Weight-watchers has been a trope in many middle aged romcom books over its 62 year history – but it has recently been facing stiff competition from app led regimes such as Noom, and finally from a simple medication that achieves weight loss by curbing appetite.
There is a hitch though…
You’re kidding me, I would inject if I were type 1 diabetic, but I certainly am not doing it for weight loss…
I suspect it depends on your situation. Injecting to prevent an agonising death has always seemed worthwhile for me.
I’ve had the priviledge of teaching a friend how to do an intramuscular injection, but my skills could soon be in high demand.
Apparently, there is a 17 step guide on how to deliver the perfect dose. That’s a step a minute, which seems appropriate.
While rumours of a tablet form are rife, the easiest way to effectively deliver semaglutide is currently through an intramuscular injection delivered once a week. Not too much effort, but this is a skill we don’t teach most people.
My parents were given 15 minutes one on one tuition to learn how to treat my diabetes. And that was for a glass syringe. Semaglutides are not delivered with a glass syringe.
There are risks to taking these drugs, including hypoglycemia, but they do seem to do what they say on the tin, all for a tailored dose, once a week.
So, are you doing this?
I would very much like to keep my weight at 69.5kg and, I am currently 72.7kg, so 3.2kg to go.
It is hard work, and getting my cholesterol down did not dramatically decrease my mass, in fact, temporarily I gained a few more pounds. But I am not keen on hijacking these hormones.
I know that if I can keep my blood sugar at normal levels, my appetite is not insatiable and I don’t need extra calories to realign my blood glucose levels. I find I eat less, and of course, it helps reduce my appetite too.
It’s the last day of May and as I was lazing in bed this fine Saturday, I heard the Radio 4 programme of the time telling me hose pipe bans were likely to be introduced as much of the country is “in drought”.
I live in the part of England that is declared as “semi-arid”. Yet, we haven’t had a hose pipe band for over 12 years. This year, thanks to a wet autumn and winter (that grey January was good for something) our reservoirs are still at over 90% full.
We use water butts for the garden watering and no unused drinking water is poured down the sink. That is for our indoor plants.
To save energy, I only barely cover my vegetables, rice, and pasta when cooking. Despite having long hair, I don’t have long showers. While I soap, I turn off the water – much like I do when I brush my teeth.
It it’s yellow, let it mellow is interesting advice: one that was used in Cape Town during their drought 6 years ago. Basically, don’t flush the loo if you have only urinated. We try to do our bit in that respect during the drier months…
TMI!
Human urine is antiseptic – some even drink their output. Which is further than we’re keen to go. If you are keen on going further than letting it mellow, this website explains how to dilute your output with your stored rain water… liquid-gold-urine-as-fertilizer. Not sure it’s something we’re willing to do this year…
As I am on HRT, it might not be a good idea to use it on the fruit trees or herbs, mind…
Switching from baths to showers is always a prudent step and even that can be taken further – why not share bath water? It seems a bit silly if you are having sex and sharing a bed not to make use of relatively clean bath water.
A shower cap is my friend, allowing a quick shower in the morning or evening without the hassle of having to dry my hair. If I’m planning on doing sport, I do not shower in the morning.
Using plaits and buns during sports keeps it cleaner after a wash too.
Short and economic programmes on the dishwasher and washing machine are worth their weight too. Cheaper on both water and electricity.
And let’s not forget the car and bikes. Lights and windows need to be clean, but the car shouldn’t suffer if it’s not washed as often!
Can I be absolutely frank with you: having type 1 diabetes is frightening.
Anyone with type 1 feels this from time to time, from the first hypo you have, to the first hyper that won’t respond to insulin, to the first screening you have for retinal defects (diabetic retinopathy and maculopathy).
This is, like the last 3, my results came back absolutlely clear. No evidence of either. Not a surprise if the risk factors are well understood but there is always that niggling doubt that causes the fear.
I have normal to low blood pressure, near normal glycated hemoglobin(HbA1c) in that my levels are typically below 6%, and reasonably high cholesterol.
