The Sugar Diaries: Type II Diabetes and Going Cold Turkey

Technically, Day 9 is coming to a close on my current abstention from refined sugar and artificial sweetener.  This effort is more than a week old, and most would say that the hardest part is over.  For me, the initial pangs and cravings aren’t the most difficult aspect of this endeavor.  For me, the hardest work will be in keeping it up, maintaining the habit, and resisting the temptations yet to come. In light of that, I thought I’d begin a new blog thread about my experiences.  I’d also like to offer information for those who are considering it, whether you suffer from Diabetes or not.

 

The Drug Your Body Wants

As a species, we’re wired to seek out substances our body needs that are scarce in the natural environment.  Salt, fat, and sugar are the three things your brain has a constant BOLO listed for, because, when we were coming along, these were things not regularly in abundance.  Now, however, you see all three conveniently grouped together, in a superabundant supply, everywhere you look.  This has posed some major problems for our kidneys and liver, our cardiovascular system, and a number of other other vital parts of our physical bodies.  The glut is real.

I remember someone telling me that artificial sweetener didn’t harm anyone.  I have mixed feelings about that, but they aren’t what you think.  Do they cause cancer?  Hm.  The data to date are inconclusive about that, and human tests are scarce.  Do they do other things that we should keep an eye on?  Absolutely.  One of these is very important, but first, let’s talk about the brain’s reward system.

Every time you press the sugar lever, your brain rewards you by giving you a bump of dopamine, among other things.  “Good hairless ape.  That’s right.  Do your drugs.”  Drugs?  Absolutely.  Not only is sugar addictive, in part because we are wired to look for it–honey, fruit, some grubs and insects, flowers–but because, in this supersaturated sugar landscape of modern life, we have become dopamine addicts.  And those feel-good chemicals made in-house are often stimulated to make up for deficiencies in our emotional and professional lives.

It’s Not Directly About the Insulin

Artificial sweetener does not stimulate your body to dump insulin into your bloodstream.  This is a myth.  In fact, it doesn’t actually register on your brain’s dopamine dispensary radar.  It’s not real. It doesn’t exist in nature.  Its sweetness is an illusion.  You’d get as much reaction from licking a battery in terms of dopamine and insulin response.  What it does do is much worse than the myth, at least from my perspective.

You eat these foods–which are nutrient deserts in your mouth–lots of flavor, but very little in the way of actual substance, since sugar free, fat free, and reduced calorie tend to flock together.  Your brain feels cheated, and gives you very little in the way of reimbursement for that Diet Coke.  The drug addict just under the surface of your consciousness starts hurting for it.  It needs its fix.  Wasn’t sugary sweetness just here…?

WHERE’S MY DRUG!?! I WANT MY DRUG! YOU LIED TO ME!

The Horseman, Famine

Cue hunger, even if you just think you ate a snacky cake/diet snack/fat-free sugar-free chemical cookie.  You will respond to it.  You will heed it.  Your will is nothing in the face of this.  So you eat.  And eat. And eat.  And until you consume the right food that your inner drug addict wants, you’ll still be hungry.  Lest you assume that this is simple appetite, I can assure you, it’s not.

Your body is waging chemical warfare on you as revenge for the fact that you’ve cheated it and fed it a nutrient vacuum.  By the time a Diabetic has hit the appropriate lever in the fridge, at the drive-thru, in the grocery store parking lot, they’ve been driven into a semi-hysterical fury and mistakes have been made.  Your body is now sated, but it took you 3,500 calories to feed it the thing it wanted.  That’s one of the big reasons I stay away from artificial sweets–the other has to do with gut flora, but that’s another story for another day.

 

Diabetic Relativity and Sugar

People who don’t have issues with insulin production or receptivity–type I and II Diabetes–will simply have to shoulder through the first couple of weeks and tough it out.  No big deal, apart from the psychological and physical freak show that the cravings will make of them occasionally.  However, if you’re like me–type II–there are a few additional things to be kept firmly in mind.

First, everyone and their other brother Daryl think that all Diabetes are the same.  They aren’t.  Even within a type group, there’s a lot of variation and wiggle room.  For instance, when you have uncontrolled Type II, “low” blood sugar is incredibly relative, because your body has gotten used to dealing with insane blood glucose levels all the time.  For example:

Let’s say your fasting level is 140, the norm being around 70. You eat, it spikes and comes down a bit, but is still over 200 for your 2-hour reading, when the norm is generally between 100-120.  For your body, that’s become “normal.” If your blood sugar troughs and you feel like death warmed over, with all the horror story symptoms of low blood glucose, it could still read around 100.  That doesn’t change how it feels.

