My daughter is visiting from Florida and I asked her what I could cook that would feel “momsy” and she requested lasagne. Mr. GT doesn’t eat many desserts but he can’t pass up a profiterole (cream puff) so I made those for dessert.

I can hear you say, “GT, that’s gonna bring on a gallstone attack,” now, — but where were you when I was cooking??

The ambulance arrived at about midnight and I arrived at the hospital about 1:30. Along the way the combination of the nitrous oxide and the bumpy ride knocked the stone back into my gall bladder and when I got to the hospital I was fine.

The nurse admitted me and told me to have a nice rest and I could go home in the morning. Nice rest, ha! There was a really old lady across the hall that moaned and groaned all night and made a noise like she was hacking up her left foot all night long.

The doctor came in at 7:30am and thanked me for not calling him in at 1:30 and I asked if I could go home. “Yes, but don’t eat any more lasagne til you have surgery,” he said.

So I didn’t have any leftovers and I didn’t have the profiterole I was lusting for. I had a small tub of yoghurt instead. I promise it didn’t taste as good as I knew the dessert would taste but I felt more righteous.

Since drinking spinach juice a few times a day, my husband doesn’t need any medication for diabetes.  He tests his sugar and he’s always around 6 (108).   Mine is a bit higher than that because he doesn’t like sweets.  I’m an American first and can’t pass up a small piece of something sweet after a meal.  Last night it was a Weightwatchers apple bar.

If you have type 2 diabetes and you’re not a sweetaholic, try spinach juice.  It’s better than taking medicine!  I’m taking 1/12th the amount of Metformin that I was taking before being banded, so I’m really pleased.  I was down to 1/6th before I started drinking the juice.  Maybe I’ll get to the point where spinach juice does the trick.  Fingers crossed!

Spinach. I checked my sugar level first thing this morning and then drank spinach and carrot juice and my level dropped a few points but not significantly.   I was a bit apprehensive about drinking green juice but I needed to know.  It turns out that spinach and carrot juice is quite tasty.  I think it takes a lot like the smell of freshly cut grass but sweeter because of the carrots.  I could drink that every day.  Let’s hope it is what I’m looking for.

As any type 2 diabetic will tell you, when you most want to test, that’s when you run out of little electrode strips. So I can’t test til I go to the pharmacy.

My daughter arrives in New Zealand today from Orlando. I haven’t seen her for a year so we have a lot of catching up to do. I’m still curious about what lowered my sugar so I’ll keep testing. I’ll pick up the strips at the pharmacy on the way to the airport this morning.

I’ll keep you posted! Anything not to have to take drugs would be such an improvement on my life. I hate taking medicine.

Something in the juiced concoction I made the other day lowered our blood sugar but damned if we can figure it out.  I haven’t given up yet but I know it’s not carrots or red cabbage or feijoas.  I still have a few more to isolate and then it has to be the combination.

I didn’t write down what I had in there or the quantity so it will be a hunt and peck operation for a while I suspect!

Many of us who are overweight or obese confuse what a proper portion size is. We go to restaurants (and not just the ones that offer super-size) and think that what is on our plate is what we should be eating. I think a lot of blame goes to the joints that think offering 2 or 3 serving sizes is the way to keep customers coming back.

My son used to run restaurants in the Southern US for quite a few years and I would always ask him why the portions were so huge. People can’t eat that much, I’d tell him. His reply was always the same.

“If I don’t give them more than they can eat, they’ll go to my competitor. They want more than they can eat so they can take some home,” he said.

Maybe he’s right, maybe the restaurants are only providing what their customers seem to want. To hell with their health. Where’s it going to end?

I’ll never forget going to Las Vegas for a conference several years ago and my husband and I went to a famous steak place and I ordered prime rib. As an American living in Australia – prime rib just doesn’t exist unless you cook it yourself, so it was a real treat for me. Imagine the surprise when my dinner arrived and the prime rib was nearly 2 1/2 inches thick and didn’t fit on a platter without hanging over on one side. A platter! I like beef but I’ve always eaten just a small portion of meat and porked it on by eating lots of veggies AND dessert.

I’m learning and it really is a learning exercise to change your perception of what a portion size should be for you. I say it that way because I’m barely 5′ tall, so my portion size is always going to be tiny. Sad.

First of all, let me lay the framework for what’s going on in my life. After being type 2 diabetic with high blood pressure, I had a gastric band put on my stomach in early November 2007. I lost around 2 kilograms a week which was more fat than my liver could process so it stored it inside itself and it’s causing some problems. I also have gallstones which I have been told is quite normal when losing a lot of weight in a short period of time.

