When Schenectady resident Elizabeth Villiers Gemmette was diagnosed with Type 2 Diabetes, she was trying to make lifestyle changes to improve her health, but she didn’t realize that some of these improvements might actually have been the catalyst for the problems she was experiencing.
After her diagnosis, instead of pursuing drug therapy, she decided to try to control her condition naturally. Four years later, she said, her blood-sugar levels indicate she is diabetes-free.
Gemmette spoke Tuesday, March 3, at Schenectady County Community College about how she improved her diagnosis based on a keep it simple practice, which involves knowledge, exercise, eating well, portion control, investing in books, testing blood sugar regularly, managing stress and enjoying life.
`I was overwhelmed, and I was sort of surprised,` said Gemmette, who wrote a book about her experience called `Controlling Type Two Diabetes: A Natural Alternative.` `I had the symptoms, but I didn’t really recognize them.`
Those symptoms included `overwhelming feelings of thirst, lots of trips to the bathroom and fatigue.`
`I was in the gym losing weight and doing things I thought were the right things to do, but if I had to say something that got me in trouble, it was that I bought a juicer and I was putting a lot of fruit juice in the juicer, and I think that was my downfall. I think that was my path of destruction,` said Gemmette.
In her talk, which was based on her book, she discusses how she reversed her diagnosis within six months `without the aid of oral drugs.`
`People have asked me if I would have taken oral drugs if my first line of defense hadn’t worked. Well, of course I would. But even if I had to resort to oral medicine at first and/or insulin later, I still would have followed my own diet, exercise and weight loss program,` said Gemmette in the introduction of her book.
She believes that she has now controlled her condition, which was caused by her own bad habits.
Exercise is also part of Gemmette’s daily schedule. She does works out for 30 minutes a day on a stationary bike, five leg machines, one stomach exercise on an exercise ball and weights for arms.
Through `eating well,` she met with a dietitian and eliminated harmful foods from her diet. She controls her portions and invested in two books on Glycemic Index to help her refine her diet. The books helped her determine which foods raise blood glucose rapidly and which foods are slow-acting. She tests her blood-glucose as directed by her doctor and only as often as recommended ` she said that while it’s easy to get compulsive about it, there’s no need to. She completely eliminated sugar and sugar substitutes from her diet and stuck with the mantra, `I can do this,` as she got healthy.
`You have to be so careful because someone in there was saying I can’t do this and that and the other,` said Gemmette.
Dr. Sarah Clark, an endocrinologist at Albany Medical Center, said diabetes is different for everyone who is diagnosed.
`We’ve all seen people who have been able to make lifestyle changes and commit to them and not require any medications for their diabetes,` said Clark.
However, she said that the disease often progresses, and it’s hard to predict what it will be like in 10 years.
`I am certainly not a dietitian, but in a world of diabetes management, what we consider a good healthy diet is very similar to what someone with heart disease considers a good healthy diet,` said Clark.
She said that people want to get in the appropriate number of vitamins and minerals, and despite the notion that all carbohydrates should be eliminated, they shouldn’t be. Instead, people should avoid taking in copious amounts of processed white carbohydrates.
`I don’t know if any of us advocate for extreme diets where you eliminate all carbohydrates, but certainly most Americans have room to make some cuts from our general diet,` said Clark.
In speaking about monitoring insulin values she said that people with diabetes can check their insulin values at all different times, but it really depends on what they’re trying to follow.
`If you take insulin with each of your meals you should check how much you’re going to need before you take those pills. Get a sense of, ‘What are my extremes for the day?’` said Clark.
`There’s value in all of those numbers, and it’s a matter of what question you’re looking to answer depending on when you should be checking,` said Clark.
For information about Gemmette’s book, call 370-4187. “