Day 30--Hide and Seek---The Game Must Be Played

 

We need to define or describe sugar. It is hidden everywhere and we must seek it out. If sugar was just that little white stuff in the sugar bowl then there would be no problem. We could control very easily how many teaspoons of this “white stuff” we put on our cereal, on our strawberries or in our coffee. Too many teaspoons in any of these situations finally just becomes too much and ruins the taste of the actual food. We also know that we add sugar to recipes. That, too, in moderation could be fine.  But when we understand what we really mean by “sugar” we can see how it is poison and it is killing us. There are three terms that I may use interchangeably throughout this blog, so I want you to see the the relationship and source of these three words: SUGAR, CARBOHYDRATE and GLUCOSE. I will at times call all of them Sugar, because they are all forms of sugar. Sugar is a carbohydrate (a word usually shortened to carbs).  When carbs are processed in the body they become glucose. Glucose is another word for sugar. So sugar is a carb, and carbs change to sugar when they are eaten and this turns to glucose which is a sugar. So now that you are completely confused, we will move on.   All food is classified as carbohydrate, protein or fat, and they all provide 90% of the dry weight of our diet and 100% of its energy. Now if you have an excess of any of the three, they all can turn into sugar. Yes, if you eat too much protein (mostly found in meat) it will turn to sugar, if you eat too much fat (especially bad fats), it will turn to sugar. All carbohydrates turn to sugar. Now these three are God designed to give your body the energy to function, and in moderation and in balance, will keep you naturally healthy.   The problem is that in the SAD diet---Standard American Diet—you should know by now what the SAD diet means, we do not balance the three. And it is very hard to do because the SAD diet pyramid says to consume more carbohydrates than anything else. I bought into this pyramid like most Americans and actually taught the chart when I taught foods classes in high school. Well, it was killing me and probably my students.  The problem with this is that since all carbohydrates are classified as sugar, that pyramid encourages you to consume mostly sugar.  Now hold on to your seats belts when you read the names of these carbohydrates and realize how much sugar you are eating. Carbohydrates are anything made from potatoes, rice, flour, corn, cereals, or other grains (pasta, lasagna, white bread, doughnuts, cookies, cakes, any highly processed grains). Then another problem we face is that the word sugar is disguised with other names. There are actually 61 different names for the word sugar. You don’t have to read them all, but I want you to know names for reference, because they are hidden in 74% of our packaged foods. So if we eat the SAD diet, we might think we are skipping dessert, but really we had our cake already and maybe several pieces, just by eating our meal. These are the 61 names and because they are hidden, we have to seek them out.

 Agave nectar, Barbados sugar, Barley malt, Barley malt syrup, Beet sugar, Brown sugar, Buttered syrup, Cane juice, Cane juice crystals, Cane Sugar, Caramel, Carob syrup, Castor sugar, Coconut palm sugar, Coconut sugar, Confectioner’s sugar, Corn sweetener, Corn syrup, Corn solids, Date sugar, Dehydrated cane juice, Demerara sugar, Dextrin, Dextrose, Evaporated cane juice, Free flowing brown sugar, Fructose, Fruit juice, Fruit juice concentrate, Glucose, Glucose solids, Golden syrup, Grape sugar, High fructose corn syrup, HFCS, Honey, Icing sugar, Invert sugar, Malt syrup, Maltodextrin, Maltol, Maltose, Mannose, Maple syrup, Molasses, Muscovado, Palm sugar, Pamocha, Powdered sugar, Raw sugar, Refiners syrup, Rice syrup, Saccharose, Sorghum Syrup, Sucrose, Sugar(granulated), Sweet sorghum, Syrup, Treacle, Turbinado sugar, and Yellow sugar.   

I am going to try to explain the process of what happens when sugar enters your body by using an analogy. I am hoping this analogy will help to simplify a very complex function of the body. I am refraining from using a lot of scientific or medical words to describe this process. I know I have several medical professionals who follow my blog. To them I once again apologize for my physiological  explanations. You can feel free to private message me if I am saying anything that may cause bodily harm to anyone, or perhaps even to me in the future. This is a journey so I am learning as I go. I cannot wait to share my journey until I get it all perfect. That may never happen. But also, once again, I want to remind you that this is MY journey, and I know that my reader’s journey may be very different. I therefore, do not encourage you to do anything that makes you feel uncomfortable. I just encourage you to question everything related to your health. Don’t depend on someone to call the shots for you. So I have tried to turn something complicated into something simple enough for me to understand, and because it has changed my life --- it is a win/win situation. The stories/illustrations in this particular blog were really life changing for me. So here is my analogy of what it means to consume sugar.

