60 Ways to Lower Your Blood Sugar

by Dennis Pollock

  You can’t exactly do it the way you used to, but you can still eat pizza at a pizza restaurant. You can play your part in truth, justice, and the American way—well, at least the American way!

  I don’t really know why this is, but it just seems flat wrong to eat pizza without drinking a soda. If you can get by on water or unsweetened tea, then by all means do that. But if (like me) you feel you just have to have soda to wash down that wonderful pizza, make it a diet soda. A regular soda is absolutely loaded with sugar and will ruin your good intentions no matter how much you watch your pizza. Sodas are right up there with candy bars, baked potatoes, and cotton candy. They are monsters that will kick your blood sugar into orbit. There can be no compromising here—if you must drink a soda, make it a diet soda. But don’t drink these too often.

  5

  Bun Surgery

  Americans love buns. We put hamburgers on buns, chicken patties on buns, fish on buns, hot dogs on buns…if it’s a meat we find a way to put it on a bun, wrap it up, and sell it as fast food. We even put vegetable burgers on buns. When you assess foods placed between two buns, the reality is this: buns are a problem for people with blood sugar; what’s inside is not (unless it has a bread coating).

  Not only are buns a major source of carbs but they are almost always made from white flour, which is the least healthy type of flour. Buns have little fiber and high carbs. They lounge in your colon too long, block things up, and cause general mischief. Consider the common McDonald’s cheeseburger. It is made up of the following ingredients: the bun, the beef burger, cheese, some bits of onion, and ketchup. There are a total of 33 grams of carbs in this burger. The carb grams break down as follows: 28 come from the bun, 1 from the cheese, 1 from the onions, and 2 from the ketchup. Those 33 grams are too much and are actually about the same you would get from a candy bar.

  But you can do a quick carb-reduction surgery and make the situation much more to your needs. I have done it over and over again. Open the wrapping, pull off the top bun, use the top bun to wipe off most of the ketchup (you can leave a little on for taste), place the top bun in the wrapper, squish it thoroughly for satisfaction, and eat the burger minus the top bun. We might assume we have just cut our bun carbs in half. But in most cases we will have done a little better than that. Usually the top bun is plumper and heftier than the bottom bun, so by taking off the top bun you have probably cut the carbs by about 60 percent.

  A Big Mac contains a total of 45 grams of carbs, 39 of which come from the bun. The Big Mac bun actually contains a middle bun layer as well as a top and bottom. By removing the top and middle layer, you have gone from a 45-gram carb meal to something like an 11-gram carb meal—and have done a significant favor for your pancreas and the rest of your body. Obviously you could save more carbs by getting rid of the bottom bun as well, but now you’ve got a really messy meal you won’t be able to hold in your hands and eat without looking like a complete idiot, or else you’ll have to eat it with a knife and fork. Besides it no longer feels like a hamburger.

  One of the goals of our lifestyle change is to make changes we can live with. Most people are going to feel cheated by giving up the bun altogether, but you should be able to live with losing only the top half of the bun. At fancy restaurants that serve monster hamburgers smothered with cheese, onions, and mushrooms, I do sometimes remove both top and bottom bun. Since the hamburger is so filling, I don’t feel cheated. I add a garden salad and I’m a happy guy.

  Some of the burgers you get from restaurants have buns that significantly outsize the beef within (remember the “Where’s the beef?” campaign?). Whoppers from Burger King are especially notorious for this. Here is a great opportunity to save a few more carbs. Move the burger over to far edge of the bun and see how much the bread overlaps the meat on the one side. Tear off the overlapping bread until the bottom bun matches the patty.

  I have done this so often it is second nature to me. Sure, there probably have been a few folks here and there who have observed my unusual practice and wondered what kind of odd character I was. But that is a small price to pay to keep the roaring lion of diabetes away from my door. And the practice of removing the top half of the bun works with more than hamburgers. Do it with subway sandwiches, hot dogs, Philly steak sandwiches, and any other foods that come between a top and bottom bun.

