Finis, for now

Okay, it's time I admitted what will come as a surprise to nobody: I'm done with this project. This was a really useful project while it lasted, though -- I really learned a lot about how a tasty low-carb eating plan I can live on works, and I think this leaves me with a nice archive of what this sort of plan can look like, and the kinds of food it can incorporate. But honestly, I was boring even myself -- how many times can I take a picture of the same 4 strips of bacon, or one of about 8 different lunches that I typically eat? Not to say that low-carb eating is boring; that's just me, I'm the type of person who will have one or maybe two favorite items at a restaurant, and always order the same thing, and I did it when I was eating high-carb as well -- it's just a different favorite item now. It works just fine for me and isn't boring to eat, but it makes for rather yawn-o-riffic blogging. I just don't see the need to keep showing more of the same. I may come back to this from time to time, if I discover I've got something else to say or show, but for now I'm calling it a day. Did a while back, in fact, so now I'm just making it official.

But before I walk off, let's look a bit at results:

I kept the photo food diary for 90 days. During that time I stayed under my personal limit of 50g/day of carbs for all but 4 days, of which 1 was the day I had an OGTT and 2 were associated with my daughter's birthday; I stayed under 100g/day of carbs for the entire 90-day period, including the OGTT day. The effect of this on my blood glucose regulation has been nothing short of amazing -- my pancreas is responding in essentially a normal, non-diabetic way now, to the point where my endocrinologist said, "If you'd come in here with numbers like this in the first place, I'd have said, 'What diabetes?'" By effectively giving my pancreas a rest cure for the last 6 months, I've recovered nearly all of my lost beta-cell function, even when challenging it with a couple of days of high-carb eating. Now, I don't believe for an instant that this means I'm "cured"; I think cured means that the disease is gone, like a bacterial infection that's been eradicated with antibiotics. My diabetes isn't gone -- if I went back to a high-carb diet, even the supposedly healthy low-fat whole-grains diet, I'd be in trouble again in short order -- but it is in remission, and there's no reason to believe it won't stay there if I continue keeping the carbs down. I also don't think that everybody with diabetes, or even just everybody with type 2 diabetes, can achieve even remission by low-carb eating; I think there's probably a point of no return, where too much beta cell function has been lost to permit recovery, while my diabetes was caught incredibly early, through something of a fluke, when I was still well within the zone where there's damage but it's not irreversible. I'm very very lucky in that regard and I know it.

What about cardiovascular functions? There, the results look good too. From mid-December to mid-March, my blood pressure went from 140/90 to an average of around 115/75, where it remains today (and in fact, that correction occurred within the first two weeks). My cholesterol over the same time span went from 267 to 217; it's probably come down further since, as I've stayed on low-carb since I quit logging my diet with pictures, but I haven't had it tested again yet, and this drop corresponds pretty nicely to the length of my diary project where I have complete counts of what I ate. So that lets me state that it's a drop of 50 points in a period where I ate bacon 51 of 90 days, averaged out 5 eggs a week, ran about 65% of calories from fat, and if I ate any "healthy whole grains" at all, it was by accident. My diet might be enough to give an AHA-compliant dietician a heart attack, but it doesn't look like it's gonna give me one.

Here's to good health.