Skip to main content

Avoiding Sugar: Lessons from a Diabetic in a Sugar Shack

"It's the most fattening time of the year." -Bob Rivers

My mother enjoys telling people she lives in a crack house. That's true, metaphorically speaking: she has a raging case of diabetes and a husband who lives on sweets and starch and offers them to her every day. (He's diabetic too--he just doesn't care.)

The junk food temptations people deal with at holidays are part of everyday life for my mother. Her stakes are high: an average person might gain ten or fifteen pounds over a month of indulgence, but two bites of healthywholegrainoatmeal sends my mom's blood sugar over 200--the definition of diabetes. Blood sugars at that level can cause tissue and organ damage.

I asked Mom what her strategies were for resisting starchy food--which she loves. Her answer:

I just don't eat it.

Why not?

It raises my blood sugar.

When?

About an hour later.

What happens?

I don't feel good. I get nervous and shaky and I can't write.

I've seen my mother when her blood sugar is jacked up. She gets so tired she can't stay awake. Since she's the bookkeeper and writes all the Christmas cards in the household, and does these things by hand, it's not good if she can't write.

Any other strategies?

I have some sugar-free candy, and I eat cereal about three times a year.

Breakfast cereal is the food she misses most.

A few other observations: my mother cut way back on the carbs because she was desperate to get well. She was in a rehab center for back surgery and ensuing complications from neglect and an assault. She'd been there so long she started to forget what her own house looked like. Laying off the carbs brought her fasting blood sugar from the mid-200s to the low 100s. (Yes, that was her fasting blood sugar after she came home and went on a carbohydrate bender. Her own records show some fasting blood sugars in the 300s. Her blood sugar level takes a long time to come down, just like mine.)

Even if you don't have diabetes, it's not a bad idea to avoid overindulging. I've noticed that even healthy young people tend to get tired an hour or two after a carby meal. Just today, the building's management had a free chocolate fest in the lobby at 2:00. Most of my coworkers rushed down there like--well, like there was free chocolate in the lobby. Just over an hour later, one of them said "God, I'm so tired." Someone else said she didn't feel good. (Does that sound familiar--feeling lousy and tired an hour after eating a bunch of sugar?) I didn't go to the chocolatorium because I knew my self control would have folded and I'd have felt lousy along with them.

A strategy I used to avoid the chocolate orgy was to bring a big lunch. I was full from chicken, veg with ranch dip, cheese and olives and wasn't hungry for dessert.

Comments

Anonymous said…
One of my co-workers fell to sleep at his desk 2 hours after lunch several times (a norwegian lunch is typically juice or milk + 2-4 slices of bread with butter and ham or cheese) ... :D
Lori Miller said…
I used to fall asleep in afternoon classes all the time.

Popular posts from this blog

An Objective Book about Other Childhood Vaccines

Today's decision by the CDC to add COVID shots to the schedule of childhood vaccines has some people concerned about the rest of the vaccines on the schedule. Contrary to fact-checker claims, adding COVID shots to the schedule means children will be required in about a dozen states to get a COVID shot to attend public school. Indiana isn't one of them--our childhood vaccination law doesn't mention the CDC and such a requirement could run afoul of our ban on COVID vaccine passports. But even freewheeling Indiana has some vaccine requirements and this kerfuffle has people wondering how safe those vaccines are.  There's a book called Vaccines: Truth, Lies and Controversy  by Peter C. Gotzsche, DrMedSci and co-founder of the Cochrane Collaboration, about the safety and efficacy of all those vaccines, including COVID and others. Cochrane was founded to "to organise medical research findings to facilitate evidence-based choices about health interventions involving healt

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

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

This Just In: Yogurt Doesn't Improve Health

A recent study from Spain finds "In comparison with people that did not eat yogurt, those who ate this dairy product regularly did not display any significant improvement in their score on the physical component of quality of life, and although there was a slight improvement mentally, this was not statistically significant," states López-García. Most yogurt is pretty much pudding with a little bacteria . Pudding is a sugar bomb. Hard to believe the stuff doesn't improve health outcomes, isn't it? But as usual, researchers are calling for...more research. "For future research more specific instruments must be used which may increase the probability of finding a potential benefit of this food."

1972: Carole King, M*A*S*H and...Food for 2014?

I feel well enough to try Atkins induction again. The palpitations are gone, even without taking potassium. My energy level is back to normal--no more trucking on the treadmill early in the morning  to burn off nervous energy or emergency meat, cheese and mineral water stops after yoga. It's back to lounging around to Chopin and Debussy in the morning and stopping at the wine bar for pleasure. I'm using the original Atkins book: Dr. Atkins' Diet Revolution from 1972. While looking in the book for a way to make gelatin (which is allowed on induction, but Jello(TM) and products like it have questionable ingredients), I felt the earth move under my feet : those recipes from 42 years ago look delicious and they're mostly real food. It makes sense, though: the cooks who wrote the recipes probably didn't have had a palette used to low-fat food full of added sugar or a bag of tricks to make low-fat food edible. Anyone who writes a recipe called "Cottage Cheese and