2014-2
26

LCHF Adventure … Food (what I ate)

Category: Diabetes, Health | No Comments

Topic-Health

As you may have read in my previous posts (1, 2) I have started living a LCHF (low carb high fat) lifestyle as a way to not only improve my health, but ultimately to get my Diabetes (type 2) under control.

Now you may have noticed that I did not call it a diet, but rather a lifestyle as I really think that this is going to be a long term thing rather than a short term diet.

After reading the Huisgenoot article I started doing research and come across a website called the “Diet Doctor“.  There they have an awesome article for beginners on the LCHF program – “LCHF For Beginners“. In it they explain what you can eat a lot of, what to moderately eat, and what to avoid (go check out the full article):

Eat all you like

  • Meat: Any type, including beef, pork, game meat, chicken, etc. Feel free to eat the fat on the meat as well as the skin on the chicken. If possible try to choose organic or grass fed meat.
  • Fish and Shellfish: All kinds: Fatty fish such as salmon, mackerel or herring are great. Avoid breading.
  • Eggs: All kinds: Boiled, fried, omelettes, etc. Preferably choose organic eggs.
  • Natural Fat, High-Fat Sauces: Using butter and cream when you cook can make your food taste better and make you feel more satiated. Try a Béarnaise or Hollandaise sauce, check the ingredients or make it yourself. Coconut oil and olive oil are also good options.
  • Vegetables that Grow Above Ground: All kinds of cabbage, such as cauliflower, broccoli, cabbage and Brussels sprouts. Asparagus, zucchini, eggplant, olives, spinach, mushrooms, cucumber, lettuce, avocado, onions, peppers, tomatoes etc.
  • Dairy products: Always select full-fat options like real butter, cream (40% fat), sour cream, Greek/Turkish yogurt and high-fat cheeses. Be careful with regular milk and skim milk as they contain a lot of milk sugar. Avoid flavored, sugary and low-fat products.
  • Nuts: Good to eat instead of candy in front of the television (preferably in moderation).
  • Berries: Okay in moderation, if you are not a super strict or sensitive. Good with whipped cream. 

Avoid if you can

  • Sugar: The worst. Soft drinks, candy, juice, sports drinks, chocolate, cakes, buns, pastries, ice cream, breakfast cereals. Preferably avoid sweeteners as well.
  • Starch: Bread, pasta, rice, potatoes, French fries, potato chips, porridge, muesli and so on. “Wholegrain products” are just less bad. Moderate amounts of root vegetables may be OK (unless you’re eating extremely low carb).
  • Margarine: Industrially imitated butter with unnaturally high content of omega-6 fat. Has no health benefits, tastes bad. Statistically linked to asthma, allergies and other inflammatory diseases.
  • Beer: Liquid bread. Full of rapidly absorbed carbs, unfortunately.  I don’t drink any alcohol, so no problem
  • Fruit: Very sweet, lots of sugar. Eat once in a while. Treat fruit as a natural form of candy.

Once in a while

You decide when the time is right. Your weight loss may slow down a bit.

  • Alcohol: Dry wine (regular red or dry white wine), whisky, brandy, vodka and cocktails without sugar.  I don’t drink alcohol so not applicable for me
  • Dark chocolate: Above 70 % cocoa, preferably just a bit.  (try find this WITHOUT any sugar – its like trying to find a unicorn)

Drink most days

  • Water
  • Coffee: Try it with full-fat cream
  • Tea

So using these guidelines I started eating exactly that.  This is what my meal plan looked like…

05h00 – 06h30:  In the mornings I would get up, go for a walk and when I came back my wife and I would have 2 fried eggs with biltong (dried meat for not South Africans) infused in them, with a slice of melted cheese on top. With a glass of water.  On days that I was running late and could not eat at home, I would get 4x Fried Eggs and a Beef sausage (or two) from the canteen at work.

10h00 – 11h00:  As a snack I bought 1kg of Mixed Nuts (Cashew, Macadamia, Pecan, Brazil and Almonds) which I kept in my desk drawer and would take a handful if I was peckish. Have some water (between 350ml and 500ml)

12h30 – 13h30: Depending on what the canteen was offering that day it would either have a T-Bone steak, or chicken piece or grilled line fish, with a HUGE helping of green salad (consisting of lettuce, cucumber, onion, baby tomatoes and feta cheese). Have a 500ml bottle of still water.

15h00 – 16h00: If hungry I would snack on the nuts again, with a glass of water

18h30 – 19h30: My wife would prepare supper which consisted of some sort of meat (beef, chicken, fish) and a green salad (sometimes with and sometime not with mayo on)

21h00 – bedtime: If I was feeling a craving for something “lekker” (aka “nice”) I would take a cup of Full Fat Greek Yogurt with a sachet of sweetner (and a glass of water).

And that’s how I lived.

Now you may be wondering why I kept noting my water intake. Well you see it seems that kidney stones tend to run in our family genes and the last thing that I wanted was to develop one while on this diet.  Touch wood so far so good.