You see, Diabetes is something your body works around.  That doesn’t mean you’re healthy, but your body’s job is to keep you moving around, even if it has to do some serious duct tape and zip ties to get it done.  While you’re still walking around eating ho-dinkies and guzzling Coca-Cola, your body is falling apart.  You feel a bit unwell, but you push through.  It’s nothing compared to the agony of deprivation that a diet represents, you rationalize.  Please stop lying to yourselves.  I know what you’re doing.  I did it for years.

When you decide it’s time to take your destiny in hand and abandon the Good Ship Lollypop like a fucking plague rat, here are a few things to keep in mind.  I can only speak from experience of Type II.  Type I individuals should follow what they know about their needs and the requirements of insulin dependent diabetes.

• Watch your blood glucose levels like a hawk.  Part of Type II is glucose instability, not just a really high number.  When you eschew the sugar teat, you’re going to feel it.  The first time I did this, I lived alone.  Waking and not knowing why, feeling the world was caving in on me and having to crawl into the kitchen because I couldn’t stand was terrifying.  My blood glucose levels tested around 40, and that was immediately after I sucked down some honey.  So, keep glucose tabs or a honey bear handy.  Keep your test supplies easy to hand and get into the habit of testing more often.
• Keep a record, along with your levels, the time you tested, what you’re eating, and how you feel.  Trust me, it seems like a pain in the ass, but this log will be your best friend when it comes to assessing what’s working and what isn’t.  It will also help you to identify potential foods that you should avoid or eat more of, based on these records.  There’s all manner of processed foods that are full of high fructose corn syrup–like pizza, packaged bread, or sliced meat.  Get a nasty spike from that sandwich? Look at the ingredients and figure out why.
• Exercise.  Anything more than you normally do, even an extra flight of stairs or walking the dog to the mailbox, is better than doing nothing.  Start small, keep it manageable, but do it every day.  Every. Damned. Day.  And add intensity or duration as you become used to it.  This, believe it or not, is one of the big things that I noticed helped me to stabilize my glucose levels relatively quickly.  I still had highs and lows, but they were nowhere near as extreme, and I often tested in the range of Normal People after a while.
• Keep snacks handy, but try to avoid processed foods, if possible.  Some good things that I found worked for me where:
  • Tree nuts or peanuts
  • Wasabe peas
  • Unhulled, roasted pumpkin seeds
  • Sunflower seeds
  • Berries
  • Melon cubes
  • Apples, pears, oranges, and ruby red grapefruits (seasonally)
  • Peanut butter
  • Carrot and celery sticks, kept in a mug of water in the fridge
  • Hummus (I like roasted garlic or super spicy, but there are other flavors.)
  • Blue corn chips or any that are less processed
  • Falafel chips (a little pricy, but a few will do for a snack.)
  • Chicken salad (made at home, prepped and ready to be eaten on a whim)
  • Raw honey (for emergencies)

Now this is by no means a comprehensive list, nor is it intended to be a dictate.  You should find the best snacks for your budget, needs, and preferences.  But do try to skew towards the less processed whole foods, as opposed to pre-packaged snacks.  What matters is ready availability of snackage, because you are going to feel like someone scooped out your innards with a spoon–hollow as a pinata, and ravenous nearly all the time at first.  This is your body screaming for its drug.

Try to be strong, and monitor your glucose levels carefully.  Pace yourself when snacking, so you don’t eat 3,000 calories of healthy snacks.  That’s not healthy, and your blood sugar will spike.  Another reason to watch your levels is that your liver stores reserves of sugar that your body wouldn’t process as glycogen.  For those with advanced and untreated diabetes, your liver also looks like fois gras–full of fatty inclusions, precisely because of all that sugar.  As you clean up your diet, your liver is going to dump those reserves faster than China in a fit of pique can dump their U.S. Dollars.  It’s ultimately a good thing, but the process itself makes for a bit of a glucose roller coaster at times.

Alright.  I think that’s more than enough for now.  I’ll be back another night, chattering about my experience with this particular sugar cleanse.

 

 

From Yuck to Yum and Vice Versa: The Role of Experience in the Concept of Tastes

I remember reading an anecdote by a linguist who thought that, rather than “Mom” or “Dad,” one of the first words invented might have been more akin to “yuck.”  While I wouldn’t begin to be able to test that, this silly story may have more sense than is at first apparent.  Parental names often imply cultural concepts of relatedness, which, as we know, can shift quite a bit depending on when and where you’re looking.  The concept of wanting to teach children when something should be spit out, due to toxicity or other factors, might have a bit more durability, hence–“yuck” or some very similar sound of violent rejection.

Behold, the Picky Eater

But “yuck” has undergone some serious elaboration since we moved beyond our evolutionary environment.  Such living conditions would have undoubtedly have possessed a richer and more varied palette of odors and flavors, as well as a proximity to these sensory data that many modern Western cultures would find unsavory.  “Yuck” has been watered down considerably, and become the favorite word of picky eaters everywhere.

