Sugar is not the enemy.
Reevaluating my relationship to sugar as a diabetic of 10 years.
I am a Type 1 diabetic on insulin.
It has taken years to admit it publicly. I don’t even tell my friends about it myself, unless they ask about my peculiar food habits and why I regularly stab myself in my stomach with a colourful plastic pen after meals. It’s an incredibly easy chronic ailment to manage, given the severity and urgency on the spectrum of chronic ailments, but that is just my experience of it.
What sucks though, is how much I’ve had to learn and unlearn about diet on the whole, and the psychological baggage of change is HARD. It’s harder yet with the constant public rhetoric about SUGAR IS THE DEVIL and everyone who cares about their health should be off sugar 100% of the time.
JESUS CHRIST, Anita, we know you’re sugar free, gluten free, fat free, vegan and insensitive.I have my own horrible love hate relationship with sugar, and you know what, overthinking it DOESN’T HELP. Sugar is a crazy addictive substance, but EVERYTHING IS SUGAR. Or more complex carbohydrates all eventually broken down to glucose, at the end of the day. I talk about sugar in the most general sense, as white and artificial as it can possible be.
Talking science for a minute here, most of everything you eat is TRULY sugars. Saccharides are the foundation of carbohydrates (and other food groups- think milk, fruits, peanut butter) and they’re all eventually broken down into glucose, the OG sugar that your body and brain love.
Anything which has starch (mixture of) is going to become glucose no matter what. Your body is a glucose guzzling factory of chaos and you cannot (especially as a diabetic) that you’re going to self deprive yourself of sugars/starch/ all the good stuff. I mean, you can, but shouldn’t, especially after seeing a bunch of diet influencers on Instagram.
I take medications with very little thought before injecting myself with ~8 u of fast acting, very expensive insulin de facto. Yours could be 5–12 based on how carb-y your most common meal is. It gives you a good idea of how much carbohydrate dependent you really are per meal, and have been since you stopped caring how much insulin you really should be taking.
Either way, 8 units covers a standard breakfast plus whatever bitch hormones I’m feeling that day. It also covers a light dinner with no added sugars/ fruit for me. That’s how it became my go to number anyway. Taking 8u for a lunch of lime juice and coffee, however, is absolute foolhardiness. It’s bound to get you majorly low within the 2.5 hour mark. And so it does.
I take 10g+ sugar/ juice boxes/ glucose/ non- diet coke/ WHATEVER CHOCOLATE IS AVAILABLE (Shout-out to KitKat, kindly sponsor your diabetic demographic.)
Real life tweets of almost hypoglycemia.
The point is not that I’m personally careless with my health. EVEN IF I was a normal, self-respecting diabetic, hypoglycemias are unavoidable because the insulin mathematics is hack-y at best, not to mention all the errors in the process of administering it to yourself.
In trying to be normal and “healthy” in terms of a non-diabetic metric, you have to learn to understand and play around with sugar all the time.
I NEED sugar. The narrative that sugar ruins your day with all the fluctuations IS MY WHOLE LIFE. I don’t need to consider that when I might be quite literally dying, you know?
If I overthink when my sugars are low — “Ugh I hate my body, I feel bloated let’s not add sugar in the mix” it is the single worst reaction to your body trying to SHUT DOWN because your vital organs have no access to sugar.
At this point, I have to physically force myself into believing: Sugars are not the enemy, they are not the enemy, they are not the enemy! and that’s quite sad. I am trying to rationalize my behaviours based on a normal that doesn’t reflect my experience well.
Any food I consume will invariably be evaluated as sugar in my experience. Candy- more sugar, quickly digested whereas a bowl of soup is as much sugar in the vegetables + all the cornstarch they used to thicken it- medium sugar, digested much slower. Fruit, grains, legumes, KitKats- sugars are the base of your diet, for god’s sake! Keto is probably the only diet that can side-step the whole sugar drama, but my doctor very strictly warned me against it after noticing my self- sabotaging tendencies.
Keto works if you (as a diabetic )have an intimate understanding of sugars in your diet, never else. You cannot expect to take high doses of insulin for a carb-free diet and that in itself seems like a gold standard in diabetes management. Guess what: it isn’t. Eat your damn sugars.
White sugar is bad for all the reasons people have made 10 movies on Netflix explaining, but if I need to keep sane and functional-diabetic, there’s no chance I’m buying into that. I try to stave off as much sugar as possible, I only indulge in it properly when I’m cramping and cannot physically eat, so if I’m surfing on 2 mood swing-y waves (hormones + white sugar), it’s a valid choice because I need the calories per day to function. Also keeping your insulin regimen near constant everyday is the best practice for a hassle-free lifestyle.
In terms of white sugar, I will not personally endorse it because there aren’t direct benefits beyond the carbohydrates itself.
(White) sugar is bad. Sugar needs to not be as addictive as it is, because the cravings will ruin my control of my day & blood sugars. Long term, there are a ton of other consequences.
Taking sugars after hypoglycemia is a double edged sword, as with anything in diabetes, because your sugar levels will spike unnaturally (like a sugar rush), tire you out in the crash but you need that, and you have to live with it. White sugar is just any other drug with side effects, IT IS NOT THE ENEMY. You have to make your peace with it. There is no normal for (type 1) diabetics that looks sugar-free.
Especially when there’s no other choice and I have to shamefully stock up on sugars more often than I have to insulin.
I ate a KitKat while writing this, it leaves me drained to be candid or aware of my own diabetic experience, but I will try to reduce my dependency on it. You might want to sponsor a coffee instead so I can write more diabetic words!