Sugar is very much like fire, a source of energy and very dangerous, and if it gets out of control it can be deadly. Let’s illustrate eating sugar by using a house (you), with a fireplace (your stomach), and logs for the fireplace (sugar) and water (insulin). If you place a reasonable amount of logs (sugar) in the fireplace (your stomach) you would achieve a comfortable temperature and not need any water (insulin).  If you decided to burn more logs, the house would become warmer.  If you kept pouring on more and more wood, it would become unbearably hot. If you continued to keep putting in logs, you would eventually catch the area outside the fireplace on fire, so you would need water (insulin),  to help you put out the fire.  Hopefully the water would stop the fire and your house would be safe, but there would probably be some damage that you would have to repair.   You might keep putting out fires, but each time the house is going to get a little more charred, and it will take more and more water to put out the fire. You are going to have to quit fueling the fire, or figure out how to get someone (your doctor) to furnish you enough water (insulin), to  put out the flames each time. Now if you back off building big fires, and restore the burned areas, you can eventually get back to the place where you know exactly how many logs it takes to keep the house at a good temperature and have a nice house.

This is what happens in our bodies when we eat sugar. Now going back to the first paragraph, remember what defines sugar. When you eat carbohydrates, these turn to glucose, another word for sugar. So as long as you are eating good carbohydrates (God made foods), and you are not eating too many of them, (too many logs on the fire), you can have excellent health. God designed a great way to help you control the inflammation that sugar causes---insulin. He designed our body to produce insulin to control the glucose.  But if you keep piling on the carbohydrates, your body can’t keep up with the amount of insulin production needed to keep the fire put out----but his happens in steps.  You first of all become insulin resistant, which I will explain later, because this is what happened to me. But the part of the story that I did not have to face was a doctor saying, “You are diabetic and you will have to “take” insulin”. But even if I did hear those words, the good news is that this does not have to be a lifelong prison sentence. I have read many, many accounts of people who have reversed this diabetes by changing their lifestyle. So why not change it now, I asked myself?  That in my goal and here is my journey to do just that!!

 The worst thing about sugar is the insulin resistance it causes.. I simply got to the place that I could not lose weight. I could drop a few pounds here and there, but it came back with more added.  Compared to how much I had eaten in the past, I was starving myself to death, so it was not necessarily the amount of food I was eating. I went back over several diets that I had tried in the past and nothing seemed to work this time either--- long range---you know the treadmill diets? It works as long as you are on the treadmill, but once you get off, the weight comes back and usually extra pounds with it.  On this journey I found out that I had created an insulin resistance in my body that was controlling my hunger which controlled my eating habits and therefore my weight. I found out that the human body is only designed to handle a small amount of actual sugar (you know the white stuff). It can handle---15 grams a day—less than half the amount in a 12 oz. soft drink. (Don’t even go there with the sugar-free soft drinks theory, because they are worse (more later). This insulin resistance was the culprit. When I understood what caused my problem and that it was not totally my fault that I struggled with weight, I got myself off the guilt train.  My entire life I had put myself on the “you have no self-control” guilt train.  I read Scripture about self-control being one of the fruits of the Spirit, so I constantly prayed for more self-control. Since I struggled with this so much, I constantly found myself defeated, discouraged and if you know anything about food, the more you eat, the more depressed you get and the more depressed you get the more you eat. And what do I eat?--- processed food full of sugar (you know, the feel good stuff). Nobody, including me says, “I feel so bad I think I will go have a carrot”. But besides that,  I knew deep down that I did have self-control. Not to brag, but I had more than almost anyone I knew. For goodness sake, as I said in a previous blog, I fasted several times in excess of 10 days, one being 40 days. You think that is not will power? I worked a full time job, went to school at night, played the piano at our church, while rearing two small children and handling food service at a church camp in the summer.  If that’s not will power, I don’t know what is, so it was so comforting to me to know that my problem was not a lack of will power, it was a lack of wisdom and understanding. Proverbs 4:7 tells us to get wisdom and at any cost, get understanding. This is not talking about knowledge. You can have a lot of knowledge and yet no wisdom or understanding.  I had a lot of knowledge about diets. I once counted and I had 14 different diet books, but I did not understand how the body worked. Wisdom is actually looking at life from God’s point of view. There are a lot of people who have no post high school education who are wise in a lot of areas. There are people with college educations that have no common sense.  My prayer now is not to have more self-control, but the desire to cooperate with His design for my body. In my imagination I see God listening to my prayers, chucking, and saying to Himself, “You’re problem is not that you do not have self-control, your problem is that you are praying for the wrong thing. I know you have read James 4:3, where it says, you pray and receive not because you ask for the wrong things (amiss is the Bible term)”. I thought I needed self-control, but self-control has little to do with how my body functions. I can try to self-control myself all I want,. For example, if I might say I am not going to urinate for 24 hours. I can say during that time, you can do this, you can do this, you can do this, but my body will eventually urinate, and before 24 hours is up.  I have no control over that natural God given process. That is exactly what was happening in my body. I was taking a natural response and perverting it “for my pleasure”---that is what the end of verse 3 says in James chapter 4. My own pleasure made me become insulin resistant.

