Hi

I'm new here, so be nice!

I've been low-carbing for a couple of months now (for the second time...) and feeling great. I've lost about 7lb and all cravings have virtually vanished. I feel like I'm eating better and healthier than I have before - and enjoying it! The main benefit for me is the impact on my moods - the crankiness, mood swings and depression have improved miraculously, due mostly I guess to blood sugar control. I do not think I am diabetic, but given family history (see below) know I am particularly prone to it, and experience tells me I am very sensitive to blood sugar.

I've also been doing a lot of research about the health benefits of this diet and am totally sold on it. In particular, I've been thinking about how much this could potentially help my mother, whose health is in a pretty bad way. She has insulin controlled type 2 diabetes, angina/heart problems, kidney stones, and recently suffered a minor stroke. She is also very overweight and chronically depressed.

I am thinking that switching to a low carb diet would potentially have many benefits for her, however this would clearly need to be managed very carefully to avoid problems with medication, hypoglycemia etc. She is on so much medication for all of the above conditions, most of which would possibly have to be tapered. She lives alone and I think it would be extremely dangerous to try and do this without medical support.

So I guess the question is, would it be possible to use this diet in such extreme circumstances, and how would you go about convincing her doctors? She is regularly seeing a diabetic nutritionist, who is recommending the standard low fat diet...

Is there any particularly relevant and convincing research she could take along to show them? Has anyone else managed to convince health professionals to support them?

Any ideas or suggestions most welcome!

There was just a study published (Look in the media section) about low fat diets and diabetes in postmenopausal women. The study showed it didn't help at all.

Would your Mom consider reading a book? Maybe the Bernstein book would convince her. Or Atkin's has a diabetes book too, you could try that.

But be prepared to fail. I found it is hardest convincing the people who need it the most. Usually they're extremely addicted to their carbs and they suffer a lot of withdrawals if you can manage to convince them to try the diet. You know the old saw, "You can lead a horse to water but you can't make them drink". Well, it perfectly fits what you'll encounter when you try to help someone most of the time.

My parents lost a lot of brain power as they aged and I don't think they could have understood the diet or the requirements. I wrestled with the notion of trying to get them to change their diet but decided that they felt entitled to eat however they wanted at their age.

You might also want to print out postings for her from Dr. Davis's web site. He's got some great stuff there. Dr. Eades has good stuff too.

http://heartscanblog.blogspot.com
http://proteinpower.com

Oh! One thing you might be interested in showing her is the DVD for "My Big Fat Diet". It is about a whole town in Canada that went on a low carb diet and the diabetics had wonderful results. A video might be a lot more inspiring than other forms of getting the message out.
http://www.mybigfatdiet.net/buydvd.html
Article about the video: http://www.cbc.ca/thelens/bigfatdiet/

Thanks so much for the reply, I will check out the links.

Actually I don't think it will be too hard convincing my mum herself, she has heard me rave about it before, and has seen me lose the weight. Also she already doesn't eat that many carbs in general. She has already cut out nearly all sugar on advice from the doctor.

Her problem is not eating enough calories/protein/fat - she basically lives on vegetables and fruit with occaisional small portions of lean fish/chicken, then will binge horribly on pasta or something when she gets too bored. The main issue will be budget I think - she sees high quality meat as too expensive.

It's convincing the doctors which I think will be more of a problem, though hopefully the studies you mentioned would help. She trusts them too much to fight very hard against their advice I think.

Thanks again!

I have had experience with older people (I'm 68 ), but I mean really older women who have a general food phobia of sugar, fat and protein, and they were not anorexic. Just recall all of the diet advice that has been promulgated and the dangers of beef, butter, pork, skin of chicken, candy, etc. The message got through and some of our truly aged friends are not the better for it.