When Food Is the Enemy

Alright, I'll admit it: food has always been my drug-of-choice when I think I need a pick-me-pick. And if you're trying to lose weight, a little excess (aka "cheating"), on occasion, isn't such a bad thing.

But if you're a diabetic, it can be dangerous. Or deadly.

I'm one of the many Type 2 diabetics in this country. We don't have to shoot up insulin -- that's a "privilege" normally reserved for the Type I folks. We make insulin, but for various reasons, we're "insulin-resistant" -- meaning, the insulin doesn't work as well as it should. Being overweight is one of those reasons -- as I understand it, the fat around our cells literally gets in the way of the insulin, which is needed to get the sugars into our cells. (That's why we're supposed to get our weight down and keep it down).

Well, last night I cheated. The Wiffee came home from her sister's around dinnertime and wasn't hungry yet. So I snacked on a little leftover macaroni salad. And a bite-sized Snickers bar. Then The Wiffee got hungry and Carls Jr hamburgers sounded good.

Now -- one each of any of the fastfood burgers has my maximum number of carbohydrates for one of the three major meals: around 45 grams of carbs. But my snack had carbs too, and I ate it thinking The Wiffee might not get hungry for anouther two hours, when it would have been OK to eat again.

But nope! I went right over to get the burgers -- three of them -- and we split one of them. That probably put me up to around 66g of carbs, plus the macaroni salad and the candy bar. Then we had dessert -- a bowl of ice cream. I'm already had too many carbs, and now I added even more. Bad mistake for a dude like me.

First came the headache. Even before I was diagnosed with diabetes, I would often get bad headaches if I ate too many Christmas goodies. Untreatable headaches. Very painful headaches. And I sure got one last night. And it went downhill from there.

Briefly: nausea. Profuse sweating and feeling like I was burning up. And on the verge of passing out.

I should have tested my blood sugar while all of this was going on. But I wasn't up to it. But I did check it when I was feeling a bit better, and you know what? It wasn't that high. It was only a few points higher than what it normally is before having breakfast after I wake up in the morning.

I suspect my blood sugar was too high, and then dropped quickly. I crashed.

In the end, I'm still alive and functional this morning, although I still feel a little drained. And icky from all that sweating last night.

Food feels like a friend, and most of the time it is. But sometimes food is the enemy. It's an unregulated drug. I believe in "all things things in moderation," but I'm not moderate enough about food. It tastes too good, especially when chocolate is involved!

Even Confucius advised against making food too tasty, less we're tempted to eat too much of it.

Ahem, bro!