A few months ago I joined a type 1 diabetes carnivore group. It's been a wonderful place to ask questions and also to help others.
One of the members is around 70 years old and has been doing this for many years now, and I really look up to her. She posts multiple times a day with every meal she eats, how she treated it, and how it affects her blood glucose levels. She recently made an exciting announcement about how her blood glucose levels are the best they have ever been: her A1c was 4.8, an achievement that even non-diabetics would be envious of.
Yesterday, she was hit by a car.
Her son was visiting from out of town and she posted that they just finished a nice meal at a restaurant together as a family - steak and eggs. As they drove home a careless driver crashed into her side at an intersection.
She survived, but her arm and chest were bloodied and bruised. She refused to be taken to the hospital. She has learned, as I and many others have, that the emergency room is not safe for type 1 diabetics (and the ambulance is not a safe place for anyone's wallet in the US). Thanksfully she seems to be doing okay so far aside from the pain.
Perspective
This is another one of those jarring moments when all your striving, worries, and effort take on a different hue in the impartial light of death. I spend so much time trying to be healthy, trying to survive, while still knowing that I too will die.
When I see someone else who has achieved the goals I want to achieve, and then nearly lose their life, it has me reflect on what I'm even doing. If I knew I was going to die tomorrow, you can bet your ass that I'm going to be eating a gallon of rocky road ice cream and a dozen bavarian cream cronuts (a sinful cross between a croissant and donut).
My weakness
Obsessions
If I achieved my health goals right at this moment (normal blood sugars, no thyroid problems, no gut issues, full of energy), as many others have strived for, THEN WHAT?
I have often put off living my life to attend to my health, and so if there is no health problems to attend to, then I'm forced to start deciding what I want to spend my healthy days doing. However many chronically ill people live their lives anyway, despite having the same or even more severe health problems than I have.
I am a bit of an obsessive type of person. I find something I care about and I just lunge for it. I seem to cycle through a few different versions of myself that care about different things.
Right now, it's my health. Much of the time it's whatever work I'm doing. Or it might be buddhist/spiritual practice. Or a tv show, video game, book, or podcast. It rotates around depending on the month/day. It's somewhat jarring to wake up one morning after several weeks of an obsession to just not care about it anymore. So I wonder what will capture my attention next once my health-focused self gets bored.
Gratitude
It's amazing to me that we can experience so much death in our life and still our brains assume that death is something far away from us and those around us. Of all the old news in the world, this is some of the oldest. "Yeah, yeah, everyone's gonna die someday, so what?" It's a relief to brush off our impending death as something to not worry about. "That's for later. What can we do about it anyways?"
Death is certain but its time is most uncertain, so worrying about it just doubles our trouble. We tell ourselves to be grateful because nothing lasts. We use impermance as a reminder to have gratitude. But gratitude doesn't last either. Reminding ourselves to relish what we have and not take it for granted is about as helpful as telling an angry person to calm down.
Suffering is sometimes described as, "Wanting things to be anything other than what they are." Gratitude seems to take on an opposite mindset. You could say that gratitude is an appreciation for the way things are, best balanced with the equanimous appreciation that the way things are will change too.
Diet
With my recent adventures with blindness and migraines, I first decided that I would try to get into ketosis. But the deeper I got into it this past week by reducing my protein and upping my fat, the worse I felt. I developed a horrific keto rash again across my entire chest and neck which has lost me several nights of sleep.
One thing I've noticed as well is that the more protein I eat, the more dehydrated I get. So the reduction in protein was actually really great for my hydration! However the massive amount of fat that I was adding in the form of tallow pulled me into ketosis, which I just can't seem to adapt to no matter how many times I try over the years.
Thus, I'm pulled toward rebalancing my diet once more.
Moderations
I have a lot of admiration for people who try to act as healthy role models for others. They take care of their body the best they can and live a life that we may want to model aspects of ourselves. Right now I'm looking towards people like Paul Saladino MD who shows what he eat in a day and even spends an hour explaining all of the results of his blood work. Paul was originally on the carnivore diet as well, but after some of his own health issues, he has moved towards an 'animal-based' diet that features lots of meats, organs, fruits, dairy, and honey.
I've been able to find one type 1 diabetic who follows a similar way of eating and he's become a body builder with an a1c of 4.6! He's a real inspiration, and I think I can learn a lot from him.
As one of the oldest type 1 diabetics to ever reach 90 years old, Dr. Richard Bernstein often said, "Big Inputs, Big Mistakes. Small Inputs, Small Mistakes." So I'm probably not going to go so ham with 400 carbs like I did when I was high carb low fat, which led to some big crashes and my own hospitalization. So I'm eating more like... moderate fat, moderate protein, moderate carbs.... moderate... everything. Haha! I'm also going to have to start using exercise and muscles as an important blood-glucose lowering tool, which for me is a good thing. I've spent a little too long imprisoning myself in sedentary behavior. Time to get my butt moving again!
Song of the Week
I am very tired today and didn't want to write this blog. Whenever I'm feeling unmotivated or depressed, this song starts to automatically play in my head. It's a bit cheeky and always cheers me up.
Thanks for reading :)
-Jason