Cake and Eat It Too - wait - "Cake"?

I enjoy all of the after effects from my eating well more than I ever enjoyed eating, and I enjoy eating well too.

Nothing New

I'm never hungry, eating the way I do.  One of the most telling and important indications of a person's diabetic tendency is hunger.  If you aren't hungry and do not have a tendency to overeat, it's a good sign.  Otherwise, better check your blood sugar.

I am not hungry because I get the insulin I need.  Artificially.  And of secondary yet very significant importance, I eat only high-value food.

Without insulin, 'super food only' would do me no good.  Insulin enables digestion, including that of sugars.  Without it, you have more than excess sugar that can't get digested, but also every other vitamin and nutrient.  Thus hunger.  Starvation is a better word for it. 

Before I understood it, and before I had enough insulin,  I ate till the needle pegged and then ate a lot more and then threw up every night.  The feeling of starvation never left, it was constant throughout every day.  For 8 years.

High blood sugar and the damage it does is only one side effect of "Sugar" Diabetes.  The general problem of the disease is seldom discussed.

Most people are Type II though, and I am pretty much Type I, I think.  My doctors were never interested in determining it for certain.  I don't know if it's exactly the same experience with hunger for Type II folks.  I expect it is though.  Type I is inadequate insulin, Type II is insulin resistance, so I would expect the effect to be similar, except that in the case of Type II, the person can reduce their resistance through exercise and diet.  A Type I person can exercise till the cows come home and eat perfectly and they will still starve and suffer sugar damage as much as if they had stayed home on the couch, to the degree that they are insulin deficient.

So based on just my experience, I am certain I am at least predominantly Type I.  Which makes sense because I never lived the life they say causes Type II.

The rare times that my sugar doesn't want to come down, I suspect are times when I am temporarily more Type II than usual, due to lack of exercise or whatever.  I take shot after shot after shot, and it does no good till I get back to normal.  Happens like once a year or whatever.

People notice that the body works overtime to accommodate less-than-perfect discipline, and not when they have had good discipline for a while.  When they've been disciplined and then suddenly fall off the wagon, they hit the road and the rocks a lot harder than when they have been less-than-perfect for a while, and do the same things.  Catches the system off-guard.  I notice it myself.

Milestone

I made a change a couple of weeks ago and have procrastinated posting it here.  I thought I better do it without delay now, in case it helps somebody.

I have practiced what I preach in this blog to varying degrees of strictness throughout my life.  Everybody who says "I will never eat ice cream again!" are going to have it again sometime, right?  So why not just be strict when you're strict, and have some ice cream sometimes, and then get strict again?

Well, I have been no different.

I have told myself stuff like, "Well, Buddy...I guess this is it.  This is how it's going to be from now on, I guess."  thinking that I was going to eat a certain ideal way from that moment till I die, and never have a sugar spike again.

But you know how it goes.  I have eaten lots of cake and ice cream since such moments.

But on the other hand, when I look at the advantages and disadvantages of perfect abstainance and having sugar that one time,  at least at the point where I am now, I am finding it easier to see that I really don't want to eat sugar ever again, if I can help it.

And as a 4-year-old, after my parents told me about it, I made up my mind I would never touch tobacco or alcohol.  Nothing would ever make me, and as it turned out, nothing would ever even tempt me.  I made a simple decision.  I was completely serious.  I never changed, I never wavered.

I wish they had explained a few other things to me at the time.  I could have included those as well.

Well, a couple of weeks ago, I finally made up my mind in the same way as I did when I was 4 years old, that I will never eat sugar.

And knowing the protests and urgings and naggings I would receive regarding my decision, I said, "And I don't even need a reason."

And as an ammendment, I also included all the little mystery ingredients akin to sugar that one finds in packaged and commercially prepared foods.  For example, here is a short list of things I will never in my future put into my mouth:

Splenda
Every other sugar substitute, good and bad
High Fructose Corn Syrup (redundancy is allowed here)
MSG
GMO
Guar Gum
Locust Bean Gum
Mono and Diglycerides
Xanthan Gum
Dextrose
Carrageenan
Dough conditioners
Nitrates
Cheap oils

You get the idea.  I am free!

I am free of processed (mystery) food.  Sugar is obviously included because it is a processed food.

I do not consider processed honey (taken from the comb) worthy of including, nor pure white flour and pasta.  I'll still eat those.

Obviously, I would still be eating fruit, which I have always enjoyed far more than any man-made treat.

I explained all this to a friend.  His response was, "You have to eat sugar!"

I said to him Fine, I will grant you that I am an idiot, nevertheless explained how I didn't need to tell him why, but in all of ensuing eternity, I would not eat sugar, and I didn't need a reason - it just isn't happening.   He seemed to get the message.

Less than an hour later, he was trying to get me to eat a store-bought granola bar and he kept trying to get me to drink Gatorade.  Do you know how many teaspoons of sugar are in an individual sized bottle of Gatorade?  He did not seem to know.  I thought to myself, this must be among the 7 wonders of the world - how a person can hear and put on that they are conversing, without listening.

