At the end of the last blog post I alluded to a bit of a medical whoopsie that’s going to affect not just my riding but pretty much most aspects of my life moving forward, and I really have nobody to blame but myself. My long standing addiction to Coke has entirely predictably eventually had a long term effect on my health. If that sounds a touch melodramatic let me explain further, but first I must take that vital first step in my recovery journey my admitting my faults to the world.

‘Hello, my names Mick and I’m addicted to sugar’ Yes, its not the coke you sniff up a rolled up banknote that’s been my undoing, but the coke that’s available in every corner of the world and usually comes in 500ml bright red cans. I reckon since my teenage years I’ve probably consumed at least one can or bottle of what I call ‘full fat’ Coke or Pepsi a day and that’s just one aspect of my long standing super poor diet. In the last six years I’ve done a fair amount of long distance driving up and down the United Kingdoms sometimes quaint but more usually gridlocked motorway system and every time I stopped to put diesel in the tank a largish bag of something with a lot of gelatine, E numbers and of course sugar seemed to somehow find its way back into my car with me, and by the time I’d reach my destination that bag would usually be empty and my fingers would be sticky. Then there’s my chronic inability to make healthy choices when it comes to cooking for myself, which again in the last few years due to necessity I’ve done a lot of. Let’s just say salad and veggies do not make up a lot of my diet and never really have. Crisps (chips if you’re from the USA), ready meals fresh from the microwave, full sugar coke and lots of chocolate digestive biscuits have been my staple diet for far too long. Lastly while I’m in my self loathing / owning my faults paragraph I’ll need to admit to my other major longstanding lifestyle issue – I really like beer, and I’ve been drinking more of it than is good for me both in volume and frequency for years.

Now deep down I think I always knew that all these bad habits would have to be paid for eventually, but if your not feeling ill and you’re not looking that fat then eating and drinking like I’d been doing for years seemed like a pretty victimless crime. Yes my weight was a bit higher than I’d have ideally liked it to be but its wasn’t awful, people didn’t have to turn sideways to edge past me in narrow corridors or anything, and I knew from donating platelets regularly that there was nothing to badly amiss with my blood composition or blood pressure as its checked every time they syphon some blood off. I was still for my age and certainly compared to a lot of my peers pretty fit and active and apart from needing to up the ‘Ready Reader’ glasses strength a couple of times over the last few years the old body on the surface at least seemed to be holding up pretty well. Until it didn’t one night.

That fateful night I’d gone to bed with what I thought was a mild case of indigestion, nothing that the pretty hefty dose of anti-acids I’d popped at bed time couldn’t take care of while I slept off whatever my insides were having a spot of bother breaking down. Boy was I wrong, its was a long night and by the time the cold grey streaks of dawn were lighting up the sky my Garmin watch told me I’d walked 26,000 steps around the downstairs of my house over the hours of darkness broken up with some really unpleasant interludes lying on the floor of my downstairs bathroom clutching my lower stomach which seemed to be trying its best to tie itself into ever tighter knots while at the same time some joker was stabbing me in the kidney area with a red hot poker. This was serious next level pain I was in and by the time my very worried wife came downstairs to find me cuddling the toilet I was in a pretty sorry state. Now usually it takes major blood loss to entice me to go anywhere near a hospital but in this case I really needed very little persuasion to seek some professional medical assistance.

Now I was pretty sure I knew what thew probable issue was as the symptoms were very similar to a nasty encounter I’d had with a kidney stone a few years ago which had self resolved after a telephone consultation with the NHS helpline, lots of water to drink and a very painful visit to the toilet. This time around the problem was however much I drank (and I’d drunk a lot over night) the problem very much hadn’t gone away and I still felt like there was a giant with anger issues trying to use my midsection a a stress ball. I’m not going to bore you with a blow by blow account of my fun morning at my local A&E department, the short version is after giving me some industrial strength pain killers and anti cramping drugs to unknot my insides and lots more to drink I was home after lunch and after spending the rest of the day recovering was more or less back to normal 24 hours later. What makes all of this relevant to this story is that the hospital doctors strongly recommended I saw my GP for a full range of blood tests as at my age it would be prudent to make sure this bout of largely unexplained abdominal pain wasn’t a symptom of anything really nasty lurking deep within me such as prostate cancer……. which for men at my time of life is unfortunately a real concern.

So usually my modus operandi with medical issues is to simply ignore them until either they go away or I learn to live with them, but this time even for an Ostrich like me it seemed prudent to take the advice so after a quick telephone appointment with my GP who also seemed to think testing me for everything under the sun that it was possible to get out of a blood sample was an excellent idea, 3 largish test tubes of blood were extracted a few days later and then I vainly hoped that would be the last I’d hear about it. As I’m sure you can guess that was not the hand fate dealt me, and I’m also pretty certain most of you can guess what the results were.

