2002-09-13 - 11:48 p.m.

So Far, So Good

I think this marks the fifth day I've been on this low carbohydrate diet, and to my utter astonishment it seems to be working as advertised.

On Wednesday morning when I took my blood sugar, I got quite a surprise. The reading was only 129! It's been months since my blood sugar was so low. I thought that the meter must have gotten the wrong reading, so I took it again. 133! Close enough for government work! Prior to that it had been above 190 for the last couple of months.

Yesterday it was 142 and today it was 130. Well, I guess it wasn't a fluke.

To be fair, I don't think that it's ALL the diet. I did start taking my diabetes medicines again. However, even before I stopped taking the medicines my blood sugar was over 200 nearly every day so the diet is probably a large part of it.

However, like Mal says, the diet is HARD. The hardest part for me is all the WORK involved in eating. I'm a lazy person, and the fact that I have to THINK about what I'm eating, and plan ahead and actually do work preparing the food really takes some getting used to for me. In fact, I'm finding that I'm procrastinating making meals and sometimes just not eating altogether, because it's easier.

This means that I might be a little poorly focused, and listless. Well, it's not nearly as bad as it was when my blood sugar was scraping against the sky. I'll get the hang of it if I keep trying.

I also know that I am not, in fact, on the REAL Protein Power diet. I'm only about 50 pages into the new book, and they're still talking about the justification for their diet. There are some interesting theories about the development of the human diet, and its effects on civilization. One of the more crackpot-sounding theories is that carbohydrate addiction in early man is what caused his to settle down and start farming, and that's where cities came from. While it's droll to think of "carb addiction" as the reason that man gave up his hunter-gatherer lifestyle, I would tend to think that it would be easier to be a farmer than a hunter-gatherer having to fight wild animals and move where they move. When you're a farmer, the food is already right there, growing outside. When you're a hunter, the food MIGHT be outside, and it might not. It's like the difference between a steady paycheck, and sporadic freelance work.

Well, it's just a theory anyway.

One of the most unfortunate things about the diet is that I've discovered that much of the food I have around the house is technically inedible. Of course stuff like pasta, bread and cereal is out of the question, but things that I thought were neutral or good protein sources are off limits too. I looked at a container of yogurt, and there's 41 grams of carbohydrate in there! That's roughly a whole day's allowance on the diet! Of course once I thought about it, it made sense. Unsweetened yogurt tastes like crap, so it takes quite a bit of sugar to make it palatable, and then there's the fruit in there.

Carbs seem to be practically omnipresent, especially in processed foods. In fact, most of the foods that have been modified to be "low fat" have had their taste improved with more sugar.

Something else I've been doing at the same time is decafinating myself. I'm quite the Diet Pepsi junkie, usually quaffing two or three a day, but now I'm going cold turkey. In the old edition of Protein Power the authors said that diet soda was okay, but in the new edition they are not so sanguine, and they recommend that their patients not drink it.

Why? I don't know, I haven't gotten to that part yet.

However I do know that caffeine helps you retain water, and can retard weight loss. Aspartame interferes with brain functions and a significant portion of the population is allergic to it. In fact, there's a lot of things scientists don't know about the effects of Nutrisweet. Isn't it nice that all of us are participating in this experiment on the long term effects of ingesting chemicals?

The lack of caffeine may also be making me punchy too. I seem to remember reading that it takes two weeks for it to completely get it out of your system.

It's made me uneasy that I've been drinking so much of this stuff, so cutting it out is probably a good idea. In fact, just before I was diagnosed with diabetes, I decided I was going to drink regular soda because I was worried about the effects of aspartame. It took a trip to the hospital to teach me that simple ol' sugar was much more dangerous to me than the mysterious combination of chemicals that make up Nutrisweet. On the side of the bottle, it says: Warning, contains Phenylalanine. I'll bet there's some Asdfghjkl;zxcbxzvc in there too.

Too bad I've still got about three six-packs of the stuff floating around the house. Anyone want some Diet Pepsi?

So I am continuing to try to make myself healthy again, to improve my energy and clear up my foggy mind. I'm still learning, and it's going to take some time. However, it's better to slowly walk in the right direction than to just stand there with a stupid look on my face.