Doctors told me to eat a lot of raw veggies so I decided to buy a juicer. I wrote the other day about how tasty some of the juice was but I had no idea whether it was doing me any good or not. Last night I found out that it was. Sad thing is, I don’t know which veggie did all the work! I’ll work on identifying which veggie juice worked its magic on me and let you know.

I juiced carrots, celery, red cabbage, parsnip, pea shoots, beets, apple, ginger and zucchini. I had a glass before dinner that I cooked for some friends who are visiting from Australia. We had steak on the bbq, roasted kumara, white potatoes and steamed broccoli. For dessert we had a kiwi favorite – pavlova with whipped cream, kiwifruit and mango. I figured I’d better test my glucose level because it would be off the planet.

It wasn’t

It was 5.5 mmol – for Americans that’s 117. I had eaten starchy potatoes AND pavlova and my sugar was 5.5 with NO drugs. That’s not diabetic! A reading of 6 is normal and a reading of 8 up to 2 hours after eating is still considered OK. How cool is that?

My husband just rolled his eyes and said, “right…” So I asked him to have some juice and sure enough, he had a low reading on his test when it should have been much much higher.

Now if I just knew which veggie to give the credit to I’d be much happier. I’ll sort it out though. It’s really got my curiosity going a million miles an hour!

If you’ve been reading my blog you know that because I’ve lost so much weight so fast I have a bit of a liver problem. The doctors have said no red meat, no dairy and stick to low fat. So I got a masticating juicer and the first few I tried were like eating liquid poop. Not so today!

I put 8 carrots, 2 apples, 1 pear and a small knob of ginger in that thing and it was devine. I could live on that stuff.

I read somewhere on the net yesterday that I shouldn’t mix fruits and vegetables when I make juice. Something in my brain started to whirr because I would eat a fruit and a vegetable together, no problem. Why would juicing it make a difference? I don’t care if it does make a difference – getting a juice that’s tasty and healthy to drink is the top order of the day around here.

Tomorrow I’m going to try some fruit that I’ve never seen before moving to New Zealand. I’ll juice up some tamarillos and some feijoas. I tasted a tamarillo the other day and it was as sour as anything I’ve eaten in the past so I’ll put something yummy with it. With a taste like that it’s got to be good for me.

Recently I’ve been having some stomach discomfort in the middle of the night and I figured it was that I’d eaten more than I should and I was overfull and maybe it was tugging at the band. Ok, I didn’t have a clue but I assumed I was responsible. Last Thursday morning about 2am it started again. I was doubled over in pain and thought.. “wait a minute.. I didn’t overeat.”

When the pain didn’t go away in an hour or so I began to be concerned. Not only didn’t it go away, but it was getting worse. It got so bad that I asked my husband to call an ambulance. They arrived in about 30 minutes, took one look at me and said, “you need to come with us.”

I won’t bore you with all the details of going to the hospital, being transferred to another hospital, getting sent home, having it happen again, going back to the hospital, getting transferred to another hospital again and all to find out I had gallstones and need my gall bladder out. The problem was when I went to the hospital the first time, they tested my blood and then when I went back the next night, they tested it again. It turns out that I have a fatty liver and one doctor told me in his best technical terminology, “your liver function tests are off the planet.” Then he left with no explanation.

Next day a specialist came in and patted my leg and said that everyone with a gastric band should be told about fatty food and not losing too much weight too fast. When you get the band your liver copes just fine with the fats you’re eating but if you lose a lot of weight, your liver stores what it can’t process inside itself. Nobody said that to me. I’ve lost over 50 pounds since the first week in November and I should have lost no more than 25 and my liver would be fine. What to do?

Who knows? The best advice I could get was to not eat any red meat for at least 5 days and no more butter, cheese, cream or ice cream. I should eat as many raw vegetables and fruit as I can hold. It would be best if I juiced the veggies and fruit because I could get more nutrition that way.

So that’s what I’m doing. So far the veggie juice that I’ve crushed through this fancy dancy masticating juicer tastes like liquid shit but I’m drinking it and licking the glass. I’m being so good you’d think I was running for Ms. Lapband.

If you have a band and nobody has told you about liver problems or the propensity to get gallstones, listen up. Don’t lose more than a pound or two a week (less than a kilogram) and go lightly on saturated fat.

I’ve got 16.5 kilograms (36 pounds) to reach my goal. I can’t wait. I’m ready for new boobs and a tummy tuck but I can’t consider that until all the excess weight is off and my liver is stabilized.