That diabetes diagnosis COULD wind up being the best thing that's happened to you in ages!

I know that sounds odd but my DH was diagnosed with T2 diabetes almost 5 years ago now and he will readily tell you that it probably saved his life. And his diagnosis has definitely had a major positive impact on mine too.

He went to a minor emergency clinic with pain in his side (which turned out to be a splenic infarction) but while he was there they ran a blood glucose test and got a reading of over 350. And since he's basically not been eating for a couple of days due to the pain in his side, that was essentially a fasting blood glucose! So we're talking BADLY diabetic. When they ran his HbA1c is was 12.4.

The doctor wanted to put him on insulin immediately but DH is seriously needle phobic so they agreed to a 3 month trial with metformin and "controlling his diet"... but no explanation about how to do that except to follow a low fat diet which we'd been trying to do for years.

With zero guidance we decided to just pay attention to how his BG changed based on the foods we ate. (I decided to eat whatever he did just to be supportive.) Within less than a month, we'd figured out that the problem was CARBS, especially "starchy" carbs that turn into sugar almost immediately upon ingestion. Even true whole grains caused huge spikes. So, we cut out potatoes and bread and sweet fruits.

Then we were able to see the lower he kept his overall carbohydrate intake, the less his blood sugar rose and the quicker it returned to normal levels (which, for us, originally meant numbers under 140). Pretty soon we'd worked our way into eating very very much the exact same diet suggested by Dr. Bernstein... even tho, at that point neither of us had heard of Bernstein.

Fast forward 3 months and DH's HbA1c had fallen to below 6.0 and he was starting to see fasting BG numbers below 110. And, in that same 3 months, without even trying to lose weight, I managed to drop about 35 lbs!

By the one year mark, the doctor had cut DH's metformin dosage in half. DH had dropped about 30 unneeded pounds and I was down 90 some pounds and feeling better than I had in years! I had quit snoring and stopped having GERD issues. We both slept better. Our joint pains had diminished SIGNIFICANTLY. Because we felt better than we had in years, we had started being more active... walking, going dancing, just generally able to have fun again!

About 18 months after DH's diabetes diagnosis, he had to have a heart-valve replaced due to a congenital defect that we'd known about for 30 years and had known would eventually HAVE to be done. His cardiologist let us know that DH's weight loss and recent increase in activity level made the heart surgery much less risky than it would otherwise have been. Among other things, getting rid of the excess weight had resulted in lower blood pressure which meant less strain on the valve and fewer medications to take. And DH bounced back from the surgery much quicker than he likely would have otherwise! Within just a few months, he was back to being able to walk a couple of miles, go dancing again, etc.

Now, 4.5 years post T2 diagnosis, DH is off ALL diabetes medications and we've both managed to maintain the weight loss. We still eat low-carb although we're sometimes not quite as strict as we used to be. DH pretty much never even bothers to do a finger-stick test anymore. As long as he eats low-carb, he KNOWS his blood sugar is going to be fine. His doctor has even decided that he only needs his HbA1c to be measured annually... and every test comes back right at 5.4.... NORMAL!

We both feel years younger than our physical ages and are enjoying life so much more than we were able to do 10 years ago.

So yeah, accept that diagnosis as a GOOD THING and let it motivate you to stick with low-carb. Someday you too may look back and think "Thank heavens I got diagnosed with diabetes! Life is so much better now than it used to be."