HEALTHY BODY: LEARNING AND CHANGING - MORE SUGAR BLUES

"Dear Body,
I'm sorry I've been so hard on you.  In your 20's you were slender and beautiful, with smooth clear skin and vibrant red hair.  Still, I criticized your skinny arms and hated your red-headed freckled paleness.  In your 30's and 40's, after the kids came along, I filled up all those sleepless nights, worries, frustrations, and exhaustions with cheese, pizza, and ice cream.  Then I hated what you had become -- overweight and out of shape; lethargic and perpetually tired.  In your 50's you found yourself the middle of a sandwich between acting out teens and failing elders, working full time, stressed to the max.  Hello Chardonnay.  And desserts.  And "fast and easy" anything.  And more pizza.  I was just trying to help!
I'm sorry,
Your Psyche"

Body: "I know.  I forgive you."

And I do.  Coping mechanisms are not always conscious, healthy, and intentional.  They are often detrimental, habitual, and often addictive.  In my case the food industry was in cahoots with my poor eating choices by actually making foods in laboratories with chemicals and ingredients purposely designed to be addicting to humans, ensuring a steady profit margin for the manufacturer of "convenience foods" for the busy, stressed, and overwhelmed working men and women, parents, teens, children, anyone really, who had one serving and said, "I want more!  That tastes good!"

The tail ends and early years of each decade is always a transition time. I look back at my late 50's as a time when I finally started to care for myself with intention and get smart about why certain foods issued a siren call to my cravings.  I went to my first (life-changing) yoga class at 58; in my early 60's I quit drinking alcohol.  I lost 25 pounds.  All those years of struggle with food and drink and the scale were fading into the past, mostly.  The scale is still a nemesis at times.

In my 60's I've been learning more and more about healthful living and how to have a strong body.  Aging will do that -- I can't stop the clock from it's inexorably ticking down, but I can choose to live every ticking minute as healthfully and happy as possible.

Now having just turned 69 and heading into my early 70's, I've completed Yoga Teacher Training and  I'm eating a 90% plant-based diet.  Most recently I have committed to giving up sugar in the form of sweet treats and desserts -- and as much as possible any added sugars in the foods I buy.  That part is super hard since everything (thank you processed food industry) has some form of sugar added to it.  I look at my favorite bread and see it has 2 grams of added sugar.  I still eat it, for now.  I look at my favorite salad dressing and see it has 6 grams of added sugar.  It's off the grocery list.

In my reading about the dangers of sugar, here are a few things the Beating Sugar Addiction for Dummies and Fat Chance books lists for deleterious effects of sugar on our health.  See which ones you you can relate to:

• Depression
• Anxiety
• Obesity
• Diabetes (Type 2 is an epidemic!)
• Liver Disease
• Cholesterol imbalance (and attendent cardiovascular health deterioration)
• Metabolic Syndrome (chronic metabolic diseases may result in: heart attack, stroke, heart failure, diabetes, cancer, dementia, cirrhosis of the liver -- all travel with obesity, which is a marker of metabolic disease.)
• Hypothyroid Disease
• Chronic Fatigue
• Fibromyalgia
• Irritable Bowel Syndrome
• Immune System Impairment
• Bone Loss
• Wrinkles

Does an overload of sugar alone cause each of these.  No, not all, but some.  Does an overload of sugar exacerbate all of these? Yes. There is rock solid scientific evidence demonstrating the biochemical cascade of effects, made worse with each sugar binge, that occur in the body when we "treat" ourselves to a Dairy Queen Blizzard or its equivalent.  

I am not a scientist or a doctor so I have to wade through the lay literature written for people like me and still I get confused.  But I am not so dense as to not see clearly that sugar is not a good thing for us to be ingesting in the enormous amounts we do.  There are real health consequences to our love affair with sugar.  I'm learning about them and making daily decisions around what I put in my mouth just because it tastes good, because the "tastes good" test is one the food industry has forced and fostered, our culture has encouraged, and my sad, addicted taste buds (and brain) craves for all the wrong reasons.  

The more I learn, the more I believe sugar is a toxin to be avoided.  This sounds extreme even to my own ears, so I've a ways to go, and OHMYGOD does this mean no more Costco Tuxedo Cake?  Say it ain't so....   (Yes, it is so.)

In checking my BMI (that marker of healthy height/weight proportion) on my apple shaped physique, I see that I am still one tick over the line into 'overweight'.   I'm determined to rectify that.  This is my year to do it.

Here's to health, for ourselves and our planet.  ©

Photo Credit: www.pixabay.com

SOME GREAT RESOURCES:
Beating Sugar Addiction for Dummies by Dan DeFigio
Fat Chance - Beating the Odds Against Sugar, Processed Food, Obesity, and Disease by Robert H. Lustig, M.D., M.S.I.
Salt, Sugar, Fat -- How the Food Giants Hooked Us by Michael Moss