was not his thing. It was okay though, because he would check his blood glucose level on a regular basis and take his insulin.

He used to shoot pool and was very good at it. He was on a pool league, would go out in the evening, inhaling second hand smoke, staying up late into the next morning and then sleeping throughout the morning, sometimes into the afternoon. But most of the time he wouldn’t get enough sleep. Again, he thought this lifestyle was okay because he was monitoring his blood sugar and taking insulin.

His eyesight continued to get worse until he had Lasik surgery. He was getting weaker as the months passed. He would bruise and cut easily and of course it would take a longer than normal amount of time to heal. Easy bruising on the outside meant his capillaries were weak, and if they were weak on the outside, then it can be assumed that they were weak on the inside, like around his heart and brain as well.

Then, unexpectedly, it happened.

He lifted something fairly heavy and caused a stroke. He would forever be the shell of the man I used to know. One stroke led to another, and another. He became dependent upon medications to try and rescue him. It didn’t work. He eventually entered the hospital. The symptoms of multiple strokes were more evident. An MRI of his brain showed that it was turning to mush. He was having rapid multiple strokes, too many to count.

When my wife and I went to see him for the first time I could not believe my eyes. I saw him struggling to breathe while being intubated. Tubes were stuck in his arms. His face all cringed as if he was in serious pain but couldn’t tell anybody. He was emaciated. Urine bag hanging off the bed was dark brown. My friend was quickly dying. About a week later, in September of 2010, my best friend for life died at the age of 57 from complications arising from diabetes.

It still breaks my heart to think that my friend is no longer here. I miss him so much. I used to always challenge him to start eating healthy. I told him constantly to stop drinking sodas and start drinking water. I encouraged him to take supplements that would help him, but as time passed he would forget to take them, or his medication, or take too much. I’ve had to clean a tub filled with bile throw up and call the ambulance because he had fallen into a diabetic coma. But still he did what he did and then he died. I saw the devastating effect diabetes had on his body. Fifty-seven is way too young to die. I always told him he had to change his diet and start exercising, but he never did. I told him. But he didn’t listen.

Now it’s my turn.

I am now, as of this writing, 52 years old, and recently I have had a change in my body. Almost overnight my eyesight became blurry. I thought it was just the new glasses I had recently purchased. Maybe I had the wrong prescription. I had them checked. They were spot on with the prescription. About two weeks later, I began to have a constant thirst. I started drinking lots of water and having frequent urination. My mouth became dry at times and I started rapidly losing weight. I no longer had a craving for sweets and I was getting easily tired. OMGosh! No way. This cannot be happening. Am I really showing signs of diabetes?

I look back on my lifestyle and I never thought it could happen to me. Here I was berating my best friend because he had diabetes and didn’t take care of himself, and now my deep dark secret of eating burgers and fries and processed foods and ice cream and shakes and candy has been revealed. I was a food addict.

Years ago I would tell my patients to stop their bad eating habits, but I knew I had a problem with eating myself. I knew I shouldn’t eat like I do. Portion control? What’s that?! I couldn’t push myself away from the table until I felt full. I had to eat everything on my plate. My eyes were definitely pushing my stomach to the popping point. My wife would always tell me to slow down and breathe. I would eat so fast I hardly chewed my food. I knew the effects it would have on my body, but since I never had any symptoms except being overweight for my size, I thought I would just someday start really eating right and exercise.

I slowly started coming around to eating more organic foods, taking my supplements when I remembered, occasional breakfast bar, protein shake, but I still had my desserts and sugary snacks and breads, pastas and pizzas to excess.

Surveying this past year (2011) I saw where I continued to eat more than I should have and exercised less. My portion control was still out of control. I ate larger than required meals and always topped it off with a sweet dessert. I ate until I felt satisfied. The holidays were a time where I thought I could just gorge myself because 2012 was around the corner and that was the year I would start eating right and exercising. This time I was going to really do it.

Neither my eating habits nor my exercising happened. The first two weeks of January passed without incident. The third week of January the symptoms, as mentioned above, started.