It’s one of the reasons everyone is so keen to lower my cholesterol (the other obvious reason is to prevent heart damage). But despite high cholesterol levels, my heart is very healthy. There’s no reason I shouldn’t reach 70 and be perfectly healthy.
I do not want to take statins because although they would lower my cbolesterol, they would screw my blood pressure and my HbA1c.
And for my quality of life, that is more important.
So I have modified my lifestyle: more fibre and more exercise. Keep the rest the same.
I am a coder, it’s what I do, it’s how I view the world.
It’s not the only way to solve problems, it is not the only tool in my kit, but it is a powerful one for the right kind of problems.
I spend, during my working week, approx. 7 hours a day sitting at my desk to achieve my tasks during the working week, and, in my past, a good 3-7 hours during the weekend too, learning, developing skills, creating fun things.
My desk chair is vital to the quality of my work when I am working from home. Like our beds, the qulaity of our chairs impacts our comfort and health.
I was lucky, the first house I bought was downsizing and they left an old, great quality office chair behind them, which I built a desk around – I had room for a 10 foot x 2.5ft desk, so we bought three trestles from ikea and built a desk with a custom cut 20mm deep MDF desk. It weighed a ton, and due to the stairs in this house, there was a bit of shuffling to get the painted desk up into the room, but it was glorious. My monitors were in the perfect position, the modem was in the same room, life was perfect.
My desk was indigo blue, the trestles were stained pine, and my chair was maroon – but comfy.
Then we moved, the house took my desk, my (then and now) husband at one end of the desk, me at the other, and my son could squeeze in when the time came. My chair was begining to show its age.
So, I spotted one I liked in Staples that was being sold in a clearance sale, and swapped out my chair. My husband started working for a different employer, so moved to a different room and I started looking a the room in a different way and bought a smaller top for my desk. Moved a sofa into my office and had a couple of tamber units from my husband’s old office we got for £2 plus moving costs.
When we moved house again, the old desk became a model railway table, and I finally bought a “proper” computer desk. It’s a corner desk, with a unit for my computer and room for the cables. I have network connections and a white board, my piano and a white board. A printer is ready to go when I need it. But again, my chair was begining to show its age.
Cushions helped with the sagging and tatty coverings, but it was not someone I wanted to spend my weekends doing my blog and web maintenance. The kitchen was drafted instead.
But last week I saw a chair I thought might work – this isn’t something I’d normally get mail order, but I am now sitting, drafting this blog in my pale green computer chair with my feet nestled under my desk on its foot rest. My lumber support is doing its job and I feel like the next time I work from home is going to be dicing with my back health.
No, ten people, well actually nine, one person RSVPd after I’d done the shopping, so it counts as ten…
Concentrate.
Sorry. I thought I’d share how to “do it all”: cook the buns, make the burgers from scratch, coleslaw, salad, etc. for a home barbecue.
First, and foremost, do not panic.
Each time you do this, somethings will work really well, some won’t. It’s the nature of life. Personally, I had the added joy of a pump cartridge that was failing, raising my blood sugar and randomly dropping it.
Despite the best laid plans, life happens round the edges.
Choose what battles you’re fighting.
I made the buns, with a bit of an experiment on some brown rolls, part-baked from scratch. Worked really well.
I also chose to make the burgers from scratch. And the salad, and the coleslaw. But I bought in sausages for the hotdogs, dips, and reused sauces we had in the fridge.
Make a plan.
What can be done early? In our case, I made the first bit of the part-baked rolls the day before. 24 rolls to cover the 20 burgers and 8 sausages. That may seem a little broken, but 2 people didn’t eat bread (carb avoidance rather than Celiac’s), so it worked out well.
I also did the coleslaw. I prepped the herbs for the burgers, including washing the fresh herbs, and basically made it so it was an easy build day, not figuring out processes on the fly. I even pulled together the recipe sheets so I had one crib sheet for all the burgers on the Sunday.
What we should have done was planned our stow and serving strategies. I put the coleslaw in a container that would have worked really well for the burgers.
The day in question.
Build day for the cooking. The burgers all need “standing”. So before I had my shower, I made first the beef, then the lamb, burgers.
