How I’m beating Diabetes with the right food
Actor Robin Ellis, most famous for playing the eponymous Poldark in the BBC TV series, tells us how his lifestyle transformed after he was diagnosed with Type 2 Diabetes.
A familiar disease
Soon after moving to France in 1999, I was diagnosed with Type 2 Diabetes (sometimes called ‘late-onset’ or ‘adult onset’ diabetes). It was picked up during a routine PSA blood test to check for prostate cancer, undertaken at the urging of an old school friend who had been diagnosed with that illness.
The prostate was fine, but the test showed elevated levels of glucose (sugar) in my blood. My French doctor spotted the danger and ran another test a few months later that confirmed the diagnosis.
It was a disease well known to me. My mother died from a heart attack, related to her 30-year battle with Type 1 Diabetes. I had therefore seen, first hand, how destructive it could be and what a toll it can take on someone’s body over time. Nevertheless the suddenness of her demise was shocking.
Having experienced the trauma of Ma’s death and knowing the difficulties and complications she’d endured beforehand, it wasn’t hard for me to take on board the potential dangers of this insidious condition. I was lucky.
Determined to change
There are few pronounced symptoms in the early stages of Type 2 Diabetes, and as a consequence some people find it difficult to take it seriously and are reluctant to make changes to their daily routine. That wasn’t the case for me.
After a week or so of “why me” and “c’est pas vrai” behavior, I faced facts, bought some books, and started to read up about Type 2 Diabetes.
It was immediately clear that diet and exercise were key to controlling the condition. Luckily, I've always included exercise as part of my daily routine. I used to combine early morning workouts at the nearby health club off the Fulham Road in London with running around the streets and parks nearby. I also bicycled into Soho for voiceover work on my 1938 Raleigh sit-up-and-beg bone shaker.
Living now in France, it wasn’t difficult to switch to walking in the countryside and doing a yoga-related routine for exercise.
Thankful for Montignac
A friend put me onto Michel Montignac’s book, Dine Out and Lose Weight, in which the author talks of adopting “a way of eating”, rather than dieting, as a means of losing weight and keeping it off – a crucial element in the control of Type 2 diabetes.
Montignac, who grew up in southwestern France, where eating well and plentifully is a way of life, had inherited his family’s tendency to obesity. He believed that diets served only as a short-term fix, and were rarely effective in the long run. He therefore researched another approach, which he described like this:
"There is no deprivation, and it is not a diet. It is more a lifestyle. It is designed not only to aid weight loss in the short-term, but also to help people maintain their weight loss long-term by advocating healthy eating habits, which can also prevent illness and disease."
So long, white rice
Montignac was an early advocate of the Glycemic Index of foods (GI), which measures the effect of carbohydrates on blood sugar levels (how quickly carbohydrates turn to glucose in the blood) in an effort to help people lose weight.
He distinguished good carbs (unrefined with a low GI) from bad (a high GI), and asserted that it is the high sugar content in bad carbs that encourages the body to store unwanted fat. He did not believe that high calorie intake per se added weight.
I made adjustments to what I ate. I cut out white rice, white bread, white pasta, favouring instead brown basmati rice, wholewheat pasta and rye bread. I also gave up eating potatoes, which are high on the glycemic index (have a look at my recipe for 'no potato fishcakes', pictured left). Never having had a sweet tooth, foregoing desserts was no sacrifice.
Wine and chocolate
Montignac, true to his roots, readily recognised the positive qualities in wine and dark chocolate (!) and encouraged their inclusion (in moderation, naturally) in his way of eating. A square of 90% cacao chocolate with a delicious dried fig is my favourite way to end a meal now.
Following his guidelines, I lost about eight pounds and stabilised my weight.
The phrase “a way of eating” quickly became a mantra for me when discussing how I was dealing with the diagnosis.
It helped me define an approach to my new circumstances in terms of everyday eating.
My cookbooks
For years our diet had been centred around the Mediterranean, favouring olive oil as the cooking agent rather than butter. The adjustments we made were relatively few and there was little feeling of being deprived.
I say “we” advisedly. My wife Meredith continues to eat more or less the same way as I do. Though when we have company she usually makes, and eats, dessert.
It was Meredith who persuaded me to pull together my collection of recipes which Constable and Robinson published in 2011 as Delicious Dishes for Diabetics – A Mediterranean Way of Eating.
To our delight, the book sold well both in America and the UK, and I was asked by the publisher to write another book. Healthy Eating for Life was first published in January 2014 and you can buy it here.
Encouraged by my publisher I also launched myself as a food blogger, sharing recipes and stories of life in rural France on robin-ellis.net. Please take a look, and share your own healthy eating recipes in the Comments box below.
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