Diabetes Update

Back in January I talked about my Type 2 Diabetes diagnosis. It is now 7 months later, and I am proud to say that I have reversed my Type 2 Diabetes.

I am still using the Diabetes:M app that I discussed before, to track my daily calorie/carb intake.

I changed my diet, I did not just continue to eat as I did before and rely upon the insulin to correct my glucose. I started off by changing to a more of a restricted carb diet, this was the recommendation from the Dr. at the hospital. This consisted of eating fewer carbs, but not what I would consider a drastic change. It was a restriction of 75g of carbs per meal.

A few weeks in to January, I adjusted even more. I went to more of a Ketogenic style, or Atkins Modified, diet. Typically, I consume fewer than 40g of carbs per day, which is not as restrictive as either of these diets, but it is what I am currently following. When I started doing this diet, I didn't even know what a Ketogenic diet was. This was just a restriction that I put upon myself. My meals consist of high protein, high fat, low carb items. My go to is Potbelly's Farmhouse Salad (sans the tomatoes, because I don't like them) with the Potbelly Vinaigrette Dressing. This is about 560 calories, and 14g carbs. Or I will have the Jimmy John's #15 Tuna Unwich (again, no tomatoes). About 650 calories, and 9g carbs. But I also go to places like 5 Guys and get the Bacon Cheeseburger… The key is to axe the bread, and fries. I eat a lot fewer calories than I used to as well. On average, I consume 1,350 calories per day.

A lot of this change in my diet stemmed from an episode of The Joe Rogan Experience with guest Neil DeGrasse Tyson. In the episode, Neil said "If a physicist wrote a diet book it would be one line: Consume fewer calories than you burn". That sentence made complete sense to me. It is so simple. So that is what I did. Also in that episode, they talked about how Terry Crews does intermittent fasting. He only eats within an 8 hour window of the day. I also adapted that practice. I eat lunch at about 11:30am (or 12:00pm) and then I have dinner at about 6:30pm. I may have a snack of like a SlimJim type of food in between. But after 8:00pm I do not eat again, until lunch the next day.

Back in December, when I was admitted to the hospital, I weighed in at 347lbs. And this was after about a week or 2 of me not really eating because I was not feeling well. As of this morning, the day of writing this, I am 265.6lbs. That is 81.4lbs lost in 7 months, for those that are counting. Keep in mind, everything I described above is dietary changes. I have not added really any exercise to my day, except maybe a little bit of walking. The next phase of this will be to work in exercise to my daily routine.

This is just the beginning of my story. This is not the end. This is not something that I can say "Oh, I can eat what ever I want again, I am not a diabetic any more".

I never liked to share pictures of myself, because I was not happy with my appearance, while I am not satisfied to call it done, I will say that I am a lot happier with how I look, and feel. The picture on the left is back from October 2015 (It was the most recent photo I could find), the picture on the right is from the end of July 2017.

Type 2 Diabetes Diagnosis

I won't go through all the details, but on December 26th, 2016, I was diagnosed with Type 2 Diabetes. As you probably expect, it means a drastic life-style change for me. I have to give insulin injections, and monitor blood glucose, as well as monitor the amount of carbohydrates that I consume. To help me track that information I found an application on Google Play called Diabetes:M (Play Store). The application is free, but ad supported. You can purchase the ad-free license for ~$9 or so, which I purchased as soon as I was sure it was the application that I wanted to use.

This allows me to track everything that I need to be successful in controlling my diabetes. This includes information like my meals, my medications, blood pressure, insulin injections, etc. One of my favorite features of Diabetes:M is the ability for the application to sync the SQLite database, that contains all of the logged data, to a cloud storage provider like Dropbox. This, as a developer, got me thinking how I could leverage that so that I can provide my information to my wife so she is aware of what my current blood glucose level is.

To start this project I created an Express node application and put a copy of the SQLite database in the directory structure of the application. I then went to work on creating some SQL queries to pull information from the Diabetes:M database. To start, I queried my most recent glucose level.

One of the important steps to make the data current was for me to find a way to detect when a new version of the database was saved to my Dropbox. To do this, I found an application (for windows) called Directory Monitor. There is a free version of the application, which is what I am currently using, as the free version fits all my needs. I configured the application to run a shell script when the SQLite database file is modified on my system, which happens every time I log information in the Android application.

The shell script goes and extracts the dbz file, which is just a gzipped (or some other compression) SQLite file. It takes that extracted database file and puts it in the /data directory in the express application. It then does a git commit and git push of the git repository. This commit triggers a deploy in Azure. Within seconds of me taking my glucose level, the database is updated on Azure, so when my wife wants to check to see how I am doing, she can see the data in near real-time.

So when she opens the site on her phone she would see something like the following:

 

 

She can even see a history of all the events that I have entered into Diabetes:M

 

 

And, because I could, I added a dashboard with some charts

This is just the beginning of what I have done. I have other things I want to add so my wife, and family, can support me in managing this so I can live a healthier life. Right now, the code for this is not publicly available because it is still very tied to my information and configuration. I will work towards getting this in a place that I can share the code so others can use this.

 

Some other ideas that I think will be fun, and useful:

• Alexa Skill – Wife will be able to ask Alexa what my glucose is, and will respond with something like "about 32 minutes ago, Ryan's glucose was 132"
• iOS/Android 'support' app to be able to receive push notifications when there is a reason for concern, like high, or low glucose levels.
• More detailed reports and the ability to change the timespan of the data.
• Support for other systems to monitor the database changes. I have multiple Raspberry PI's that are always running, one of them could monitor the database for changes in Dropbox and the rPi could sync the database.
• Nightscout (CGM in the Cloud) – Integration / Support for Nightscout and all the work that the community has already done here.