Friday, November 24, 2023

Drinking the Kool Ade




I knew before "Thanksgiving Week" that there could be trouble in my future if I ate unwise food choices.  But sometimes I do it anyway.  I convince myself that this time will be different.  But it wasn't different for me or for Mrs. Billingsley.   Big surprise.


Mrs. Billingsley ate a few things that even I didn't eat.  One of them was a chicken pot pie by Marie Calender.   This contained 55 g of carbs and a lot of other bad ideas.  She also had two slices of pie.  The next day (Wednesday) Mrs. Billingsley was back to her two year old state.  Just then Tuna called.  Not to say Tuna isn't cause for concern.  She called for a moment to let me know that she has lupus.  Tuna is doing what I would say gives the lupus victims a bad name.  Basically it's all about Tuna.  But her timing was just the second that all fairyland was breaking loose over here.   It was two hours before the chaos calmed down.  Finally I threatened Mrs. Billingsley with packing her off to a nursing home.   And put Tuna on call block.  


Why all the mischief?  Thinking it over, I realized it was largely my own fault.  I knew about the Jekyll and Hyde phenomenon when Mrs. Billinsley eats carbs, yet I fed her carbs.   And the predictable happened.  


But can people be blamed for being confused about diet?  I continued down my ill conceived path and ate all sorts of things I usually avoid, mostly because of the carb intolerance problem.  It is hard to deal with the way that no one takes this seriously or believes what can happen to me if I drink the kool ade.   Well, nor do they care.   It seems like the Thanksgiving holiday is just a way of enticing people like me into the danger zone.  


The number one problem with carbs is that they provoke neurological issues.  For example, the ketogenic diet was originally developed to treat epilepsy in children.  It was found that a high fat, low carb diet many times brought a remission to seizures.  Well, let's not do that!  We don't believe in the ketogenic diet!   We believe in pharmaceuticals.  Pharmaceuticals are scientific.   We are scientific!


I stumbled upon the ketogenic diet on my own, by experimenting with my own diet and what worked for me.  But the thing that doesn't really make sense is that it isn't the only diet that worked.  For a long time I was on a diet that a doctor in Dallas had prescribed for me.  It was a bit involved.  First of all, I ate "mono meals."  I ate only one food per meal, three meals a day.  I only ate the same food once every four days.  I only ate from the same food family, like legumes, every other day.  And to top it off, I only had the choice of 15 foods to choose from, since I was allergic to the rest.  Well, this worked beautifully and my health was great.  Also I was hungry all the time.   I was pretty skinny too.  


Then I got cocky.   Many terrible days later I worked out a new plan with the ketogenic diet.  


Still, the throwing caution to the wind resulted in me noticing something that I've noticed before.  It's not just the carbs.  It's not that simple.  Another diet that worked well for me is called the Specific Carbohydrate Diet.  In this diet, one avoids disaccharides and polysaccharides but can eat limited amounts of monosaccharides.  The same clinic in Dallas had pointed this out to me and steered me to a book about it, called The Specific Carbohydrate Diet.  It's a wonderful diet because it expands the dietary choices.  


The crazy thing is, pie is bad, ice cream is bad, grapes are good.  Yet grapes have carbs.  ??  Well, that's just how it is.  Some carbs are poisonous, like the ones in pie.  Others can be OK.  Still others seem to vacillate.  Potatoes are like that.  I ate a piece of pie.  Checking my blood glucose, I was shocked to see it was 176 an hour later.  And I couldn't sleep that night.  The next day was Thanksgiving.  We had three courses.  One, sliced tomatoes.  That's pretty safe.  Two, sweet potato.  That's usually doable.  Three, Stove Top stuffing and roasted chicken.  Not so good.   All this occurred about one pm.   The timing is key because the damage is less before 3 pm.  


I didn't bother with checking my glucose until around 6 pm.  92.  ??  Nice.  I had wanted baked potato, so I ate one around 7 pm.  At 8 pm blood glucose 105.  ??  Nice.  Still, it's weird.  Many many carbs, no glucose spike.   And I slept well.  


So, I'm in a metabolic maze.   Back to keto. 








 

1 comment:

  1. I thought she had learned to moderate her compulsive habits.

    ReplyDelete