One of the known “side effects” of this diet may be constipation. And I will admit that in the beginning yes I did have this issue, however my wife then read somewhere that dried pears seem to help with it, so I would then add two pears in yogurt (every 3-4 nights) just to stay regular. Seems to do the trick with me!

A word of warning….

When you start this way of eating the first 3 weeks will seem like hell. You WILL suffer from withdrawal symptoms (from wheat products) and you will feel slightly more irritable also.  It will feel like your body is screaming to have bowl of cereal, or slice of bread, or tiny block of chocolate. DO NOT GIVE IN! Set yourself a goal – YOU CAN DO IT!

Coming up… My medical results from the 13/02/2014… 

*Disclaimer – Please note that I am merely sharing my experience and story, and I do not condone anyone stopping whatever medication that they may be on.  Please see the About section for full disclaimer.

2014-2
25

Google Hangouts removed my Messaging app!

Category: Android | No Comments

Topic - Android So one of my favorite clients came into me the other day with an issue where the Messaging application icon was missing from her Samsung Galaxy S3, and oh yes can you please check to see if you can have Google Hangouts stop managing my SMS’s.

Now I knew that her phone is not rooted so actually deleting the system application would have been impossible, but I knew that Google Hangouts would have been the cause…

Open Hangouts, go to settings and untick the SMS option.  Done.

OK now I open the app drawer and low and behold no Messaging application… Hmmmm….

I did a quick Google search and found that it is most likely caused when the application is disabled.

I opened Settings, Application Manager and started scrolling and scrolling looking for Messaging…I eventually found it – right at the bottom of the list and as you can see below it was set to Disabled.

Opening it allows you the option to Enable it again. On enabling it Messaging was back in the app drawer! Check it out below…

2014-2
22

Error: “You have been logged on with Temporary profile”

Category: Windows / WHS | No Comments

Topic-Windows

Had a client the other day who was working fine one day and then the next day every time that she logged onto her computer she was greeted with a message that said “You have been logged on with a Temporary profile”.  All her files and folders were “missing” and she had to go to a client urgently…

This is what the message looked like:

error-tempprofile

I firstly logged on as the local Administrator and checked, yup her user account was listed in the Administrators group. Logged off and tried to logon again – same thing.

Renamed the profile folder found under C:\Users folder to 1. in front.  Logged off and tried to logon as her again – same temporary profile error.

I was like what the @#$%? So I did a quick Google search and it seems that it is a common issue., however not many people actually state how to fix it.  Thankfully I stumbled across Sysprobs.com and they had an article on this issue – http://www.sysprobs.com/fix-temporary-profile-windows-7  . The author lists a number of fixes however the on that worked for me was the registry fix. Check it out:

 

Why Windows 7 Loads with Temporary Profile?

Obviously, your profile (the files and folders located under C:\Users\user_name) is corrupted. There is another chance which is a delay in reading your profile files due to Antivirus scan or something else during boot up. Usually after typing your user name and password Windows tries to read and load your profile, if it gets corrupted or delay in reading, Windows will load with temp profile to give temporary access on computer.

How to Fix Windows 7 Temp Issue on Workgroup and Domain Environment

1) Before do anything, restart the computer 2 or 3 times to see whether it’s going back to your old correct profile. Go to next step if this doesn’t work.

2) Rename the temp profile registry and revert back the old registry settings for the correct profile. This method works most of the time for me in Workgroup and domain environment.

a)      Log in with temp profile.
b)      Start registry editor by typing regedit in find box of Windows 7.
c)      Navigate the following location.

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\ProfileList

tempprofile-windows7registry

 d)      You will see similar keys under profile list, but one with .bak, as shown below.

tempprofile-correctprofile

e)      The key with .bak is for the correct old profile. Currently your Windows 7 computer logged in with fresh (temporary) profile with same key. So, rename the new profile key ( which is not having.bak) and remove .bak from correct profile key. See below.

tempprofile-bakremoved

f)      That’s it. Log off and log in (or restart) with your user name and password. You must get your correct profile with icons and profile settings back in Windows 7, if you are lucky enough.

Well I guess I was very lucky! Better go buy that Lotto Ticket!

(thanks to Sysprobs.com for the fix and the captures above – check out the site)

2014-2
20

Replacing Windows System Files Live

Category: Windows / WHS | No Comments

Topic-Windows

Recently I had the need to replace Windows system files manually, while Windows is running.  For those of you have tried this in the past you may know that it is easier said than done.  Windows protects these files and/or they may be in use and then the error you get is “Access Denied”.

After searching high and low for a solution I stumbled across a StackOverflow page that provided the solution – http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4443578/how-to-replace-locked-dll-was-inuse

Copying system dlls on Windows 7 (and Vista) is described in System File Checker tool article (in “Step2: If the System File Checker tool cannot repair a file”).

Here is a quick (almost copy&paste) solution to use in a batchfile:

REM you will need to change this :-) - the SOURCE and the DESTINATION
SET tmpset_SOURCE=c:\Temp\fileyouwanttoreplace.dll
SET tmpset_DEST=c:\Windows\SysWOW64\fileyouwanttoreplace.dll

REM copy and paste this straight to cmd:
takeown /f %tmpset_DEST%
icacls %tmpset_DEST% /GRANT %USERNAME%:F
copy %tmpset_SOURCE% %tmpset_DEST%

For those of you who want to understand what is happening above, lets break it down.

