Daily Archives: May 23, 2012

Self-Discipline: Myths and Merits

Posted on May 23, 2012 | Leave a comment

Sugar is a problem. Perhaps the biggest problem is that people may not have any problem limiting sugar for years, but once it does become a visible undeniable problem too much damage has been done. Sugar is doing damage internally all along; cells have problems with not letting go fat from insulin resistance among many other things. The outward and visible problem is gaining weight, the mental problems of bingeing, constant cravings, are not psychological weakness but our bodies’ overly stressed response to too much sugar-starch-artificial sweeteners.

The primary myth about sugar is that just a little won’t hurt since weight is about calories-in, calories-out;  the secondary myth is that people just need to buck up and exercise restraint, that becoming overweight is a sign of not having self-discipline or being self-indulgent.

The reason it’s so hard to be disciplined is that the “old brain” or limbic brain– that which sits beneath our larger neo-cortical mass which does advanced things like thinking–has one goal only when it comes to food, which is to eat any and all carbs and fat in order not to starve the next period of famine (inevitable in prehistory). That “old” brain is not clued in to modernity, HFCS, high calorie density in every food, etc.  As long as we eat a diet high in refined sugars/starch the majority of us will eventually find ourselves plagued by carb cravings. Cravings are that old brain demanding we eat, an insulin driven cycle that’s hard to break free from as long as we eat sugars. Add insulin resistance into the mix, and you will find someone gaining weight, miserable, trying desperately most of the time to be disciplined, but succumbing to binges all too often.

For those who find ourselves in that awful place the best and probably only chance to get free of those cravings, binges, misery is to rid our diets of all refined sugars/starches, and keep any carbohydrates even from fruits and vegetables strictly controlled. That takes discipline. Discipline is ultimately a great friend.

Once we see the path to free ourselves of the addictive properties of sugars-starch-artificial sweets, then for some period of time we will have to exercise self-discipline to establish good eating habits often lost for several years.

For most of my young life I ate three meals a day rarely snacked, then as age, menopause, lack of sleep, a high stress career all began to take their toll, my cravings steadily increased; I ate ever more carbs, mostly the so-called good carbs, but found myself beginning to have binges on ice cream, sweet rolls, and such high cal-carb-fat foods. I became miserable, for how could I be in this position when I had always been very good at accomplishing what I wanted to do with my life. No wonder so many people who get fat are also in some state of depression (which is also a direct product of too much sugar).

I refused to give up or in, and read and tried dozens of different plans until I stumbled across Atkins low carb plan, which helped a lot, but not quite enough, for Atkins unwittingly allowed for the use of sugar substitutes, aka artificial sweeteners. Only a few years later did I learn that these artificial sweets were also creating strong cravings for me. Further, I had walked four miles a day for years, so lack of exercise was not my problem, indeed it was contributing to the problem. How could I be doing everything 90% right and getting 100% bad results?  Gary Taubes book, Good Calories, Bad Calories was a revelation! Finally it all made sense. But after ten years of eating too much carbohydrate, my brain was not happy to give them up, so now was when the need for self-discipline became vitally important.

My spouse once said that I had hit the “perfect storm” of conditions to get overweight. He could see that I was working hard to keep my weight in control, and had a lot of sympathy, for which I’m very grateful, for I know people who don’t have that support. So in a way it became necessary for me to make sure I was sailing in calm waters. Happily the hormone problems are past, back surgery very successful, and so I could implement the right things like being faithful to recording my food intake, keeping my carbs around 20g per day, increasing fats, eating mostly grass-fed and organic, getting enough but not too much exercise, and meditating, which has been a long time practice through writing and walking.  The biggest areas of discipline came around avoiding artificial sweeteners, and not eating between meals. I still catch myself opening the refrigerator and thinking “what’s to eat?” then reminding myself that I don’t eat between meals.

Changing our eating habits as well as the foods we eat can lead us to good health and leaner, fitter bodies, but all of us have to exercise some level of self-discipline. Just eating low carb won’t be enough to lose weight if you are eating too much food and your body doesn’t have to give up the stored fat.  Most of us, especially if not young, will have to do some restricting of how much and when we eat to get success. That said, it can be done, which was the best news I’ve had in years.

Yours in determinations,

Nan aka Sugarbaby

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Posted in binges, cravings, determination, diet, emotions, getting back on track, sugar addiction

Insulin Resistance or Hyperinsulinemia

Posted on May 23, 2012 | 1 comment

There are probably many people who have over the course of some years of being overweight, and having exceedingly strong cravings of carbohydrates, who have become insulin resistant (IR); another term for the condition which Dr. Robert Atkins used is hyperinsulinemia. The short definition is that your body having been flooded with far too much insulin for too long is coming into pre-diabetes territory, a very bad place–but still a place from which you can recover. When the body gets in this place the cells will keep taking up fat, but won’t let it go, so you can be over-eating yet have no energy, feel tired and miserable because your body isn’t giving up its stored energy. Below is what Gary Taubes has written of the condition, and I will add more here as I come across it.

The main message is to get off the carbs, meaning less that 20-30g per day in order to force the body to start burning all that stored. The following comes from my Kindle edition of Good Calories, Bad Calories.

(Taubes, Gary (2007-09-25). Good Calories, Bad Calories (pp. 139-141). Anchor. Kindle Edition.)

