Day 3
August 10, 2011
Wt. 260.8
Blood Sugar (first thing in the morning) 178
Blood Pressure 144/90 60 bpm.
Rules Rule
Over the next few blogs I am going to be explaining the rules and the reasoning, research and science behind them. Today I am beginning with Rule 6 because this one is key to success in beating back this thing that is trying to take over our bodies.
Rule 6. Stop eating after 8 p.m. and do not eat until noon the next day or until your blood sugar is in the normal range.
In my other blogs I mentioned that our bodies seem better at extracting energy from the food we eat and that people who have undergone laparoscopic or gastric bypass surgery quit being diabetic and that diabetes is a disease of abundance. Well, as I was unwilling to have my guts cut out I looked for something I could do that would mimic the effects. The answer came to me while I was fasting.
I had decided to do a juice fast, just a few days of cleansing but after day six of juicing I couldn’t stand the thought of another drop of juice. What had tasted like the food of the gods now made my stomach feel like it wanted to fall over like a plugged gopher. So I decided not to eat for a few days. Just water. I’d done this as a younger man and rather enjoyed it but hadn’t done one for over 20 years. What I discovered was absolutely amazing. I checked my glucose levels and blood pressure first thing in the morning and found my blood pressure dropped to really nice healthy numbers and my glucose jumped to really high numbers and then gradually came down during the course of the day.
That’s right. Nothing at all in my stomach. No food, no juice, nothing, and my blood sugar was up–What was going on?
The answer was several things were happening. First my body was burning stores of fat and a small amount of muscle mass. It did this at night while I was resting so in the morning I was fully charged. This didn’t change until the very end of the fast although as the fast went on, the morning numbers got lower and lower even though they were still higher than a non diabetic’s numbers. I talked to a diabetic friend of mine who has a much more serious case than mine and he told me that this was normal. Humans wake up with fully charged glucose levels and that scientists speculate that our ancestors had to be ready to hit the ground running first thing in the morning and there usually wasn’t a bowl of corn flakes waiting for them to give them that energy. The other thing that happens is that a lot of digestive processes are at work at night.
Food doesn’t just go into the stomach and become everything the body needs to grow and move. It hits the stomach first and gets torn apart by digestive juices. It then moves into the upper end of the small intestines for the extraction process. The first thing that goes into the blood steam is the easily digested sugars and starches and fats. But the process doesn’t stop there. There are another 25 feet of small intestines and five feet of large intestines. The food that got torn apart by our teeth and then shredded even more by our stomachs has a 30 foot obstacle course ahead of it and it can take several days to make its way to a nice satisfying dump. Bowel movement, if you prefer.
The entire time it is being digested. Every bit of energy is being extracted and turned into the building blocks of our body and the fuel that makes it go. We don’t run on steak and potatoes, we run on the sugars extracted from them.
Wow.
So yesterday’s breakfast, lunch and dinner is still with us, still being strip mined for every last bit of nutrients. Probably some of the food we ate the day before is still with us as well and still going through the process. So-here is the question, and it is a really important one for you to consider. Why do we need to eat breakfast when our blood sugar is high, and in the case of diabetics-way higher than it should be?
Because our mommas told us to. Nutritionists told them. And my cynical side says that the manufacturers of breakfast foods told the nutritionists to tell our mommas to tell us that we had to eat a good breakfast. There may be some validity to this for young people, children whose bodies are still growing and burn calories the way a wild fire burns dry grass, but we aren’t children anymore and our bodies aren’t growing in the same way. So why do we need to pop 500 to 1000 calories in our systems every morning? We don’t. We do it because we have always done it that way.
There is a story motivational speakers like to tell. It's about a man watching his wife prepare a ham for Easter Sunday dinner. His wife slices off both ends of the ham and puts it in the oven. He asks her why she does that. She says it makes it taste better. He asks her who taught her that. She says her mother taught her. Then the mother-in-law walks in the room and he asks her the same questions and gets the same answers. Then the door bell rings and it is the mother-in-law’s mother. The husband asks her the same questions. The grandmother says that when she was a young mother she had a very small oven and unless you cut off the ends of the ham it wouldn’t fit in the oven. She had no idea why her daughter and granddaughter thought it tasted better.
Just because something has always been done a certain way does not mean it has to be done that way forever and eating breakfast is one of those things. I remember talking to an old farmer who told me that the big meal of the day was lunch. They would get up really early, grab a couple of biscuits left over from the previous evening and then go to work. They would work like fiends until noon and then go inside for a monster meal that the women had been working on all morning. Then they would go out and work like fiends all afternoon and come back to the house so tired they could hardly stay awake to eat. The evening meal tended to be light.
This is the back story for Rule number six. I decided to try giving my body a longer stretch to use up the calories already in the system and not add to the already high numbers first thing in the morning. As you can see, if you’ve been following my blogs these past few days, the numbers are coming down. The first day it was 285. The night before I’d eaten late and had something more to eat later. The morning of day 2 was down 100 points. I had a bit of cantaloupe, about 1/3 of one, about 10 p.m.–habits can be hard to break, but I told Bob he was gonna have to be happy with the cantaloupe cause he wasn’t getting nothing else. Last night the same with the addition of a half a cup of chili I’d just finished making. Bob was screaming at me and so I gave in just a little. This morning the count was down just a few more points at 178.
Tonight Bob is in for a really rude surprise. He isn’t getting a single bite of anything after 8 p.m.. Nada, zip, zilch. In the morning my number will be higher than normal but it should be much lower than this morning’s numbers. We shall see.
At the end of 7 days I will add in the morning exercise routine and you will be able to see how that affects what I’m doing as well.
The goal here is to help the body do what it used to be able to do on its own. If you keep shoveling in the food your body never gets a chance to get back to normal because there is always more and more stuff to deal with. Remember that old I Love Lucy episode where Lucy gets a job in a candy factory. She is supposed to put chocolates in boxes as they come off the line on a conveyor belt. At first the belt moves along slowly and she has no problem keeping up. But then it speeds up and pretty soon she is overwhelmed and starts stuffing chocolates in her pockets and down the front of her dress and trying to eat them. Chocolates are going everywhere, all over her, all over the floor, it is chaos. That is what has happened to our bodies with good old Bob in charge.
Getting Bob out of the driver’s seat won’t be easy but within a few days of eliminating the evening and morning feedings you will begin to see results.
One last note before I go-I may hate test strips but in the beginning it is important to test several times in the morning to see where you are. Is that really a hypoglycemic crisis or just your body not having adjusted to the new lower high numbers? Keep a close watch, make notes on how you feel as you come down from your sugar high.
I’ll take on another rule in the next blog.
Jim
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