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 Dieting Demystified is the Secret to Weight Loss.

I went to my regular doctor and for some reason he decided to check me for diabetes. So, I was sent to the hospital for a test.  You have to drink an enormous amount of sweet liquid and have your urine and blood tested every thirty minutes.  All during the 3 hour test I kept thinking that I needed dieting demystified so I could learn the secret to weight loss.

A few days later, I received a phone call from  the doctor’s office  requesting that I come into the office for my insulin orientation.

Sitting there in shock for about thirty minutes,  I thought about what I had just been told  and grabbed my phone book…I looked up Endocrinologist and made an appointment with the one closest to my home.

I never called my doctor’s office back, I just didn’t go in, instead I went to see Dr. Miller, the Endocrinologist.

Dr. Miller talked to me for a few minutes, then asked why I was there.   I told him about the test and the appointment for insulin orientation.

He asked,  “have you been given a diet and exercise routine or any oral medication.?”

When I said, “no,”  Dr. Miller said,  ” you  should try a good diet for thirty days, come back and we will assess the situation at that time”.

Since I had unsuccessfully tried to lose weight for over two years with various diets and plans…needless to say I had no knowledge of how to demystify dieting and learn the secret to weight loss.

I took the diet card he gave me (something printed up by Carnation Milk Company). It had headings for Breakfast, Lunch, Snack, Dinner and a Bedtime Snack.

He had checked enough blocks for me to have 1200 calories per day. Portions were defined as “exchanges”, a word I had never heard before.

There were a great many choices for food, but the free foods (eat all you want) were all raw vegetables: celery, lettuce, cabbage, cucumbers, broccoli, cauliflower etc. If it was raw you could splurge.  Another consideration was if cooked, these same vegetables were limited to 1/2 cup servings and had to be counted as calories.

Dieting Demystified the secret to weight loss includes Fresh Raw Vegetables to help control blood sugar.

Everything else on the card was measured…1/2 cup was a serving for rice, potatoes, spaghetti, macaroni etc. and were basically limited to one serving per day unless you wanted to forgo all bread in order to  eat more rice or potatoes.

Nothing fried…Ever.

To make a long story short, I memorized the diet .

I also wrote it on a 4×6 index card and kept it in my purse.

• Breakfast: 1 meat (2 oz protein or 1 slice American cheese or 1 boiled egg) 1 bread (one slice of any kind of bread) 1 fruit (small orange, apple or 8 oz v-8 juice)
• Lunch  2 bread 1 meat (1 boiled egg or small can potted meat or tuna, 2oz hamburger patty) All the free raw vegetables you wanted to eat with 1 oz of salad dressing.
• Snack  Fruit or cracker or an  apple and in the afternoon at work, I often had hot tea and 1 Cadbury cracker (chocolate covered).
• Dinner  2 meat, 1 bread (1 slice bread or 1 small baked potato or 1/2 cup rice) 1 serving limited vegetables eg: carrots or squash etc. plus all the free raw vegetables. dessert…grapes or other fruit..
• Bedtime Snack  two honey graham crackers and 8 oz milk…
• There was also a small amount of fat equal to 3 pats of butter…so I used regular milk in my coffee, sour cream on my baked potato (get twice as much as has 1/2 the calories of butter) and no SUGAR IN ANYTHING.

I STARTED THE DIET ON OCTOBER 29, 1983 AND BY FEBRUARY 25, 1984 I HAD LOST 40 POUNDS.  Oh yeah, for exercise I walked during my lunch hour after I ate my potted meat sandwich (easy to measure & cheap) and took my apple with me while I walked.

The hardest part was going home and cooking dinner for kids and husband not on a diet, but I found after awhile, I could eat the meat eg: meatloaf, roast, baked fish, steamed shrimp, lots of vegs. carrot sticks, cucumbers, tomatoes etc. and green beans, and just limit my “bread” at night and get by. 

I also found that drinking coffee would slow my weight loss so limited it to none or one cup per day.  I know because I weighed myself every morning and found that if I drank very much coffee I didn’t lose weight the following day.

You are what You Eat so You Have to Make a Life Style Change

Getting your  “mind set” or attitude towards dieting is important.

I had a great reason to diet and lose the excess weight..I was scared to death of the Insulin shots.   That would motivate anyone who had the fear of shots that I had!

If you don’t have such a motivator, you might want to think about this remark by a retired physician Dr. Gary M. Levin who said,

“ I have felt the pain of so many patients and their families who have been struck by Diabetes. You take medications that may reduce asymptomatic acute attacks and control blood sugar levels but they just don’t work when it comes to fully treating your Diabetes condition.”

reference: Dr.GarysDiabetesTreatment.org   

Having the right attitude towards food is as necessary as what you eat or don’t eat.  It is important to move from the trap of living to eat over to eating to live.  Controlling diabetes can be as simple and easy as you want to make it.

Since You are What You Eat… put your thinking cap on and take charge of your life now.  After all as a type 2 diabetic you weren’t born with a tag stuck on your big toe: Diabetic.

Now for the Nitty Gritty. The first and most effective treatment for diabetes is a combination of diet and exercise.  It is up to you to find the right combination that you can live with.

However take note of this one fact.  Walking is probably your best choice.

Dr. Miller, my endocrinologist made a point to tell me that heavy exercise can actually make losing weight harder, so keep it simple. No big gym workouts while you are working on losing the weight.

Sometimes having a guide is helpful.

A well known nutritionist has put together his suggestions for changing your life.  Read what he has to say and pick up some interesting and workable tips.    It is something very different.

There are more articles to read here and one that will help with the food and meal planning is a review of

Visit Cararta  at    Videos, casual articles and tips.

Plus leave a comment below here and let me know how you are doing controlling your diabetes.

It is as much a MINDSET as it is a Diet and Exercise thing.  They help but can’t work if not done right.

In the long term it comes down to you adapting the diets, diabetic meal plans,  recipes…food suggestions to fit you and your desired lifestyle.

What I have found out on my trip to controlling my diabetes and continuing to be me and not “A Diabetic”   was this  fact:  I couldn’t live with a diet that removed everything I liked to eat.

Even before this trip to the hospital, I had tried some of the groupie weight loss plans (just kept gaining weight), some from magazines, friends…etc. and still just kept gaining weight.

Eating is a social  event in most of our lives.

So by experimenting, learning  and adapting what I wanted to eat to fit into the diabetic meal plan given to me by my caregiver, a life changing lesson was learned:  Dieting Demystified is the secret to weight loss for me and can be for you.

I was able, after that first intensive, concentrated  focus on the diet to reach the goal of sugar control, to make a few changes to the diet that allowed me to still be me, yet do what was needed to be done to successfully control blood sugar levels and therefore control my disease.

It is up to you.  Whether you are a groupie or a lone wolf… help is available.

You are what You eat.

Be you, not a label.

Losing weight is the name of the game.   Get in there and win.

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