In the early 1950s, clinical investigators began to characterize the physiological mechanisms that would underlie Cleave’s saccharine-disease hypothesis of chronic disease, and that could explain the appearance of diseases of civilization going back over a century—the basis, in effect, of this carbohydrate hypothesis. The research evolved in multiple threads that resulted in some of the most fundamental discoveries in heart-disease and diabetes research. Only in the late 1980s did they begin to come together, when the Stanford diabetologist Gerald Reaven proposed the name Syndrome X to describe the metabolic abnormalities common to obesity, diabetes, and heart disease, all, at the very least, exacerbated by the consumption of sugar, flour, and other easily digestible carbohydrates. Syndrome X included elevated levels of the blood fats known as triglycerides; low levels of HDL cholesterol, now known as the good cholesterol; it included hypertension, and three phenomena that are considered precursors of adult-onset diabetes—chronically high levels of insulin (hyperinsulinemia), a condition known as insulin resistance (a relative insensitivity of cells to insulin), and the related condition of glucose intolerance (an inability to metabolize glucose properly). Over the years, other abnormalities have been added to this list: the presence of predominantly small, dense LDL particles, and high levels of a protein called fibrinogen that increases the likelihood of blood-clot formation. Elevated uric-acid concentrations in the blood, a precursor of gout, have been linked to Syndrome X, as has a state of chronic inflammation, marked by a high concentration in the blood of a protein known as C-reactive protein. In the last decade, Syndrome X has taken on a variety of names as authorities, institutions, and associations have slowly come to accept its validity. It is often referred to as insulin resistance syndrome. The National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute belatedly recognized the existence of Syndrome X in 2001, calling it metabolic syndrome. It has even been referred to as insulin resistance/metabolic syndrome X, or MSX, by those investigators attempting to cover all bases.*39 By any name, this metabolic syndrome is as much a disorder of carbohydrate metabolism as is adult-onset diabetes, and is certainly a consequence of the carbohydrate content of the diet, particularly, as Cleave would have predicted, such refined, easily digestible carbohydrates as sugar and white flour. It wasn’t until the late 1990s that the evolving science of metabolic syndrome began to have any significant influence outside the field of diabetes, at which point the media finally began to take notice.†40 The potential implications of metabolic syndrome for heart disease and other chronic diseases have only just begun to be appreciated by the research community. As a result, a hypothesis that emerged from research in the 1950s as an alternative explanation for the high rates of heart disease in Western nations has been accepted by medical researchers and public-health authorities a half-century later as a minor modification to Keys’s dietary-fat/cholesterol hypothesis, even though this alternative hypothesis implies that Keys’s hypothesis is wrong. The bulk of the science is no longer controversial, but its potential significance has been minimized by the assumption that saturated fat is still the primary evil in modern diets.

In the early 1950s, clinical investigators began to characterize the physiological mechanisms that would underlie Cleave’s saccharine-disease hypothesis of chronic disease, and that could explain the appearance of diseases of civilization going back over a century—the basis, in effect, of this carbohydrate hypothesis. The research evolved in multiple threads that resulted in some of the most fundamental discoveries in heart-disease and diabetes research. Only in the late 1980s did they begin to come together, when the Stanford diabetologist Gerald Reaven proposed the name Syndrome X to describe the metabolic abnormalities common to obesity, diabetes, and heart disease, all, at the very least, exacerbated by the consumption of sugar, flour, and other easily digestible carbohydrates. Syndrome X included elevated levels of the blood fats known as triglycerides; low levels of HDL cholesterol, now known as the good cholesterol; it included hypertension, and three phenomena that are considered precursors of adult-onset diabetes—chronically high levels of insulin (hyperinsulinemia), a condition known as insulin resistance (a relative insensitivity of cells to insulin), and the related condition of glucose intolerance (an inability to metabolize glucose properly). Over the years, other abnormalities have been added to this list: the presence of predominantly small, dense LDL particles, and high levels of a protein called fibrinogen that increases the likelihood of blood-clot formation. Elevated uric-acid concentrations in the blood, a precursor of gout, have been linked to Syndrome X, as has a state of chronic inflammation, marked by a high concentration in the blood of a protein known as C-reactive protein. In the last decade, Syndrome X has taken on a variety of names as authorities, institutions, and associations have slowly come to accept its validity. It is often referred to as insulin resistance syndrome. The National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute belatedly recognized the existence of Syndrome X in 2001, calling it metabolic syndrome. It has even been referred to as insulin resistance/metabolic syndrome X, or MSX, by those investigators attempting to cover all bases.*39 By any name, this metabolic syndrome is as much a disorder of carbohydrate metabolism as is adult-onset diabetes, and is certainly a consequence of the carbohydrate content of the diet, particularly, as Cleave would have predicted, such refined, easily digestible carbohydrates as sugar and white flour. It wasn’t until the late 1990s that the evolving science of metabolic syndrome began to have any significant influence outside the field of diabetes, at which point the media finally began to take notice.†40 The potential implications of metabolic syndrome for heart disease and other chronic diseases have only just begun to be appreciated by the research community. As a result, a hypothesis that emerged from research in the 1950s as an alternative explanation for the high rates of heart disease in Western nations has been accepted by medical researchers and public-health authorities a half-century later as a minor modification to Keys’s dietary-fat/cholesterol hypothesis, even though this alternative hypothesis implies that Keys’s hypothesis is wrong. The bulk of the science is no longer controversial, but its potential significance has been minimized by the assumption that saturated fat is still the primary evil in modern diets.

Taubes, Gary (2007-09-25). Good Calories, Bad Calories (p. 140). Anchor. Kindle Edition.

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