Whizz up the onion and garlic with the herbs, then layer meat and puree in the food mixer. Mix for 20 seconds or so, then wash up the mixer pieces, construct the burgers. and stow in containers to stand in the fridge.
Go and shower.
Again, I should have then started the salad when I got back from my shower. I didn’t.
We also didn’t sort out umbrellas and blankets – after five warm days, it was a bit of a shock sitting outside with it showering and blowing a brisk northerly wind!
Or a spare table for the kitchen – nine round our smaller than average six seater was a bit of a squeeze <lol>.
So how did it all go?
We seemed to have a great time, happy munching sounds ensued once food was served. We all caught up, learnt some new things, swapped stories about holidays, recipes, etc. A party.
So, organised chaos, but not too bad on the catering front. Those learning points for next year will help.
Our son thought it was the best set of rolls and burgers we’d ever done!
We also forget to offer wine with the meal.
Should be better next time! However cold that day might be 🙂
I’m type 1 diabetic: that means my natural state is hyperglycemia or having blood sugar above 7mmol/l when fasting above 11mmol/l two hours after eating.
For days when nothing else is happening, I generally manage to keep to those limits, which gives me a long term measure of glycated hemoglobin of between 5.2% and 6.5%.
But that doesn’t mean that task is easy. My pump is capable of doing “hybrid closed loop” but, in our house, we call it stupid because I generally outperform it in terms of keeping between 3.9mmol/l and 11mmol/l. Hence my glycated hemoglobin levels.
I have some tricks in doing that, but like a non-diabetic individual, it doesn’t give me perfection, just tolerable levels.
Let’s take today, a lovely sunny bank holiday in the UK. When I went to bed, my blood glucose reading (BGR) was 5.7mmol/l – pretty good. By 3:20am it was 10.1mmol/l – third night on a row I’d been woken by a high alert during the night. I started a higher rate of background insulin (twice my normal basal rate), aiming to bring my down to 4mmo/l and it didn’t work, a coughing fit and alarm from my pump demonstrated that I had climbed to 13.8mmol/l by 4:58am when I gave another bolus (5iu which should reduce my glucose levels by 12.5mmol/l) and lengthened the increased basal rate for another 8 hours.
By 7:20am I was 11.2mmol/l (another alarm had been raised) and I gave a further 5iu. I have just over 9iu floating about my system from the boluses, at this point, plus the extra from my basal increases. But this time, things seem to be working, and I start to drop by 7:35am. By 8:15am. I am 6.0mmol/l and I get out of bed. I need breakfast soon, or the hypo is going to be a doozy. I have 85g of carbohydrate (yogurt and granola, orange juice, banana (useful for the potassium), and a wispa chocolate bar) and still drop to 2.9mmol/l by 8:45am, but I hold my nerve and shut off my basal. By 9:00am, my blood sugar is 4.3mmol/l, I still have 5iu of insulin working (plus the extra basal), and I take it easy. A bath sounds real good, but my beloved is enjoying a bath, so I just take it easy downstairs. With my basal back to normal.
Was it an infection, with my body hunting a hypo to fight the fever? I definitely have a blocked nose and sore throat?
Who knows, let’s see how today plays out! Definitely having that bath later, though…
Why not turn on the automated loop at 3am?
Because it won’t bring me down quickly enough, it will bolus, but only when basal rate increases aren’t working. It might have prevented the hypo at 8:45am but I actually wonder if being hypo is actually what my body is seeking – it is how non-diabetics generate a fever.
Because I treated early enough, the hypo was relatively short. But even so, the raised body temperature is useful for fighting infections, and I do wonder if that’s why my previous efforts hadn’t worked. If you body is seeking a hypo and you’re only giving enough insulin to bring you down safely, what is going to be happening?
I don’t do that very often – the first dose is always conservative, unless I am very high – and you can’t do that if you are travelling. But it means I am not generally above 10mmol/l outside of meals very often at all…
The week 28th April to 4th May has had some brilliant solar collection days in our little part of the world.
