The glucose solution, in a manner of speaking.
The glucose tolerance test today delivered a mildly unpleasant surprise. The starting value was 6.1, which is already too high. (Ought to be 6.0 or lower.) Two hours after the glucose meal, the value was still 9.3, which is smack in the middle of IGT, Impaired Glucose Tolerance, also called Glucose Intolerance (sounds like a worse case, but actually used interchangeably), also called pre-diabetes because something like 10% of IGT cases progress to diabetes each year.
Now, I have repeatedly told my doctor about my two diabetic parents, so he was probably less surprised than I. Back in 2005 I tested my blood sugar several times and it was below any warning lines. So anyway, I blame my shoes!
See, if I had replaced my jogging shoes two weeks ago, I would probably not have gotten a sinew sheath inflammation (or that’s what it feels like … my family has a predisposition to get those, it seems) and so I would still have been walking (with some jogging when needed to keep the heart rate up) for an hour each day. And so my liver would probably have some room to swoop up extra glucose for topping up its glycogen reserves. That would probably have been enough to lower the blood sugar to 7.8 mmol/l, or at least very nearly so. So, blame it all on the shoes. ^_^
That said, this is not exactly bad news. I don’t have high blood pressure, I have barely elevated values of fat in the blood stream (triglycerides and cholesterol), my pulse is slow, and I don’t have sleep problems by human standards. Health personnel used to envy me, perhaps not so much now with this new development.
But seriously, having more sugar in the blood? That just means I can eat less sugar and still be as active as before. I have to look for new types of food that contain less sugar AND still very little fat (since fat makes me ill) and don’t taste like coarse grass or worse. Â Uhm, I am sure I will find something. I did find low-fat foods in 2005, after all, it just took me a couple months or so to change my habits and then the rest of the year for my digestion to rebuild for the change. For a beginning, I have bought a small bag of pressed oats, the old Norse and Scottish breakfast cereal. OK, not sure exactly how old, but I am pretty sure oats breakfast predates Kelloggs. Â Mixing this with my fruit yogurt makes it last longer till I grow hungry again. It has lot of healthy fiber and slow carbs.
I am pretty upbeat about this, although I am sure my doctor will (figuratively) beat me up over it. I mean, having more fuel than necessary does not seem like a problem. “There is a way with the sausage that is too long” as the Norwegian proverb loosely says. Meaning you can just cut off some of it. I can do that with the food as well now that I know it is too much.
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Oh, and the shoes. I have been thinking about buying new ones, off and on, for weeks at least. But I never found an opportunity to get away from work for long enough. (The shop that sells them in the city takes plenty of time with each customer and nearly always has customers. People seem to accept that a specialty shop requires waiting for half an hour or two.) So I did not take that time until I was already in so much pain that the alternative might have been to stay home from work for that.
This fits disturbingly with something I read by Ryuho Okawa yesterday, that there are people who love illness. They just steer straight ahead, ignoring the warning signs, until they get sick. Then they want sympathy, or feel that that they can’t be blamed. Well, I don’t expect sympathy for this. I made a mistake waiting this long, and I plan to make less mistakes in the future, if any. Or at least not the same mistakes as this time…
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Speaking of making the same mistakes over and over, there is a small house in the countryside for rent a few miles from here, still in the Mandal area. For 3/4 the price I pay here, but 30-40 minutes walk to the bus, judging from the map. Which would been a GOOD thing, except I just have shown myself incapable of ensuring that I can even walk…