  Another thing you can do if you’re especially hungry is to order two burgers, remove the insides from one and put them on the other bun, and then remove the top bun from that assembly. This works great with roastbeef sandwiches. Now you have twice the beef but all on only one half of a bun. You have done yourself a great favor!

  I know I am suggesting you do some things very few people do, and maybe some folks will comment or look twice at your little surgeries. But high blood sugar is an incredibly destructive force in your body, and you have to get a little radical. You can’t put out a forest fire with teaspoons of water, and you can’t bring your blood sugar under control with tiny little minor modifications. This practice, by itself, is not going to make all the difference, but when you add this practice to the other suggestions in this book, it will make a huge difference. The life and limbs you save may be your own.

  6

  Confessions of a Cereal Lover

  When I was a child I was an extremely finicky eater. I hated most vegetables. Just looking at beets made me sick. My salads consisted of lettuce only, with French dressing. But I made up for my lack of variety by eating huge doses of cold cereal. I loved almost all of them: Sugar Smacks, Sugar Pops, Frosted Flakes, Shredded Wheat, Corn Flakes, Wheaties, Cocoa Puffs…you name it; I would eat it. For some reason my mom decided Trix was an unhealthy cereal (I think all the bright colors offended her) and wouldn’t buy it much, so whenever I could get it, this was a special treat.

  In fact I owe a debt to cereal, for it was the means God used to get my attention in a big way to my growing insulin resistance. In church one Sunday I decided to slip out just before the end of the service to beat the crowd. I didn’t realize when I got up that my foot had fallen asleep, and when I started to take a step the sleepy foot didn’t do what it was supposed to do, and I ended up stepping on it the wrong way and sprained my ankle. I hobbled out in pain but felt strangely weak. When I got to the hallway outside the sanctuary I knew I was losing it. I put my back against the wall and slid to the floor. The next thing I knew a lady was holding me and told me I had passed out.

  Medics were called, and they immediately did a blood-glucose test on me. The meter didn’t show a number. It simply read “Lo,” which meant my blood sugar was dangerously low. They wanted to take me to the hospital, but I refused and instead had my wife drive me home, after I had eaten a few snacks to bring my blood sugar back up. I had no clue what was happening but knew that somehow it had to do with blood sugar. I analyzed what I had eaten for breakfast that morning—a large bowl of Raisin Bran, considered one of the healthier cereals. How could my blood sugar have gone so low?

  After I became more educated I figured out exactly what had happened. Raisin Bran may appear to be a far more natural cereal than, say Cocoa Puffs or Trix, but in fact it has an enormous amount of carbs in it. The raisins themselves have quite a bit of natural sugar, the bran has a lot of carbs, and on top of that they sprinkle sugar liberally all over the raisins and inject more sugar into the bran flakes. The result is a tremendously high-carb food. You get about as much sugar and carbs in one large bowl of Raisin Bran as you would stuffing down three Hershey’s chocolate candy bars.

  And what’s more, the Raisin Bran is very high on the glycemic index, meaning its carbs and sugars are going to hit your bloodstream fast—very fast! Your pancreas is going to exhaust itself trying to keep up with all those incoming carbs. And if you are suffering from insulin resistance, as I was, and yet have an active, functioning pancreas, you are going to overload your body with insulin. Had I checked my blood sugar an hour after I ate the cereal, it would have read way too high. But now that torre
ntial flood of insulin was driving my blood sugar dangerously too low.

  The simple truth is that cereals are made from some type of grain. There are no beef or chicken cereals, nor are there any cereals I know made from cucumbers or green peppers. And this makes them a problem.

  The moral here: if you are going to control your blood sugar you are going to have to be very careful when it comes to cereal. And I am not just picking on Raisin Bran. Most cereals are just as bad; some are worse.

  If you look at the nutrition information you can quickly see that they are quite high in carbs. But wait a minute! Look more closely. You will see that their nutrition information is usually based on a tiny serving that no one would ever eat: one-half cup or three-quarters of a cup.