Indeed, April itself was the sunniest we’ve ever had, with a whopping 524.5 kWh being generated by our grid – and the thing about solar is that everyone whose cells were orientated in the same direction and elevation could get the same results.
All thanks to a photon hitting a part of the photovoltaic cell induces a current by displacing electrons from one part of the material to another – measurable as a direct current.
Thanks to the density of the material, that can happen for many years: this August our cells will be 11 years old.
Theming this up with our air sourced heat pump means we only used between 160W and 220W a day during this week from the grid. That was basically noise when the sun dipped and the battery wasn’t quite balanced against the fluctuating needs of the house.
When we first got our cells, batteries weren’t really available at anything like reasonable cost or cost to benefit ratio. It’s partly why feed in tarrifs existed along with selling your excess power back into the grid – which only really possible with appropriate meters. It just shows what progress has been made in the past 11 years.
Every little bit helps, of course. I’m writing this on the last forecasted warm day of the next five, and if we’re not warming the house, our energy needs are not super low, but are not too bad. Our energy supplier does a comparison to “similar homes” – five bed (or more) houses, with washing machines, dishwashers, tumble dryers, electric ovens, microwaves, electric hobs, heat pumps, EVs, home battery sources, and solar cells. We say how many people are living in the house too.
Hold on, aren’t you living in a four bedroomed house?
Yes, but if I do that, the numbers are even worse in how much better we’re doing and actually, volume wise, our house is nearly twice as big as most four beds, nearly 80m2 bigger than many five beds in the UK. I thought that was a good way to balance the scales.
Anyway, we’re not making a big effort to energy save, but our usage last month from the grid was dramatically lower (205.8 kWh compared to 709 kWh) than the similar homes.
It’s true, we have a nice home, mostly we just do big trips once or twice a year. We do a significant amount of our own cooking, and the move to the microwave and induction hob has made a big difference. We have an insulated house and none of our bulbs are rated above 6W – we’re not sitting in the dark, just making the investment on the cost of the bulb against it’s usage. Tapo/Kasa helps by dimming lights when we can too, and turning thigns off.
Our battery app lets us see when we’re off the grid allowing us to time things like the washing machine and dishwasher to run without the need of the grid. The peak draw on the grid is between 4pm and 7:30pm – during the summer, our battery allows us to use electricity stored up from during the day.
We’re making use of solar gain to ensure we do not need to heat the house at the moment. Our draw of 601kWh for heating and hot water in January has gone down to 187kWh in April and that was all powered by the sun.
We also try to avoid doing big things without the battery in place, a daily view from our smart meter shows we manage that fairly well.
An electricity grid usage graph for day when generated 20.4kWh from our solar cells.
Of course, our energy supplier reckons our energy footprint is 0.4 tonnes of CO2 per year, largely thanks to the fact we’re not doing anything with mains gas. That compared to 1.6 tonnes of CO2 per year in the similar homes. But, our supplier has already suggested we pay only £177 to them a month (£2,124 pa) to cover all our heating needs.
Even so, 503.2 kWh a month of seems like a great deal to be spending for a few easy steps.
Doesn’t that mean you’d be significantly better off at the moment if you didn’t have a tarrif that had a standing charge?
The short answer is yes. For the 1st and 2nd May, we paid £0.09 for our energy usage and £1.39 for the standing charge…
Ouch!
Indeed, but typically when we had a standing charge free tarrif we paid 2.5 times as much per unit of energy, so our £0.09 would become £0.23 instead. Over a year, that’s quite a sum, and need sto be compared to the £170 rounded up on the standing charge. So we’ll think carefully before making that leap.
I was reading my plans for my holiday and felt I should be honest about what actually happened.
Best laid plans, do not always come to fruition and my holiday was certainly that, although, more from my gaze being further than my reach.
For a start, my gym was manic, so I didn’t get to have a relaxing day in the pool, though I did make use of my voucher and have a mud bath. Weird but true that it really does clean spots in a really soothing way.
The food plans did not come to pass either: the flan was baked on Wednesday, with left overs on Thursday lunch, really seriously tasty even on the second visit. The coq au vin Tuesday night was delicious, as was an impromptu stilton and celery soup on Thursday night with a sour dough baguette.