I was putting more carbohydrates in my body than it could use. My body is designed to burn a lot of calories on its own. Digestion, respiration, beating of the heart, etc. creates metabolism.  God designed these processes to use up the energy created by glucose. If you want to increase energy use, you can exercise.  The problem came because I was consuming more energy than I was expending. This is where the phrase “calories in calories out” or “eat less, move more” comes from. Although there is some truth in these two statements they can be misleading, because it is not necessarily how much you eat, but what you eat. If you follow this advice, with no wisdom or understanding of calories and exercise, you will fail. All calories are not healthy, are not created equal and calories react differently in different bodies. These sayings are the basis of a lot of diet programs, and their success rate is downright pitiful. Counting calories or counting points will lead to weight gain after you finish the “program”---if you last that long.  They certainly did not work long range for me. I was following the plans (as long as I could stand it) and exercising faithfully, and I still struggled, and I certainly was not healthy. It did not change my lifestyle. I still had the same cravings and those diets encouraged my cravings by saying you can have the same things, just smaller portions. So after I reached my “goal” I went back to my old habits.  If you follow this advice you can lose weight, but there is no guarantee that you will be healthy. So it is better to forget about weight and get healthy. When you are healthy and cooperate with your body’s natural functions, the weight will take care of itself. Now once you understand why you need to eat certain foods to be healthy, you can use the above statements to motivate you to eat healthy foods. The phrase would be better said, “eat less but healthy, move more” or “good calories in, good calories out. When I figured out how to cooperate with God’s design, I found success. Now on to insulin resistance and how I created it by bad eating habits.

I flooded my body with sugar from all the carbs I ate, so my body did what God designed it to do in this case, it stored it as fat. This is a great design for a bear that hibernates all winter, but not for me.  I cut portions, changed to whole wheat bread, ate baked potatoes instead of fries, grilled or baked my meat instead of frying it, drank diet drinks instead of the ones with real sugar, ate everything that used healthy words like “fat free, gluten free, sugar free, yogurt, granola, etc.etc.etc. And of course I have been on every diet known to man and I have counted everything---calories, points, reps, steps, jumping jacks, etc. Oh my, I am tired just thinking about it. I would lose, gain, lose, gain—you know the old yo-yo syndrome.  And all the while I was destroying my body. I looked old, felt old, ached, took over the counter pain pills, antihistamines, acid blockers, and anything else anybody told me about that would make me feel better. I suffered mild depression, anxiety, and overall tiredness. I just resigned myself to the fact that this was what old age was all about. I could not have been more wrong. When I found God’s way for eating and sleeping, all these old age symptoms began to disappear. 

As I said, I stored fat most all my life. I never got to what I thought was extremely fat. I was not a candidate for the “Biggest Loser” or a candidate to have  gastric bypass surgery (although secretly I wanted to do both),  but I was miserable simply because I could not get a handle on this thing called eating. I did reach 199 on the scales and I gasped, thinking I might one day see 200. I immediately went on a starvation diet and lost a little. I have never gotten into the 190’s since then, but I have had a lot of playtime in the 180’s. By the way, going back to the Biggest Loser—quite a few of these contestants have regained their weight because they did not teach them how their body works. It was “calories in, calories out”. And there are some terrible stories out there about what foods they allowed and encouraged the contestants to eat so they could have results on the show. Sometimes they would go more than a week so the contestants could lose more, and they encouraged them to dehydrate themselves before weigh in day.  One contestant said he gained 32 pounds the day after the show ended just by drinking water, because he was so dehydrated. The highest percentage of those who mostly kept it off, were the ones who actually won the title. There was some motivation there, because a lot of them became a spokesperson for a product or the star of a video. Don't get me wrong, motivation is a good thing. Also going back to gastric bypass, everyone has their own reasons for doing this surgery.  It is not for me to judge, but I have known of 11 people who have had this surgery, and I am waiting for just one to prove to me that it is the route to take for lifelong success. Of all the ones I know, eight have gained it all back, and the other three gained back quite a few pounds. The reason-----there was no permanent lifestyle change. They, like me, kept doing the same thing and expecting different results.

As I said, at first my body was storing the extra energy as fat. This is actually a safety feature (more later)----but worse, my blood was still full of sugar or glucose. As glucose was flooding my blood, my body was increasing the production of insulin. This is good and what my body is designed to do. Insulin reduces the glucose and pushes it into the cells. But when my body was faced with high insulin levels it turned down the response.  At this point I become resistant to the effects of insulin, and the only way to correct it was to quit flooding my body with carbohydrates so my body could restore its insulin sensitivity. So the question is, how do I know when I get to the point that I know I have had just the right amount of sugar to maintain my bodily functions and my weight.  You will know, because your sugar will “spike”, and that will cause another natural response that I will tell you about in the next blog.