All posts by K. Schipper

Exercise, The Wife's Tale

Some Uplifting Words About Weights

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Emerson has done a – mostly – fine job of following a regime that has kept his prediabetes under control and may, at some point, get his A1c back to that of a totally healthy person.

aerobicsHowever, there’s one thing he won’t tell you about, because he isn’t doing it, and that’s strength training.

I’m sorry about that, because my husband’s prediabetes has totally changed my attitude about lifting weights. The truth is, I love it.

Probably just about anything you’ve read about treating prediabetes mentions the need to do some sort of strength training. Not only does it increase insulin sensitivity, but it helps to burn more calories for weight loss.

The reasons people don’t do it are also myriad. They don’t want to look bulky. You sweat a lot. It hurts. It’s boring. And, you probably should go to a gym, with all that entails, from cost to having to deal with younger and fitter people. And, that’s just for starters.

I wasn’t thinking at all about prediabetes when I started lifting almost 10 years ago. However, as I hit and then passed 50, I got tired of reading that people lose 1% of their muscle mass annually after that birthday. And, with a mother crippled by osteoporosis, I knew the best way to build and maintain bone density is weight-bearing exercise.

Still, I kept putting it off for a lot of the reasons listed above. Then, I stumbled upon a program put out by Tufts University and the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) entitled “Growing Stronger: Strength Training for Older Adults.”

At the time, I liked the idea that it was designed for we older people, so I ordered a copy, bought myself a set of 5 lbs. weights, ankle weights, a yoga mat and a step, and started working out two mornings a week behind the closed door of my office.

And, I hated it. Mostly, I sweat a lot, and it was boring. I seldom hurt because it offers good instruction on warming up and cooling down, but I didn’t see that much was happening, either. I suspect some of it was any results were hidden by the pounds I kept putting on. I kept adding exercises to get more results, and moved up to 8 lbs. weights.

Then, prediabetes entered our lives, and with it a copy of Alan L. Rubin’s “Prediabetes for Dummies,” which has a brief weight routine included in its pages. I decided to try it one morning with my 8 lbs. weights just to see what it was like.

Major mistake: I hurt big time. However, while I was doing the movements, I could tell that my muscles were working. The next workout, I tried it again with the 5 lbs. weights, and I haven’t looked back.

Much earlier, when I was reading about the debate over more reps versus more weight, one piece of advice jumped out at me: It’s your exercise, make it what you want.

These days, I’m doing Dr. Rubin’s routine, some leg exercises and the warm-up and cool-down from “Growing Stronger,” some leg stretches from my doctor, a lower back stretch that my brother sugggested and a couple yoga moves. I recently started working with 12 lbs. weights.

I’m still exercising in my office. I’m not sweating as much. I don’t hurt. I feel challenged, and usually when I finish, my endorphins are running high. With my weight loss, I’ve found that old ladies can have abs and pretty good shoulders, too.

You probably still don’t want to lift weights, and it’s not necessarily going to cure what ails you if you have pre-diabetes. However, it’s one more step along the way to better health. Don’t take my word for it. Find yourself a program you think you’d like. Buy some weights.

And, if it doesn’t work for you, keep looking until you find one you do like. I’m glad I did.

Food, The Wife's Tale

The Evolution of Pitas… and Other Natural Phenomena

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As I have related elsewhere, I’m not against trying new recipes, but when we started eating our low-carbohydrate diet it seemed to make sense to try to adapt what we were already eating – and enjoying – while cutting the carbs.

wheatThat’s happened in several different ways, and not all of them have been my doing.

The most obvious – and easiest – is to make the switch from white to whole-wheat products, be it rice, pasta or bread items. One excellent example is trading out white rice for brown in one of my favorites: a Japanese salad recipe. Would I rather it was made with white rice? Of course, but with the brown rice it doesn’t send Emerson’s blood glucose soaring, so brown it is.

The same can be said for some of the pasta salads that show up on the table, especially during the summer. However, these days I make a much greater effort to measure out everything else that’s going into them so I know exactly how many carbs are making it to the table.