The house was very slowly cleaned and a great deal of walking. I did find a whole load of missing things! I also sorted out the TV in the kitchen – turns out a new coaxial cable was all that was needed.
I researched quite a few recipes and bought a Konro grill for the summer. I am way more excited by this than I feel I should be. I produced a table explaining how my microwave works in terms of power settings. Did I say I found a really interesting recipe for a microwaved honey roast ham?
Having a hectic job, I am sure many would find my holiday less than blissful, but I honestly don’t get much time to just enjoy my home. Isn’t that why most of us work for a living? To have a place to call home?
You can control what you eat and exercise levels is the statement often touted on facebook and linkedIn.
Unless you have an immune condition that means you are manually providing the means to control your sugar and potassium levels – things are a bit more complicated when you do that.
I have resisted a high fibre diet for many years – fibre is a major headache for me, indeed for high fibre foods (anything more than 5% fibre), I subtract the weight of fibre from the carbohydrate value to prevent hypos. It’s work I just don’t need and to be honest, thanks to being very active, I have got away with that approach.
Being over 50, I am aiming for about 0.35 grams per kilogram of my mass a day. That works out at just under 25g of fibre a day but if I lose weight, I need to reduce that.
I eat vegetables, bread, potatoes, use wholegrain rice, wholegrain wheat for my bread.
So, easy, right?
I am using a tracker, Samsung Health’s meal recorder, and it shows just how difficult this work is. Thursday I managed it (259g), but yesterday only managed 20.3g, and today with my planned meals it only looks like I am managing 16g. Physically, it is really hard work.
And that’s while keeping my diet balance – 55g carbohydrates, 25g fat, and 20g of protein. Many high fibre foods, like nuts, are very high in fat.
This is my third day and I feel quite nauseas and stuffed. I also cannot drink enough liquid.
Wholemeal rolls are a bit of a saviour. A ham roll does the fibre and protein hit for 65% of the daily totals.
Balancing my insulin is hard work – the food is absorbed much more slowly, so a bread roll without butter has a 45 minute bolus split with a 25% up front bolus. The rice is over 20 minutes and I have to remember to remove the fibre amount from the carb count.
Hard work doesn’t come into it. It doesn’t feel like control, at all.
The funniest thing of all is looking at our Sunday food. Roast dinner gives me 49g of protein, 13g of fibre and a perfect balance of fat, protein and carbs, 650kCal. In one meal. A good range of vitamins, low in saturated fat. Tastes great too,
I’ve been working my way through an article in the Observer (20th April 2025) about boarding school following an announcement by my friend on her journey through life the past couple of years, and both resonnanted as both my parents went through at bording school.
My mum’s experience was very different to my dad’s. Mum went to the same school as her brothers, and, to some extent, it was an escape from a choatic family life – my gran was very disorganised and a bit of a hoarder. Mum was 11 when she left home, and it was a co-ed school with some day pupils as it was a grammer school. Her fees for boarding were paid by the RAF, as my grandfather was serving abroad when my mum was of school age.
My dad was the only son and went to a private boys school as he had failed the eleven plus. My dad was a late bloomer, not least as he was very asthmatic. Every holiday he was the stranger in the house, and school was alien and cold – I suspect in his younger years at school he was bullied. It wasn’t just the children who bullied you and at boarding school, there is no respite, no break, it’s 24-7. Every year he wrote to be allowed to come home and study in the local school and it wasn’t until 6th form that his request was granted.
One thing this shared experience meant was that neither of my parents had really experienced home life. My mum was determined we didn’t hoard like her mum did, but I think my dad never got over the experiences. There wasn’t the money at the time, but my parents would not consider boarding school for either me or my kid brother. As a grown-up, I am very grateful for that, and the traditions my parents set up for us – they had a relatively clean slate, after all.
One of the ones I remember was a ham at easter time. I did this for my family today – a honey roast ham, roasted carrots, baby corn, pak choi, baby cauliflower, and potatoes. I served it with a onion roux sauce and rosé wine.
It feels like a priviledge to be able to do that without a thought.