  1. Firstly the Source and the Destination variables are being set
  2. The “takeown” command is taking ownership of the destination file by force
  3. The “icacls” command is setting the permission of the destination file to the currently logged on user
  4. The copy command

It worked like a charm and this is something you want to keep in your “Admins Toolkit” 🙂

 

2014-2
18

LCHF Adventure begins…Exercise

Category: Diabetes, Health | No Comments

Topic - Health

OK so I had 3 months to get my HbA1c down or else my doctor was going to up my medication dosage.

My wife and I like I last said, discussed the possibility of me going on this LCHF (Low Carb High Fat) diet, and we decided to give it our best shot. I must say thank you once again to my wife for all her support that she gave – without it I would not actually be blogging about this now.

OK action plan – Number 1 – Exercise. Now I am the first one to say that I would rather be the one watching the sport than actually taking part in it. But I had to start somewhere.  Well I set my alarm clock to 05h00 for the next morning. Got my tracksuit pants and walking shoes ready. Got my HTC Desire cellphone ready (had not used it in about 8 months) that I could use to stream a radio station (using TuneIn Radio) while walking. I was ready!  The next morning I forced myself out of bed.  My body screamed “no you are crazy get back into that bed” but my will power said “if you don’t do it today you will never do it”. I huffed and puffed for 2km around my neighbourhood – walking. When I got home I felt strangely OK…in fact the rest of the day I actually felt good and full of energy.

The next morning I decided that I should start keeping track of my progress and speed.  I did a search in the Google Play Store and found that Google MyTracks would fit the bill perfectly for me. Again I noticed that strangely I felt actually great that day also. Hmmm…maybe this walking thing was actually good…

A week later my wife decided to join me on the walk. I must say although I was not longer listening to streaming radio, it was much better to be able to have 20 minutes to adult talk time with her.

Using MyTracks it started showing me that I was actually starting to improve on my overall time and speed.  This in turn made me WANT to actually do better.  My wife bought me some 4kg dumbells and I started walking with it. This felt great!

Coming Up… Food…

*Disclaimer – Please note that I am merely sharing my experience and story, and I do not condone anyone stopping whatever medication that they may be on.  Please see the About section for full disclaimer.

2014-2
16

Diabetes – What If…?

Category: Diabetes, Health | No Comments

Topic - Health What if Diabetes could be reversed? Would one be willing to do whatever it takes to stop having to take tablets and insulin injections? At what stage would the cost outweigh the benefit? Is there even a “cure” or way to reverse it, or is one doomed to live with it for the rest of your life with it once you have it? What even causes diabetes?

As a diabetic for 12 years these thoughts often have went thru my mind. Here I was at the age of 36 with a disease that was slowly “rusting”  me from inside. Weighing in at 155kg and wearing a 3XL T-Shirt, I was comfortable with myself but knew that I had to do something.

I belong to the CDE, and during my biannual visit with my doctor to measure the progress, she said that it was not good.  My HbA1c readings had gone up from the last time and even though she had moved me from Lantus to NovaMix (twice a day) it seemed that I would have to start increasing my dosage. That was the last thing that I wanted to hear.  Yes I had “cheated” a few times eating a slice or two of cake, but man I was shattered to hear that I would have to start injecting before each meal now… I was shell shocked.  When leaving the doctor I asked her to hold off on the increase of meds and to just give me 3 months to see if I could get back on track – she agreed and we made a follow up appointment in Feb 2014.

I kept thinking to myself – how are you going to get back on track (especially over the festive season) and show the doctor you can get your disease under control. A few days later I was paging thru the weekly magazine that my wife buys (Huisgenoot) and in it was an article about a guy by the name of Billy Tosh. It read that he was 159kg and a diabetic. He went on diet and 7 months later he lost 84kg and heres the best part… NO LONGER TAKING DIABETES MEDICATION.  That made me stop and think “How is this possible?”

It seems that Billy heard about a Professor Tim Noakes and his “HIGH FAT, LOW CARB” diet.  High Fat? How the hell is this possible?  We are told from when we are young that fat is bad – always trim the skin of the chicken, always cut the fat off the meat – how can he be promoting HIGH FAT? Low carbs – well that sort of makes sense as it is a known that if you cut out things like bread and potatoes from your diet then you actually start losing weight.

I started doing some research, and when I say research I really mean using up a few gigs of data reading up about this LCHF (Low Carb, High Fat) diet.  I can across a website called the dietdoctor.com where the author has an explaination for beginners on LCHF. What I was reading there actually made sense! I discussed it with my wife, who was VERY supportive.  I had 3 months to get into shape and somehow lower my HbA1c, if there was one method that would give me a fighting chance it would this diet. But I would have to be strict.

And so the HFLC adventure began at the end of November 2013…stay tuned to find out about my progress.

*Disclaimer – Please note that I am merely sharing my experience and story, and I do not condone anyone stopping whatever medication that they may be on.  Please see the About section for full disclaimer.