It’s the first of month of my first “official” clean eating challenge. I was diagnosed at age 14 with type 1 Diabetes so I guess since then I have been on a “challenge” to eat healthy in order to avoid any complications. Diabetes is very difficult to manage but any complication will be even worse, therefore I coincidently fell into this challenge as I was sharing my story w/ a mentor on how eating vegetables and reducing animal protein was starting to have an amazing effect on me. I was struggling with insulin resistance, therefore I found a book about diabetes and how to manage it. This book focuses on making a lifestyle change and become a full on vegan. My conversation with my mentor led to the introduction of this challenge which I happily accepted. I am not one to change things overnight so I thought of transitioning slowly to eventually get to a 90% vegetarian lifestyle. What does that look like and why? Well, I love to travel the world and while doing so, I know that fruits and vegetables are not readily available everywhere and the last thing I want to do is get sick while traveling abroad because my body has gotten accustomed to eliminating animal protein. Therefore, I came up with my own lifestyle of still “cheating” once or twice a week by having animal protein but 80-90% of my week will consist of vegetarian options. The results thus far?? My body is now being less resistant to insulin which has resulted in a 10% decrease on insulin intake. Another change I have done is I started going regularly to the gym and have now seen a drastic increase in energy.
My goal in this program is to get guidance on how to make this lifestyle change to prolong and/or prevent any health complications. I am extremely excited to introduce healthy fruits back into my life while still taking less insulin. This goes completely against what my endocrinologists have always advised and I will be very happy to share this with my doctor on my next visit. It’s a working progress and super excited about this opportunity! I am not sharing this story as any advice to any diabetics, we are all different and should be careful of any changes we make in our diets. This journey has been amazing thus far but I am getting guidance from other diabetics that have made this lifestyle change as well as from all of my doctors. I am extremely excited to be able to eat more of the fruit such as Dragon fruit, rambutan, cactus pears and other exotic fruit we grow and import as a family business, which is something I have not been able to do for years!
More to come….