  Go get a half-cup measure, fill it with cereal, and put that in a cereal bowl. Would you ever eat that small amount? Of course not! To fill a moderately sized bowl you would need at least two cups of cereal; a large bowl would require three cups. This means you will need to triple (or more) the carbs listed on the label in order to find out the amount of carbs your breakfast will contain. And if you eat two bowls you should multiply that number by six. So why would the cereal manufacturers give their nutrition information based on such a minuscule portion? I can only conclude they don’t dare give it to you in the portion size they know most people would eat. The calories and especially the carbs would overwhelm anyone who bothered to check it out.

  Nearly all of the cereals commonly sold in the grocery stores should be off-limits for anyone wanting blood-sugar control. In fact the only one I found acceptable is Special K Protein Plus. And then that which I greatly feared came. One day I saw the Special K on the grocer’s shelf with those horrible words “now tastes even better” proudly displayed on it. I knew instantly what that meant—more sugar! And sure enough, they had significantly increased the sugar and reduced the fiber, turning it into something off-limits. At this writing there is no cereal I find in ordinary grocery stores that meets my standards, save for those puffed wheat and rice bags you can buy for about a dollar. These manage to keep carbs low because they are more air than anything. However, they do give you that cereal taste, and with a packet of Stevia sprinkled on them they are pretty nice. You can add a little flaxseed meal to give them a little more substance.

  There are decent low-carb cereals you can order over the Internet. Go to your favorite search engine and type in “low-carb cereal,” and you will find them. The biggest drawback with them is that they cost double the price of ordinary cereals. And then there are shipping charges. But if you love cereal they will be worth it. You can get through a lovely cereal breakfast without overtaxing your pancreas or sending your blood-sugar levels into orbit.

  As with all foods let your blood-glucose monitor be your guide. Check your blood-sugar level with your meter about an hour after you have taken your last bite of cereal. You may be surprised to find that even the “healthy” cereals will do a number on your blood sugar.

  About the worst thing people can do for breakfast is to have a couple bowls of cereal, and then wash them down with sweet orange juice. That is a true blood-sugar nightmare. Don’t get your day off to a terrible start by shocking your body with a truckload of carbs. If you like cereal (like I do), eat a low-carb cereal, eat one bowl only, have a few nuts with it, and don’t eat it more than a couple of times a week. And watch out for the milk. Regular milk has too many carbs. See the next chapter for some ideas about milk alternatives.

  7

  Milk Musings

  Milk is awesome! It tastes great as a stand-alone drink, it makes a wonderful ingredient in smoothies, and it is indispensable with cereal. And it certainly has fewer carbs than soda or fruit juice. But it still has too many carbs for those who want strict control over their carbohydrate intake. One cup of milk has around 11 grams of carbs. An average-sized glass of milk would probably have around 18 grams of carbs—far less than the 36 grams of the average soda, but still more than desirable.

  Most alternatives are not any improvement and can actually be worse. You can find all sorts of milk-type products in your grocery store, such as rice milk, soy milk, and almond milk, to name a few. Typically they taste worse than regular milk, and more importantly they don’t save you any carbs or calories. In fact they often make up for their lack of taste and body by simply adding sugar!

  Soy milk is about the same as regular milk in its sweetened form. If you can find an unsweetened version of it, there are very few carbs, but it tastes nasty!

  Some rice milk contains 22 grams of carbs per half-cup. If you drank a normal-sized glass you would be getting 66 grams of carbs, the same amount as in three Dove dark chocolate candy bars!

  Some health experts tout the benefits of skim milk. In their view, skim is better since it is fat-free. But fat is not nearly the monster the experts have assumed it is. Sugar is far more destructive than fat. When it comes to milk, our concern must be with the amount of sugar and carbs our body has to process, not the amount of fat. For the diabetic and those prone to blood-sugar problems, we will choose fat over sugar any day of the week. Skim milk will not save you any carbs.