Another secret I’ve found with pasta salads is to cook two servings of pasta, but divide the finished meal into three servings, in effect cutting the amount of pasta and its carbs down to two-thirds of a serving. I’m not sure Emerson even knows I do that, and the servings are still generous (although at one point in our lives they wouldn’t have been).

While that’s a start, it’s certainly not all that can be done. I have a pita recipe we both have enjoyed for several years. It includes chopped chicken, garbanzo beans (chickpeas), green onions and pepper slices seasoned with cumin and mixed with a little lemon juice and olive oil, then topped off with ranch dressing.

We’ve also eaten it in a variety of different pitas, both white and whole-wheat, so ditching the white ones wasn’t any big problem. I just make sure to divide up each batch into three equal servings so each of us is getting only a single serving of garbanzos, with one serving left for Emerson to eat later.

walden-ranchThe only problem initially was his numbers remained high. It wasn’t until we looked at the label on the ranch dressing bottle (fat-free, no less) and found extra sugar and carbohydrates that we had our culprit. Fortunately, it wasn’t long after that that a trip to one of the local health food stores turned up Walden Farms® fat-free, sugar-free salad dressings, which are also available at Walmart and have taken care of the problem quite nicely.

As a disclaimer, I should probably note that I’m still using the low-fat, high-carb brand of ranch dressing, and at some point I will write about how I’ve made my peace with low-carb eating.

Sadly, there are some items that can’t be made to work, not matter how much wishful thinking goes into it – on both our parts. For some reason, the soba (buckwheat) noodles Emerson just loves would send his glucose off the charts.

Another miss that we tried early in this process and discarded was hamburger buns made with a combination of whole wheat and oatmeal and sold by a local supermarket. They were delicious, but they just didn’t work at our house.

After some trial and error with different sandwich buns, we finally opted to go to whole-wheat sandwich thins, which are lower in calories and lower in carbs than other options. As Emerson says, eating with pre-diabetes is a giant experiment, and you should go out and try different things before you’ll necessarily find what works.

Food, The Wife's Tale

Spaghetti – or a Close Approximation

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A plan for pasta hits the spot, but not the target.

Spaghetti is, to me, a wonder food. Most little kids love it, not to mention adults.

spagettiAs a college student, even if cash was running low, it always seemed possible to scrape enough money together for some sort of tomato sauce and a box of pasta, and voila, there’s a satisfying meal large enough to share with others.

Then, there’s real spaghetti, made with love and myriad ingredients and carefully tended for hours by someone who learned the recipe from an Italian mother, aunt or grandmother. I shared a house with such a person while I was in graduate school, and just going with her to shop for the fixings was a culinary experience.

I’m not Italian, but what I picked up in those days led me to believe making spaghetti should be an all-day project, with plenty of fresh vegetables and seasonings, and some lovely, warm bread to finish the setting. That’s how I made it for years. Then, we met pre-diabetes.

Still, at one point not too far into this adventure, I had to give it a try. I was willing to make the switch to a whole-wheat pasta, but as I was adding my ingredients and computing my carbohydrates, my heart fell. It wasn’t just the peppers, onions and mushrooms, either.

In the end, I realized a big problem with spaghetti sauce is the tomatoes. Oh, those tomatoes. As one website I checked put it, they’re 95% water and 5% carbohydrates. And, they add up quickly when you’re using both whole tomatoes and tomato sauce or tomato paste.

Even skipping the bread, that meal I put in front of Emerson came in at more than 80 carbohydrates, and it showed in his blood sugar. The number was high enough it convinced me to never do it again. My only spaghetti fix since then came one day when I went shopping with my friend Nancy, and she was kind enough to suggest the Olive Garden for lunch.

However, never is a long time, and the other day I took another stab at making spaghetti. Since Emerson knows it’s one of my favorites, we had spent some time eyeing premade spaghetti sauce one night, and came home with a jar of Trader Giotto’s Recipe #99 Traditional Marinara Sauce from Trader Joe’s, which has only 6 carbs to a serving.

Not content to leave well enough alone, I added a can of mushroom pieces, a little sautéed onion and two portions of Morning Star Farms® vegetarian Crumbles™ with 4 grams of carbs per serving (I am watching my fats, after all).

