Progress

  W   hat can I say?

Barely 48 hours in and things have already started changing—drastically.

I'll remind you that this time last week I was drinking my coffee with a heaped teaspoon of sugar, half-and-half cream and a hefty dollop of home-made whipped cream (it was delicious, as you can imagine!)

Lunch, such as it was, was some Indian snacks—you know the kind; the stuff always called "Bombay Mix" or "Hot Spice"in your more progressive ethnic supermarket—and a tall glass of Extra Spicy Clamato (11g glucose/250ml, untold amounts of sodium, FD&C Red, Yellow and Day-glo Orange) and for the rest of the day, "fuzzy" sparkling water, the occasional blended black tea (1/2 tsp. sugar, cream) and occasionally, another coffee.

For evening snacks it was a repeat of "lunch."

For dinner, it was some sort of whole-wheat pita with chicken and various vegetables and salad-type ingredients, or whole-wheat pasta with home-made tomato sauce, or home-made pizza made with the same whole-wheat pita.

Hey, that diet wasn't so bad, right?

Hold your horses. I saved the best for the last.

I started off with good intentions—Baskin-Robbins no-sugar-added ice cream (only purchaseable from a Baskin-Robbins store) with chopped strawberries and apples, chopped nuts and a whole heaping of home-made whipped cream—but over the months started adding Opéra cake from Brigitte's favourite patisserie, and, predictably, more and more of that killer whipped cream.

So that was the State of the Diet—no extracurricular snacks whatsoever, EVER (no potato chips, no popcorn, no "vegetable chips",  no nothing.)

But even with daily metformin, my blood sugars were going up as far as 11-12 mmol/L (216.0 mg/dL) and sometimes I was feeling a bit bilious upon waking, not to mention exploding psoriasis and odd mood swings—things I thought would have disappeared with my "low" sugar intake (compared to my no-holds-barred drinking self from a year ago).

Well, I stopped taking metformin on Saturday, the last day of Phase One (my "normal" diet) but in the last 24 hours my blood sugar has never been over 7.5 and has now sunk to a regular 5~ reading—something I never saw even with my reduced sugar intake + metformin.

And—fingers crossed—even just 48 hours in, the psoriasis on my hands and face seems to be . . . holding its breath. As if it's just waiting to see if a storm has passed before it renews its onslaught, or is packing its bags to get out of town.

Remember, I'm no granola-crunching, sprout-nibbling, PETA-loving vegan tree hugger, but based on the evidence of only 48 hours with this new "restricted" diet I think I'm seeing things that mean my microbiome is already partying in the streets.