  All is not lost! There are two simple solutions, both of which not only enable you to still drink milk (or a version of it) but in fact may taste better than the milk you have been drinking. For many years I have been drinking milk sold by the Hood Company called Calorie Countdown, the one milk product commonly available in grocery stores that is both low-carb and great-tasting. They used to tout it as low-carb, but now they emphasize the low calories more. Whereas a glass of ordinary milk (skim, 2 percent, or whole) will have 12 grams of carbs, Hood milk has 3 grams. And the Hood milk has fewer calories: 70 compared to 150 for regular milk. On top of that it tastes richer than ordinary milk. It certainly beats the pants off that anemic, watered-down skim milk that folks force themselves to drink and pretend to like.

  If you prefer, you can create your own low-carb milk. This is a simple feat. Buy a quart of heavy whipping cream and mix it with water, about 40 percent whipping cream to 60 percent water. Heavy whipping cream has very few carbs. In fact the carton may say that it has 0 grams per 1 tablespoon, but this simply means it has less than half a gram. When you mix it with about 60 percent water you have a low-carb milk that tastes awesome. If the 40-to-60 mix isn’t to your taste, feel free to try a different ratio.

  When you go out for a latte at your favorite coffeehouse, make sure you get them to do two things to insure your latte is kosher. First have them use artificial sweetener to sweeten it. (Another option is to have them not sweeten it at all—then you add your own packet of stevia to it. Or if you don’t need the sweetening you can do away with it altogether.) Second, have them make your latte with heavy whipping cream (or whipping cream and water if you prefer). Starbucks will do this for you but they’ll charge a little extra. It’s worth it; pay the sixty cents. Now you’ve got a latte you can enjoy without feeling guilty.

  Granted, milk is not nearly the danger to our blood-sugar levels that ice cream, cinnamon rolls, doughnuts, and chocolate cake are. But in your efforts to bring your blood sugar under control and extend your life and health, you must give attention to the lesser dangers as well as the greater. And in the case of milk, the solution is not at all radical.

  8

  Take a Hike! (or at Least a Walk)

  One simple assessment tool for deciding what activities are worthwhile is this: Is it natural? Men and women for thousands of years were physically active. They walked, climbed, bent over, carried heavy loads, jumped over puddles, swam across streams, dug holes, built houses, repaired roofs, carried children, and worked in their gardens.

  Today our two favorite exercises are watching television while sitting on the couch and surfing the Internet while sitting on a computer chair. We can even sync our large-screen TVs to our computers so that we can surf the Net from our couches while snacking on chips and taking swigs of soda. And we mustn’t forget playing video games,
which started as a kid thing but now has become a significant part of the lives of most 20- to 30-year-old men. Not very natural, and definitely not very good for diabetics.

  Some of this is unavoidable of course. I use a computer constantly throughout the day, and I do enjoy watching a movie on TV in the evenings. I am not advocating a return to the 1800s, or encouraging everyone to go join the Amish in Pennsylvania. But we must find a way to incorporate physical activity into our life.

  People who say they don’t have time for something are almost always deceiving themselves. We have time for the things we consider the most valuable or the most fun. We always seem to make time to eat meals, watch television, buy Christmas presents, drool over Internet ads, and even read interesting spam in our in-box. We really do have time to exercise; we just have to be convinced that it really will do us good.

  Does exercise promote better health and better blood-sugar management? Of course! This is one thing that people from every discipline agree on. They may argue fiercely over other points, but nobody denies that exercise helps against runaway blood sugar. If you don’t believe this, go to your favorite search engine and type “benefits of exercise on blood-sugar levels” or “benefits of exercise for diabetics.” You’ll find enough material to keep you reading for the rest of your life. Exercise lowers insulin resistance—one study found that regular exercise reduces the demand for medication by 20 percent in diabetics.

  I enjoy going to garage sales and love finding nearly new things for sale that cost me about a tenth of what I would pay in the stores. And one of the most common large garage-sale items is the exercise machine. Rowing machines, treadmills, climbing machines…you name it, you can find it. And often they look like they’ve hardly been used. Do you know why that is? Because they have hardly been used. They usually sit a year or two in the garage while the owners suffer from twinges of guilt, until finally they quit kidding themselves and sell them for a fraction of what they cost.