I am a 43 diabetic type 2 with diabetic neuropathy 5-10 and I weigh 125# with 6-1/2 years of being a diabetic.
I have the classic symptoms in the feet, hands, face tingling, pressure behind the eyes, nose or sinuses running from constricted blood vessels, wrist and below the knees being numb with hair loss, waking to a dry mouth at 3am (I think its from autonomic neuropathy), even after my sugars being less than 100 for 3 months. The past several weeks it has progressed up to my upper thighs and the groin area(burning and muscle weakness). My upper arms, upper & mid back, armpits and now my throat with sugar levels being excellent and eating vegie soup with chicken, flaxseed, walnuts, pecans, fish, okra, green beans (whey protein so that I can max out my protein calories)drinking wate for the past year and etc but I am getting extremely worse. I was diagnosed 6 years ago with careless doctors who did not inform me what my numbers should be or anything, only self education from online stories. I have had an a1c of 5.0 for 1-1/2 years with going over 140 somtimes. I have recently over 3 months maintaining sugar levels less than 100 throughout the day and fasting being average of 90. every now and then say every 30 days, it totaly disappears for 12-24 hours for the past 1-1/2 years.
For the past 3 months I have read that i need to keep my blood sugars between 80-100. I have been doing that with rarely getting over 100 (maybe 105-107 once every other week)and rarely down to 60. The past 2 weeks I have started substituting the cheap alpha lipoic acid for the r-alpha lipoic acid with some relief. I am having to eat plenty of good foods so that I can not loose anymore weight. 6 months ago, I weighed 130 and went on a very strict diet and lost 2# in a weeks time but my neuropathy felt 95% better but I can not loose any more weight so I had to go back to regular eating so that I could maintain my weight. I love to exercise but then I have to eat more calories so I do not loose any more weight and it greatly affects the neuropathy. I quit drinking 3 years ago and i qiut smoking 10 months ago with no improvement to the neuropathy. I do take benfotiamine, methyl b12, multi vitamin, coq10, l-arginine, magnesium malate and recently started r-lipoic acid and evening primrose oil.
My question is, what are the best foods or meals for me to eat without hurting my neuropathy I am a type 2 with metformin 1000mg am-pm and glyburide 2.5 am-pm
Please help me, Thank you
It sounds like you're doing a great job staying on top of your BG so it must be frustrating to have the issues with neuropathy. I have lost quite a bit of hair on my legs but no other symptoms to date although, perhaps ominously, if I run > 3 miles in Adidas Boost shoes, it makes my feet tingle. I like their ride though.
From your description of your regimen, it sounds like you are doing everything right. Even moderate exercise might help crank circulation back through your extremities. I've noticed that both elliptical and bicycling will turn my feet pretty pink, I assume b/c the circular motion sort of cranks blood down there. It may be hard to work to balance but if you can get by with like 5-10G of carbs before and get moving, it might help alleviate some of the symptoms?
Another thing I've read about but I dunno if it's readily available where you are might be medical marijuana. W/O more symptoms (I've never read that it helps the hair loss component...), I haven't gone so far as to try it (although the "green light" is going on in Illinois 1/1/14, city councils are trying to figure out where to put the clinics...) but reports from various sources I've seen, including a video from Dr. Sanjay Gupta on CNN, suggest that there's clear benefits for folks w/ neuropathy. I am wondering when I will run into this at work, as I'm a claims adjuster and see all sorts of unusual situations.
thanks for the reply. i do have a bike and I used to go biking all the time but with the weight loss issues it will cause me to eat more calories just to make up what I have burned off just to maintain the weight then the fiber optic blood vessels get clogged up allowing for no oxygen to get to the peripheral nerves throughout the body. My feet, legs and hands are tingling just from chicken, string cheese, green beans and flaxseed that I had from lunch. My doctor is already getting on to me about the weight loss. if you dont mind me asking but what do you eat to maintain your weight
I eat about 100-140 carbs/ day although on weekends, holidays, I'll let 'er rip. I work out probably 5-6 times/ week, although I went a bit nutso this summer and did T25 M-F and then ran 2-3 evenings w/ a long run on Saturday and, sometimes, a bike ride on Sunday as I'm a sucker for bike rides in nice weather and we have a bunch of great trails around here.
Foodwise, I think that a lot of it is to incorporate the timing of eating into BG management. If you're on oral and run low, maybe work some stuff into your diet that has 8-10G of carbs and try moderate exercise. If you just get 20-30 minutes in, it will crank up your HR and, hopefully get some blood where you need it.
I mostly eat egg beaters, spinach and broccoli, sometimes with ham, for breakfast, along with this Shakeology stuff, veggies, fruit and nutrients, about 19G of carbs and maybe a piece of 7G of carbs bread depending on where my BG is. Lunch is a can of tuna, 1/2 avocado and chia seeds, with Sriracha sauce for lunch and then more splurgy stuff at dinner, reasonable portions but I'll eat all sorts of stuff, including many things that are widely claimed to be horrible as I have T1 and can cover my BG with insulin. If your doc really is on you to eat more and you're determined to maintain your BG w/ the neuropathy, maybe some insulin would help with that? I can't recall anybody running into the same problem but at least the math may work. But T2 can be very different from T1.
Nope. I've had T1 since 1984 and no neuropathy but the hair loss seems like some sort of harbinger. Maybe smoking yutzes things up neurologically speaking too though and as you get farther from that it will help clear things out of your system? I don't know much about that either but quitting is supposed to be a really good thing for anyone to do.
I have to tell you, lots of conditions can lead to neuropathy. Sure, high blood sugars can be one cause. But by any measure, you should have virtually eliminated that cause. I really would urge you to aggressively pursue what is really causing this problem.