Served over two portions of whole-wheat noodles, with a lettuce salad and the apple we split after lunch, I found it to be a satisfying meal, even knowing I could have made a tastier sauce. The number of carbs? They were heading toward 60 before the apple.

I made certain that Emerson measured his blood glucose immediately before eating (111) and again a little more than two hours afterwards. The 149 reading wasn’t exactly a triumph, but it did give me hope. Someday next spring when I’m feeling a little sorry for myself and missing spaghetti, we’ll probably try, try, try that one again.

Who knows? I may cut out the mushrooms. Or, I may cut out the Crumbles™. There are many, many spaghetti recipes in the world, and I’m not giving up on finding the best one for us – or a close approximation.

Food, The Wife's Tale

Read the Label, Read the Label

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Just as “they” always advise reading the instructions, we got started on our prediabetic makeover by reading labels. Lots and lots of labels.

food3Again, we were lucky. For years, we’d been reading food labels for fat and sodium content because of my cholesterol and blood pressure. Thinking back to our first – long-ago – dietary makeover, it seemed a natural place to start a new eating regime this time, too.

It took a little getting used to, and we had some missteps along the way, but we started directing our collective gaze – remember, Emerson is the main food shopper at our house, but I write out the list – further down the numbers on each package, and trying to choose items that offered the lowest level of carbohydrates per serving.

Later, after meeting with the dietician, we learned that simply finding the lowest number of total carbohydrates doesn’t tell the entire story, but it’s a good place to begin until you’re ready to start sorting out issues such as soluble and non-soluble fiber, and added sugar. The dietician also taught us about the need to look at the available protein in a product and its importance (but more on that later).

We started looking at the labels of foods in the pantry and refrigerator, and did a little bit of cutting here and there as we felt the situation indicated. And, when the blood glucose reading came back at 160 or even 180, we tried to figure out what had gone wrong and what we could do differently the next time to keep those numbers below 140.

There were some measures we adopted almost immediately, including some that might surprise a few people. Long, long ago my then new husband told me he wanted dessert every night. Over the years, that evolved into something relatively fat-free in front of the TV between 8-9 p.m., frequently washed down with a big glass of milk. Oh, but even fat-free milk has 10 grams of carbohydrates in a one-cup serving. So the approximately pint glasses we’d been enjoying were cut to 8 fluid ounces or less.

Another place that quickly dawned on us as being a potential problem was the morning glass of fruit juice. We both grew up with the idea that a glass of juice is an important part of a healthy breakfast. That first Sunday morning of our new life, however, I decided to check the carbs and serving size on what I was pouring out for my husband.

Even at half a serving, the carbohydrate load seemed pretty heavy to us. Emerson had all but eliminated his morning glass of juice by the time we had our session with the dietician; she pointed out to us that, as tasty as that juice may be, it’s really not much more than a glass of sugar without any redeeming fiber to soften the blow.

A much-better choice, which we have stuck with, is to have some fresh fruit with breakfast, preferably one with a high fiber count to balance off some of the carbs. Today, our refrigerator runs to grapes, plums and nectarines in season.

Not all fruits are created equal, either. Another quick victim of our new regime was the apples with which we used to finish lunch. Well, not entirely. But at 25 grams of carbohydrates in a 3” diameter apple, we decided that was just too many for Emerson to consume. These days, we’re still ending lunch with this fan favorite, but we split it.

Obviously, these are small steps, but I think we felt we were at least doing something and we could certainly find a few things to help drop those blood glucose numbers.

The Wife's Tale

Let Me Overwhelm You

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x02a32If you’re like me, there are a lot of things that you’ve gone through life without studying. My knowledge of diabetes had come mostly from a couple peripheral acquaintances growing up who had type 1 diabetes (insulin shots, no candy), and an elderly cousin of my mother’s.

When Emerson came home with his diagnosis of prediabetes, I knew that as the chief cook and bottlewasher of this establishment I was going to quickly need to be much more knowledgeable, but oh, where to even start?