I was a finicky eater as a child, and today, I still am to some extent.  What has changed?  At one time, I refused to eat a number of foods that register high on the bitter scale–including many vegetables.  Over the past decade or two, I’ve made a decided effort to include many of these foods in my daily diet, with quite a bit of success.  I discovered that it wasn’t the food itself I disdained, but often the method of preparation.

I grew up thinking I would always hate squash.  To this day, I find the way my mother prepares it to be utterly revolting–grotesquely overcooked with onions, and loaded with butter and salt.  The final product resembles a cross between scrambled gray matter and mucus, with a smell that advertizes the high level of sulfurous compounds possessed by the vegetable.  It took a wonderful Italian dish with lightly sauteed squash to convince me otherwise, and today, I quite enjoy it.  This is the same case for many other foods I disdained in childhood–cooked carrots, sweet potatoes, cabbage, collards and other greens, spinach, and others.  It was a matter of preparation, not the food itself.

 

The Role of Bitterness

Bitterness is often a hallmark of toxicity, and we are wired as children to be somewhat averse to it until we learn what is safe to eat, usually through exposure and observing our kin group.  Check out this relatively easy to absorb article based on research, which explains why children may reject bitter foods {http://www.parentingscience.com/picky-eaters.html/}.  It touches upon both a cultural reticence to encourage children to eat more bitter foods by pairing them with pleasurable and known flavors as well as a predisposition for some individuals to be more sensitive to bitter flavors than others in their kin group.  This is an interesting article that delves into the genetic roots of picky eating, which you might also enjoy. {http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/why-are-you-picky-eater-blame-genes-brains-and-breast-milk-180953456/?no-ist}

From my personal experience, I still have a very strong reaction to bitterness in food.  Perhaps what I’ve found most effective in shifting my preferences is the pairing of flavors.  While the article linked above suggests pairing bitter with sweet, I have always found that umami–a flavor sensation that coresponds with rich meaty or cheesy flavors evinced by glutamates–spicy, and salty were more suited to creating a pleasing sensation with bitter foods.  Over the years, I have come to enjoy a variety of foods that no one who knew me as a child would ever believe I could.

 

Coming of Age in the Land of Bland

I grew up in a rather typical and traditional Southern household.  Please read that: Salt Is the Family Seasoning.  I would argue that taste is far more determined by cultural experience than biology, and I don’t think many would disagree with me.  Having returned to the South after living somewhere else for years, I see more clearly the utter lack of flavor in many of the foods I took for granted as a child and young adult.  The daily diet is often full of fat, sugar, and salt.

While we are biologically wired to seek out these substances because they are infrequent in the natural landscape in which we evolved, we’re also seeing the disastrous impacts of ready access to unlimited supplies of them.  That’s another topic for another day.  What I should say is that seasoning in the land of my birth is…limited and unadventurous.  Because I have experience, not simply as a tourist but as a resident, of other cultural styles of food preparation, my taste differs sharply from that of my parents and relatives.

I favor spicy, bitter, savory flavors, a diet rich in vegetables and fruits, and a more pronounced preference for alternative protein sources.  Not that I don’t enjoy animal protein, but I discovered the joys of hummus, beans, and the use of complimentary proteins in cuisine while I was elsewhere.  What I have discovered upon returning is a culture that places too much value on a limited range of vegetables, which are almost always overcooked and oversalted.  There is an embarrassment of starch and fat in most dishes, and the importance of beef, pork, or chicken is overstated.

 

I will never be happy to eat Southern food that I haven’t fooled around with myself–added spices, cut the cooking time and salt, explored alternate cooking methods and preparation styles.  I dream of tamales and tagines, pho and foods hot from the tandoori, of the hole-in-the-wall Thai place that knew me as the “Crying Blood Lady,” and that yes, I really did want it “Thai Hot.”

Sure, there are some places in Atlanta where you can order food with more authentic flavors–potent, pungent, spicy, clean, or tangy.  But they are developments of the recent past.  Suburbia hasn’t really caught up yet, with its watered down, blanded-out interpretations of other cuisines.  Travel–or more aptly, a voluntary exile–has spoiled my nostalgia of the palate, and I’m glad it did.

By pushing myself to experience other cultural concepts of “Yum,” I shifted my own.  Yes, there are still certain dishes from childhood that will remain in my category of favorites, but my palate is far more elaborate than that of my parents.  Hence, my curiosity about different ways of preparing food, the cultures that offer them, and a desire to understand why certain foods garner important attention in some places and not others shapes my appreciation of cultural differences, especially those connected to food, feeding, and the close environment of the home.  That, too, is another subject for another day.