My body has automatically started causing me to lose weight and lose cravings for sweets. It has gone into survival mode. It is doing what it is supposed to do: Preservation of the species. It has given me symptoms to show it needs my cooperation to heal itself. If I am going to be weak and stupid I will stay in full diabetic mode and probably die like my friend. If I see these symptoms as a dire warning, I will start a change of lifestyle immediately. I will begin eating right and exercising and taking proper supplements. This can change for the better, no doubt about it. But this has been a self-inflicted wound that I must heal or it will kill me too.

I had my blood glucose level checked back in late July of 2011 and it was 98 with a high end of normal being 110. When I started having symptoms this year, I again had my blood glucose level checked. It was now a whopping 308. Just like that it popped off the charts. My Hemoglobin A1C test was 9.9%. Any result greater than 6.5% is consistent with diabetes. I had a bad feeling that I was going to show high levels, but not this high. It just happened so quickly. It should not been a surprise. I was heading for this for years.

My blood glucose level jumping to such high extremes just confirms what I already knew. My pancreas is tired. It worked and worked all these years trying to keep up with what I presented it with - bad foods. It has done its job. It has started tiring and just like a race horse at the end of the race, I continued to whip it to the finish line with my bad habits. It was getting tired and yet I pushed it more and more until it became too exhausted. It didn’t make it to the finish line and so my body did what it could only do to survive. It made me lose weight, it made me thirsty to flush out the sugars, it caused me to not crave sweets that would feed the blood stream with sugars.

Our bodies are amazing machines, aren’t they? But my addiction to foods, especially bad foods, exploited this. I pushed and pushed until my body struck back and said ENOUGH ALREADY!

Now I am looking upon this bodily change as a blessing. With God’s help through prayer, through the proper diet, proper nutritional supplementation and proper exercise, diabetes can be cured. Food is powerful. Food is what caused this disease, food can also reverse it.

I must include chiropractic care. It is so vital to keeping the body systems working properly, including freeing up nerve flow to the liver and pancreas and reducing the inflammation that has riled the pancreas for months, if not years. I also include whole food supplements, because my adrenals are now shot as well and I need to revive them along with the rest of my body. (Exercise is very important but for now I cannot. It's too soon.)

Food is the biggest necessary change. No starchy food, no sugar unless I have a serious drop in blood sugar. But right now, that isn’t going to happen. I have to bring it down from 308, so no starchy foods that slowly turn to sugar and no sugar - just vegetables, proteins, fats (which are very important) and no fruits. Once the blood sugar is normalized, I will incorporate starches and sugars on a limited basis.

This is a lifetime, lifestyle change, not one I do for a short time until things settle down. I finally understand that I must do this for myself and my family.

My symptoms have slowly started fading, but my glucose is still fluctuating at a high level. I still have some fatigue, my vision isn’t anywhere near as blurry as it was and is close to where it used to be. I don’t thirst like I used to. I still drink lots of water. Lots of water. I am still losing weight, but not as fast. Right before the symptoms started I weighed 194 pounds at 5’7". I now weigh 173, and still losing, only not as fast.

I do not have a family history of diabetes, but I believe I have a genetic predisposition that made it easier to become diabetic if I didn’t live a different lifestyle than I have. Just because I may have had a genetic tendency does not automatically guarantee I would become a diabetic. It ws my choices I made that determined it.

As I got older, my waist line became too large for my size. I wear (wore) a size 36 and for my height, I never could understand that. I’ve seen men six-foot tall with size 34. Most of my weight has been around my mid section. I held it well. But much was held around my liver and pancreas.

I realize that, as a diabetic, I can still eat mostly what everyone else can, except I have to be careful. I have to be mindful of my blood sugar spikes and falls. I have to balance my meals, eating less more often.

There are hundreds of theories about how you should eat, what you should eat, what you should stay away from. For me, I will do it my way. I may or may not include medical intervention at first, but not for long-term use. It took this extreme change to finally make me realize how devastating my lifestyle was.

One in three people are eating and drinking their way down the diabetic path, but just like me they are pushing it to the brink. Research has shown this to be true. Look around. Can you see yourself as the one of three people heading down this road? It is a road filled not only with diabetes potholes, but other potholes such as heart disease, strokes, cancer, autoimmune disorders and many other conditions.

I will continually update you with my journey and I will have lots more on diabetes and treatment protocols in the days to come.

Dr. Kenneth