And I do agree with you, your current weight is way too low and suggests something more serious going on.
As a smoker, you and I opened the door to neuropathy. I have to say that after 2 years of being clean has greatly diminished the problem but I still have some numbness. You seem to be doing everything right so I wonder if something else is going on. I agree with BSC that perhaps this isn't a diabetes thing but some other condition that you really need to find out about.
While you have lived with diagnosed T2 diabetes for 6 1/2 years, chances are that your body has lived with diabetes before your diagnosis. During that pre-diagnosis period (it could have been years) your body and extremities were exposed to untreated hyperglycemia. This is often overlooked by people who receive a secondary complication diagnosis relatively quickly after the diabetes diagnosis. There's a huge population of undiagnosed T2Ds today.
I'm sorry to read about your peripheral neuropathy. Your BG results are exceptional so I don't know what else to recommend. When I starting experiencing numbness in my arms several years ago, my doctor prescribed a low dose of amitriptyline. That medicine was effective for me but I quit taking it last year in an attempt to simplify my Rx habit. The symptoms did not return once I quit the drug.
its been almost 10 months since i quit smoking. I think that the micro blood vessels are partialy closed up from smoking and high blood sugars. so with that being said starting today I have cutting my carbs down to 60gr per day from and just 40gr of omega 3 fat and upping the r-alpha lipoic acid to the max of 1800mg, magnesium malate, l-arginine and evening primrose oil,My Feet stay red accept early in the mornings until i first have my first meal then they go from whitish/pink to red, so that has too be what it is, constriction of blood vessels
how long did it take for your neuropathy start getting better after you quit smoking and maintained normal blood sugars
i went to a neuro who did me no good and told me there was no cure and that was it, Itried other neuros doctors and will not accept me with no insurance. Disability kicked in for me but medicare will not until july of 2014. I went to 1 neuro and 6 different primary care doctors in 2012. I think the smoking caused some major micro blood vessel costriction and high blood sugars. so with that being said starting today I have cutting my carbs down to 60gr per day from and just 40gr of omega 3 fat and upping the r-alpha lipoic acid to the max of 1800mg, magnesium malate, l-arginine and evening primrose oil, My Feet stay red accept early in the mornings until i first have my first meal then they go from whitish/pink to red all day, so that has too be what it is. constriction of blood vessels Thanks
My doctor gave me amitriptyline a while back but it caused excess tingling in my feet and hands so I took my self off after the first week unless you think it would help.
I would be wary of any drug that increased symptoms instead of alleviating them. My doctor's first recommendation was Lyrica. But I never took any of that. I've heard that Lyrica can produce strange visual dreams.
Yes, Credbaron. I agree with Super_Sally and the other posters. I had undiagnosed b-12 deficiency 12 years ago( pernicious anemia). Took doctors several months to diagnose me at that time. My Symptoms of relatively sudden onset of neuropathy were so severe that I could not walk do to the lack of balance, trembling and spasms in extremities, pain in lower back, tightness in abdominal muscles... etc. After massive daily doss of b-12 when I was hospitalized ( 3 days in hospital, 3 weeks in an extended care facility), and monthly injections of b-12 for three years, symptoms greatly subsided . But I Still have neuropathic symptoms from type to time. Usually subside if blood sugars are stable, but still get the tinglies and pain from feet to knees even when in relatively normal control. But the symptoms are so much less than when I had Pernicious Anemia.
I have low thryroid and My endo is checking me for hypoparathyrodism, another autoimmune scourge, that could be causing the tinglies. My vitamin D tends to stay low if I do not take the supplement daily, said to be related to me being African-American. Vitamin D is also reported to be a causation of neuropathic symptoms
Do get those possible areas checked out.
Now are you definitely a Type 2? Have you ever been checked for latent Autoimmune Diabetes in Adults? There is a group and an astute informative Member here on Tudiabetes , Melitta, who leads it, I think. You eat so little carbs and have to take Metformin to stay in range. A number of autoimmune disorders can cluster if you have one of them, possibly LADA.
I know is so hard to get proper diagnostic info without insurance.. Any University Medical centers where you live; or if you are a vet, VA hospitals you can go to which I may offer reasonable re-payment plans?
It may not all be D-related. Most docs think that if you have diabetes, that diabetes causes EVERYTHING that is medically wrong to happen. Not necessarily true.
Seems to me it was only a few months before it got better and stabilized where it is now. I can still feel but it is very remote if that makes sense. Tingling/burning stopped after a month or two.
how long did you have diabetic neuropathy before you were able to stop the progression and what kind of foods did you eat, please let me know, thank you.
Hi CDredbaron: As Brunetta suggests, it would probably be a good idea to be tested to see if you have slow onset Type 1 diabetes (aka LADA). The tests are autoantibody tests (GAD, ICA, IA-2, insulin autoantibodies, ZnT8) to see if you are positive for markers for Type 1 autoimmue diabetes. Your doctor can order these tests. In adults, the onset of T1D can be very slow, but the preferable treatment is low doses of insulin. This might make you feel MUCH better.
I went to the doctors today for a follow up visit for some blood work and my a1c changed from a 5.0 to a 4.4 and my doctor is getting on to me. my doctor did not answer my questions so I will ask them on here. As you well know I have diabetic neuropathy for the last 6 years with the last 1-1/2 years having a 5.0 aic. I have read a lot about keeping the blood sugar level under 100 in attempt to stop the progression of the diabetic neuropathy getting worse. please let me know, thank you
Does low blood sugar below 70 cause neuropathy to get worse when not exceeding 100 at all times
can low blood sugar deprive(starv) oxygen not to get into the nerve cells causing the neuropathy to get worse
what should my blood sugar level goals be to where my neuropathy will not get worse if this low blood sugar is the problem
