Skip to main content

I Eat Sugar, They Eat Sugar, Why Can't You?

The polite brush-off answer: because I'm not you or them.

Answers that require more thought:

Metabolism doesn't improve with age. I could eat crap, or have nothing but a bun or soda for lunch, when I was nineteen and it didn't bother me. Much. Most people that age can say the same. Now that I'm 44, I usually can't fast and more than a little carb makes me tired and hungry and gives me a stomach ache. A high-nutrient, low-carb diet and three meals/snacks a day is my way of dealing with it.

Genes. I'm from a family full of diabetes and hypoglycemia and used to have most of the symptoms of hypoglycemia listed in Dr. Atkins' Diet Revolution. Expecting someone like me to do well on a "balanced diet" (i.e., lots of starch, little meat) of three meals a day is like putting gasoline in a diesel truck and wondering what's wrong.

Natural and Artificial Selection. Richard Dawkins has written about animal species undergoing natural selection within a few generations of living in new conditions. Why would humans be different? In isolated places where a high-carb diet is all that's available, people who can't tolerate such a diet from a young age are winnowed out.

Culture. If you're hunting antelope or digging up and carrying thirty pounds of roots all day, every day, like the Hadza (see Catching Fire by Richard Wrangham), you can probably get away with more starch and sugar in your diet than a suburban desk jockey. If you have to walk half a mile to the train station, pay dearly for food, and pack groceries and everything else up three flights of stairs to an expensive little apartment, you can probably get away with more Big Gulps than a New Jersey housewife, and might not be eating as much food.

Some people care more than others. Yes, I know diabetics who eat "normally" and enjoy crap in "moderation." They don't have any tricks--they're covering the carbs with medication, burning some excess blood sugar off with exercise, or having high blood sugar. Some of us know people who get drunk every night but go to work every morning. But just because you can doesn't mean you should.

Comments

tess said…
ALL very good responses (depending upon the recipient)! One more that occurs to me more and more as time goes by: i just don't LIKE it anymore! Other people's treats are usually not TREATS to those of us who use butter and cream and good-quality chocolate.
Lori Miller said…
Sad to say, I'd be face down in the chocolate cake if I could get away with it. But I never even think about Coke anymore (quit twice in 2007) and never liked most pastries that much. A lot of what passes for candy is just gross.
Anonymous said…
I've learned over the years to never discuss diet with anyone! A response that will shut most people up is 'it gives me gas'.
Which is actually true anyway.
(TMI?)
Lori Miller said…
Ha! At least you're warning them.

Too much carb gives my dog enough gas to wake me up.
I find now that if I do eat more carbs than normal the result can be a bad head and feeling grotty, I can do without it.

All the best Jan
Lori Miller said…
And yet some people call carbage "fun food." Too much of it is about as much fun as an endoscopy in my book.
Galina L. said…
Conveniently for explanations purposes, I have migraines as an excuse for my sometimes socially awkward diet. I indeed feel wrong in my head after eating sugar or even "safe starches".
Lori Miller said…
Suffering with a migraine is a high price to pay for following the crowd.

Popular posts from this blog

Not Only Cheaper, But Easier

A while back, I wrote about saving money on break time coffee and snacks. I haven't done very well putting it into practice. But a post by James Clear today got me thinking about it again: Warren Buffett uses a two-list system to prioritize things. Check it out --and follow the instructions. Using Buffett's two-list system, two of the goals I ended up with were taking care of myself and saving $400 more per month than I already am. As I said, I've been wanting to save money, and the system made me really focus on this. I came up with 11 money-saving ideas, six of which had to do with food. Buying hamburger in bulk. Ranch Foods Direct sells one-pound packages of 80% lean pastured ground beef in bundles of 20 for a lot less than Whole Foods. Sprouts only carries super-lean beef that's grass-fed, and it's more expensive, too.  Not driving to Whole Foods. Whole Foods is out of my way, and saving a weekly trip saves gas. Coffee at home, tea at work. Tea is fr...

Blog Lineup Change

Bye-bye, Fathead. I've enjoyed the blog, but can't endorse the high-fat, high-carb Perfect Health Diet that somehow makes so much sense to some otherwise bright people. An astrophysicist makes some rookie mistakes on a LC diet, misdiagnoses them, makes up "glucose deficiency," and creates a diet that's been shown in intervention studies to increase small LDL, which can lead to heart disease. A computer programmer believes in the diet and doesn't seem eager to refute it because, perhaps, scientists are freakin' liars and while he's good at spotting logical inconsistencies, lacks some intermediate knowledge of human biology. To Tom's credit, he says it's not the right diet for everyone, but given the truckload of food that has to be prepared and eaten, impracticality of following it while traveling (or even not traveling), and unsuitability for FODMAPs sufferers, diabetics and anyone prone to heart disease (i.e., much of the population), I'm...

Palpitations Gone with Iron

Thanks to my internet friend Larcana, who alerted me to the connection between iron deficiency and palpitations, I doubled down on my iron supplements and, for good measure, washed them down with Emergen-C. It's a cold medicine with a mega-dose of vitamin C, plus B vitamins and minerals. I don't think vitamin C does anything for a cold (a friend bought the stuff and left it at my house the last time she visited), but vitamin C does help iron absorption. After doubling up on iron in the last three days, I feel back to normal. (I'd already been taking quite a bit of magnesium and potassium, so I probably had sufficient levels of those.) How did I get so low on iron? Maybe it was too many Quest bars instead of red meat when I had odd cravings during my dental infection recently. Maybe because it's too hard to find liver at the grocery store and I haven't eaten much of it lately. Maybe the antibiotics damaged my intestines . And apparently, I'm a heavy bleeder . ...

Getting Over Palpitations

Note to new readers: please note I'm not a health care provider and have no medical training. If you have heart palpitations, I have no idea whether the following will work for you. Over the past several days, I've had a rough time with heart palpitations and feeling physically jittery. I was wondering if I was going to turn into one of those people who can't sit still. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but it would be a major lifestyle change. Kidding aside, something wasn't right and I really needed to get back to normal. I tried popping potassium pills like candy. I ate more. I doubled up on my iron dose. I went to yoga and even got on the treadmill at 6 AM yesterday. I tried the nuclear option of eating more carbs to stop peeing away minerals. Most of these things helped, but the problem kept coming back. A comment from Galina made me look up epinephrine, one of the drugs my surgeon used to anesthetize me Friday. First, the assistant at the surge...

My Long-Term Experience Eating Safe (and Other) Starches

Years ago, before the Perfect Health Diet came out, I followed a program that involved eating quite a bit "safe starch." It was called Body for Life. It involved eating six small servings of carbohydrate along with six small servings of protein, plus two servings of fibrous vegetables per day. (A serving was the size of your fist or the palm of your hand.) There were six workouts a week (three weightlifting, three cardio) and one free day every week where you ate whatever you wanted and didn't exercise. In all fairness, these two programs are different: BFL allows certain grains, legumes and low-fat dairy and discourages fat. It doesn't call for a wheelbarrow full of vegetation. Nevertheless, my experience eating lots of fruit and lots of starch is relevant to the PHD because the amount and type of digestible carbohydrates are similar, and for the first few years, I didn't eat wheat except on free days. At first on BFL, I felt great. Before, I was continually...