I had a bowl I fixed for breakfast that was good enough to mention:

grollet (soaked before steaming, with yellow yeast cooked in)
cold baked potato  (incl. skin, of course)
picante sauce
cucumber
fresh tomato
lettuce
turkey
cheese
mayo
onion
ginger powder
black pepper

I might have had some broccoli in there

Anyway, bowls are great when you feel like having grains but don't want to just sit and gnaw on grollet, or eat bread (a sandwich).

I like bowls better than sandwiches anyway.  or wraps or burros or what have you.

I was making grollet and mistook the nutritional (yellow) yeast for amaranth and poured it in.  Turned out tasty - ate it all in one day.

Just finished a breakfast combo that is noteworthy good:  Grollet, cottage cheese, carrot.

Reminder

The method is one thing, this is a reminder of the other thing - the main positive reason for practicing the method of this blog:

Once you get into the real paradigm, and into the food, real food tastes better.  Lot better.  All the way up, all the way down.

So it  ain't just about feeling like you're 18 again.

Gettin back....one at a time

Novolin R makes me feel like my sugar is not high when it is.  Plus, I never experience neuropathy with it.  So Novolin R is my 'feel good' insulin. 

(With Humalog, I am almost never surprised at a test strip result; I can almost always tell what my level is by how I feel.  I wrongly assumed it would work the same with Novolin R.)

Trying to get by during financial crises on Novolin R and no test strips was a tragic mistake.  Especially during Winter.  Especially when I was in Casual Mode, thinking I could eat like whatever I want and get away with it, my sugar had gotten so good.

At the end of February, Providence intervened and placed in my path a friend whose neighbor had died and left a pile of testers and strips.  This is how I discovered I was not doing well.

In fact, I was in one of those things that happen with me once a year or every two years where for a day or two, my sugar is 250 or so, and no matter how much insulin I shoot, it does not come down.  Does not come down.  Does not come down.  And I never know why.  But it is rare it happens.  Seems like usually maybe it's a virus or something.  Or maybe I am for some reason just slipping into Type II mode.  I don't know.

But this time the sugar was higher and it didn't come down for longer.  I borrowed some humalog from a friend and, being in the worst shape for running that I have ever been in my life, started running again (Well, if you could call it 'running'), thinking as I suggested above, that maybe running would reverse a Type II onset.  First of March, I started exercising again, something I had not really done much of since I was first laid off in '08, except for the short period I had been using the Westinghouse gym in '13.

After hobbling a few days, and shooting humalog, the sugar came down.  I set myself up to get to the doctor again, and my A1C was high - I forget exactly what it was.  For the first time, I got the word that something had begun to deteriorate - he pronounced me to be in Stage III chronic kidney disease.  By now, it was about the end of March.  My sugar was under fair control but instead of my normal 2-4 units of humalog per meal, I was needing 6-14.  He also had me on Lantus, of course, and I was using 20 units per day, and then 15.

I could jog now, but remained fairly challenged to run very fast or far.

I knew all the tricks to good sugar, and I knew the importance of each, but you get casual and over-confident, and you get sloppy.  I had some re-learning to do.

Getting back onto the proper meds and running was a good first step.  I started to get back into shape and my sugar was fair with a lot of insulin use.

Then I began to learn again how to eat no more than I should at a time.  Made my meals quicker, and stopped eating well before I had too much for what insulin I had shot.  Made sure I never spiked too high.  Now I was doing a lot better.  But still using a lot more insulin than I had ever used before.

Finally, mostly motivated by how it makes one feel for running, I learned to eat  simple again - all the time.  Then my insulin requirement plummeted.  I realized (AGAIN) that sugar, not just HFCS, is unnatural and poison to me, let alone all the other junk that I don't normally eat, and to eat just a little, just sometimes, is no more acceptable than having just a little lead dust with my soup.  To perfectly abstain, and to eat strictly plain, was making me well again.

It is now April 22.  I am in my best shape, in many ways, in 20 years.  In just over a week, I am going to participate in my first formal wrestling tournament in 25 years.  It is time to adjust down my Lantus again.  My insulin requirement is rapidly returning to what it had been.  I have relearned the essentiality that if I don't do like my blog says, I will always surely have a setback, one way or another.  So I must treat table sugar (and all its substitutes, of course) and fancy eating the way I always treat lead dust.

For those who need the obvious spelled out, this blog in no way suggests any criticism or rebellion against mainstream medical care, nor does it seek to present any alternate treatment therefrom.  Rather, it strongly criticizes and rebels against mainstream America's diet and lifestyle and attitude, and presents the one true natural way to eat  (by use of the appetite) that will keep one in good health.

It's not about the medical care, it is about how to be a patient - something only patients can really know first-hand how to be.

I share a little story to illustrate:

I asked a person to share with me their experience using an insulin pump, such as how convenient was it for them, and things of that nature.  They missed the nuance and just told me to speak with my doctor, thinking only about whether a pump would be appropriate for me from a medical standpoint.  But you see, unless my doctor had worn a pump himself, as a patient, he could relate nothing to me that I wanted to know.  Only my friend with the pump could.

So you see, this blog is about the patient experience.   This blog is about how to cope with the diagnosis and the treatment and the fear and discouragement.  This blog helps you figure out how to do what the Medical Professionals rightly tell you must be done by you.

Like, "Don't tell me I gotta quit smoking - tell me something I don't know!  Tell me how!"  And don't just give me a patch and say "Next!"