Well if you’ve got this far its going to be no surprise when I say I’ve moved from the estimated 1.2 million people in the UK with undiagnosed type 2 Diabetes to the frankly mind boggling 4.4 million who have been clinically diagnosed with the condition. Yes that’s right the best current estimate is there’s at least 5.6 million people in the United Kingdom who are type 2 diabetic and the majority of them like myself have most probably ended up with the disease because of their / our poor diets and lifestyle choices. Whatever way you cut up the sugar free diabetic friendly cake those are pretty big numbers.

Don’t worry its not my intention to become an instant diabetics lifestyle expert who dispenses advice and ‘this is how I transformed my life’ wisdom, there’s plenty of those people out there as I quickly found out in the first 30 minutes of internet research after my first test results came back. This is all new to me and I’m obviously going to take awhile to get my own head around it. Personally my long term blood sugar level (my HBA1C level apparently ?) is currently scoring 56(I can’t remember what the unit of measure was) anything above 48 is considered diabetic, below 42 is normal and 42 – 47 is what’s called pre-diabetes which effectively means you’re not there yet but diabetes is coming for you if you don’t shape up quick. My level of 56 is highish but not high enough for the doctor to put me on a drug regimen straight away to bring it down. I’ve been sent away till the end of March to see if I can bring my levels back into near the normal range with adjustment’s to my diet and lifestyle. Basically the diabetic specialist nurse at my local GP practice gave me a massive rollocking after I rather shamefully recounted my usual diet and told me to go away and make better choices to see if I can redeem myself.

What’s the plan then and how’s it going to affect my coming year on the bike? Painful though it’s been there’s been a fair amount of low hanging fruit that I’ve managed to cut straight out. The full fat massive sugar hit Coke has been swapped out for sugar free Coke Zero which took a bit of getting used to but I’ve persevered with it. Likewise the very sugary blackcurrant cordial (Ribena in the UK) has been ditched for the ‘no added sugar’ version of the same drink. I took a long and honest look at my alcohol consumption (especially at home) and have cut that right back. Without realising it I’d fallen into the bad habit of uncapping a beer most nights when I sat on the sofa if I was at home, and more often than not one beer would probably turn into at least three before bed time, and these where full pint bottles or cans, not the little supermarket’s own brand bottles. Now I’m really trying hard to make a beer after dinner a special treat not the norm, and when I do reach for the fridge door I’ll nurse that one pint for the whole evening rather than neck the first one like Captain Anson in the last scene of ‘Ice Cold In Alex’ (If you haven’t seen this classic film why not? there’s no excuse). Luckily I’m spending far less time in the car as my recent change of job means I’m back home full time again so the car sweet guzzling fests have died a natural death. Likewise now I’m back under the wife’s more watchful eye my diet has naturally improved since I’m not spending half my week living off ready meals and biscuits on a boat miles from home. (I’m even trying to eat more vegetables and brown bread instead of white) Initially I was also quite successful in ditching the biscuits and sugary snacks in-between meals both at home and at work but I’ll admit to falling a little bit of the wagon on this front since the Christmas holidays.

The other thing we of the sugary blood persuasion are told to do by the medical profession is to exercise more, now admittedly I think that’s aimed more at those those idea of a big workout is to get up off the sofa to reach for the TV remote or another bag of pretzel’s but what’s good for the goose is good for the gander so they say so I’m making it clear to the family that I’m now under doctors orders to ride more and its quite possible that this may require me to spend money on new bits of bike, new gear and possibly more besides. It really is true that if you look hard enough there’s an upside to almost everything.

This little truth bomb about the sugar content of my blood dropped in early November last year so I’ve been trying to crush my new sugar reduced lifestyle for almost 3 months now, so has it made much difference to my life or my riding? Well if I’m honest I’m not feeling radically different. Unlike some keen beans on the internet of Youtube who seem to spout endless nonsense about their boundless energy and quantum leaps in cognition hat happened once they banished the evil sugar I can’t say I’ve noticed any amazing benefits, hopefully its doing me some good inside and I’m certainly hoping to see a decent reduction in my long term blood sugar reading when I face my make or break blood test at the end of March. I’m going to be pretty crushed if after all these changes my blood is still basically red coloured Golden Syrup. Now the thing that is giving me hope is the very tangible drop in my weight since I made the changes to my diet. When I started to cut the sugar down I was a shade under 79 kgs which is 12.4 stone or about 174 lbs , I’m now a much more slender 72 kgs / 11.4 stone / 158 lbs which I’m quite pleased with. It’s certainly made me quicker up the hills on Zwift and hopefully if the weather ever improves it’ll make me quicker out doors as well.

Will finding out I’m a type 2 diabetic make me a better cyclist ? well it seems early indications imply it just might. I’ve always known I’d be faster and stronger if I cleaned up my lifestyle a bit, but until serious and clever people in white coats told me to do it I was always going to lack both the motivation and will power to make the necessary sacrifices, let’s see what performance gains my new reduced sugar self is capable of!