The Pancreas: Maker of Insulin (among other things) What they don’t tell you about diabetes is extensive. What we don’t know about diabetes is more so. I haven’t written as much about my experiences with diabetes as I thought I would, but I have a few things in mind – unique observations that I don’t hear people talk about very much, as it were. There are many misconceptions about diabetes. I have read two separate articles lately (here’s a sciency one and here’s one from the press) that indicate overweight diabetics fare better than thin ones – and when you start talking about what that might mean, people are quick to shoot you down. Maybe that’s why it was always so hard for me to lose fat – maybe there was a reason for it to be there. Anyway. Something that took me twenty years to realise that nobody tells you is that the same foods affect you differently depending on where your blood sugar’s at. This shouldn’t be revelationary, because the idea that the same food has a different effect in different circumstances is far from new, but we’re always told “this is how it is, peasants”, and then we’re told off for not taking personal responsibility when we’ve been badgered to do exactly what we’re told. “DO WHAT WE SAY, now take responsibility for that. Thanks very much”. They don’t want you to be responsible, they want you to be obedient. The irony is of course, that when you fail at obedience, they accuse you of failing at responsibility. But what does it mean to be personally responsible? It means questioning them, demanding evidence, and calling them on their bullshit. It means demanding long-term solutions, not quick fixes or wild-goose-chases. But they don’t want that – why would they want that?
It clearly bugs me in a big way, but it’s a topic for another time.
I’m very fit, so my insulin sensitivity is very good. I don’t need to inject much, even if I’m not training a whole lot – there are many variables, but it’s well established that exercise increases insulin sensitivity (even if you don’t lose weight), so we’ll go with that. Whatever the reason, my muscles can suck up the sugars eagerly, as long as there’s some insulin around. What’s interesting is that when my blood sugar is low, my body will work hard to efficiently draw sugar out of pretty much anything that has the merest hint of carbohydrates in it. The very same food – when eaten at other times when my blood sugar level is higher – might not do much at all to raise my levels. Sometimes, usually after I’ve been training – if I eat something small like a sandwich or whatever, I don’t need to inject any insulin at all to be able to metabolise the sugars. They don’t tell you that. Maybe they don’t know, maybe it’s different from person to person. The thing I keep coming back to is that the body knows. When your sugars are low, and you eat, it’ll help bring your levels up. When they’re not, the impact isn’t so extreme. People talk as if the human body is a Bunsen Burner, but – however it may sound – human bodies really do vary. The effect of a given food is different when my blood sugar is low, to what it is when my blood sugar is high. Same food, same quantity, different effect because the circumstances are different. It’s logical, but nobody really talks about it in that way. They just want you to control everything with your iron diabetic fist. Also, another thing they don’t tell you – my insulin sensitivity is cyclical. Some months I need to inject slightly more, some months less – it’s so subtle it took me twenty years to figure it out. They don’t tell you that in the textbooks. In fact, there are a lot of people who would disagree with me – what’s funny is that my twenty years’ experience and my independent research seem not to count for much in the eyes of some. But I understand that too – one human is a very small sample size, and I don’t really qualify as a significant scientific study all by myself. Tasty, sugary, disobedient food for thought.
4 Comments
Aiyesha
10/27/2012 08:57:04 pm
I've actually read a ton lately about post-training uptake of carbohydrates, but sadly it was all written by douchecanoes whom I don't care to link to, even if the science was there and sound. Something about cell transmitter surface thingies something-something. Bottom line - insulin blunted by heavy training, skeletal muscle can still soak up sugar. I'm pretty sure it's not the only endocrine pathway significantly altered by heavy training - I mean, duh, but my own experience bears this out and I don't have any kind of endocrine thing going on, just the gallbladder stuff. But, digestion is regulated by metabolism, and hormones basically ARE your metabolism, so, yeah. Nobody tells us this stuff. "Eat healthy and exercise!" And the underlying assumption is that doing so will enable control.
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Chris Serong
10/28/2012 11:53:29 am
Oh, control! It's been on my mind lately - what do we control, what do we respond to - y'know, we can control (to an extent) how we train, but how we respond to our training? That's why so many people research and write about hormone optimisation, but to me it seems naive to think we will ever have much control over that whole bag of goodies.
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Aiyesha
10/28/2012 02:48:49 pm
See, those articles are talking about the moral judgement of food replacing that of sex because attitudes towards sex are so "open" and "easy-going," but what I find interesting here is that in individuals, an eating disorder (characterized by both preoccupation with and fear of food) is often related to a desire, conscious or not, to suppress sexual feelings. So on a cultural scale I'd say our preoccupation with food (and fear of it) has more to do with perceiving sex and sexuality as more of a threat than ever, perhaps *because* of the increasingly overt exposure we have to it via social acceptance and pressures, advertising, and the like. Consider that the "ideal" body composition favoured by our society these days is, for both men and women, one that correlates to infertility and suppressed libido. So maybe rather than food being the new sex, it's that food ("nutrition" really is more accurate, reflecting the link to health) is the new religion, and religion needs a Devil. Sex will no longer do, so it's food!
Chris Serong
10/28/2012 05:31:23 pm
That makes perfect sense to me. Which is also a bit worrying. Funnily enough, having moved several inches of waist measurement away from the 'ideal' body composition, and having recovered from disordered eating patterns somewhat, I feel sexier than I did before. But I too was kinda skeptical about the notion of sex being less subject to moral judgement these days - I'm not sure how it was really judged in the past, but it's not like these days you can shag with reckless abandon without raising a few eyebrows... nor can you be celibate without eyebrows being raised... dang. Leave a Reply. |