In retrospect, I was pretty lucky when we made the switch to low-fat eating almost two decades ago. Years earlier, my mother had researched and experimented during the nine years between my dad’s bypass surgery and his fatal heart attack, and she sent me her books. If I had questions, I called.

However, even getting started learning about prediabetes felt like studying oceanography – in the desert.

Our health-care provider offered a class with a Certified Diabetes Educator (CDE), which I immediately called to schedule. It’s an excellent idea, and I thank them very much, but at that time it was six weeks away and they didn’t understand why I would want to attend. I can’t imagine why I wouldn’t. Not only is eating a communal activity, but as I say, I’m the chief cook around here. I had to fight to be included in the session, but in the end I got a seat, too.

The real problem: that six-week time lag. Obviously, we’d need to do some eating before then, and it couldn’t be things like Emerson’s post-diagnosis lunch, which sent his blood glucose soaring above 180.

So, I started out with what I could do immediately, which was to begin reading.

quick_startMy first stop was Google, and my second was Amazon.com, where I ended up ordering two books: The Quick Start Guide to Pre-diabetes, a Kindle Single by Gretchen Scalpi that I ordered electronically for some immediate info, and Prediabetes for Dummies, by Dr. Alan L. Rubin, which I asked for in print form because I knew we’d need to share it.

The Scalpi book truly was a quick start on educating myself a little about pre-diabetes, and because I was so new to the whole thing – and more than a little freaked out by that point – I probably didn’t get as much from it as I might have. However, I felt truly ready to take on the world of low-carb eating – right until I stood in the pasta aisle at my supermarket trying to do a comparison between white and whole-wheat spaghetti pasta.

Truth be told, I am not a good shopper. However, in this case, I knew I was definitely in over my head. I folded my tent and headed home. I don’t remember what I made for dinner that night, but I’m sure I wasn’t happy about it.

The Wife's Tale

Prediabetes: The First Ton of Bricks

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dietaryLife is full of memorable days. And, if you’re reading this, you’ve probably experienced the same sort of memorable day my husband, Emerson, and I went through more than a year ago. My name is K. Schipper, and I certainly wasn’t thinking of anything quite as upending to our lives as prediabetes when he headed out the door for his annual checkup.

Sure, I’d had my concerns, especially in my more pragmatic moments when I’d think about the fact that the man I’ve been married to for more than 30 years, was not only obese, but much-less-prone to exercising than I am. The fact that his systolic blood pressure was sitting in the 130-140 range has also stirred that little nagging voice in the back of my mind.

We do know about blood pressure. Nineteen years ago, I had my own memorable day with my doctor. My systolic blood pressure was at 160, my total cholesterol almost 300. I was surprised then, too, and I’m not sure why, since heart disease killed my father at 50, and every woman in both sides of my family has medicated for high blood pressure starting around the age of 40.

Home I went, and we overhauled both the pantry and what we were eating. We lost weight. And, with the medication my numbers went back to where my doctor was much happier with me.

If anything, I was expecting Emerson to come home with a prescription for something to lower his blood pressure and a suggestion to exercise a bit more. So, when he gave me a brief call to say he was coming home with medication, and it wasn’t for blood pressure, I was concerned. However, I also needed him to pick up some vegetables for the salad I was making as our main entre of the day, so I knew he’d come home and explain – eventually.

When he did come through the door, groceries in one sack, a glucose meter and a bottle of Metformin in the other, and a diagnosis of prediabetes, I had only the smallest inkling of what was to come.

Probably the contents of the grocery sack epitomized our problem. Although my request had been for a large zucchini, a red pepper and an onion, the recipe I was planning to make also included spaghetti pasta – white, of course – and as always, I figured the two of us would split a bagel or I’d warm up some dinner rolls – white again – to go with it. And, he had also considerately brought home a package of day-old, reduced-price brownies from the store’s bakery.

Yes, while I can congratulate myself in taking a great deal of fat and cholesterol out of our diet, we had replaced it with carbohydrates, and now those were going to have to be changed, replaced, closely monitored and always with that meter to tell us how we were doing.

To say I was a little out of my comfort zone isn’t the half of it.