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Crafting stories from the ideas that tumble from my mind.
In today’s post for My Tumblemind Utopia, I discuss how having Type 2 Diabetes redefines my utopian view of food. A food lover can adjust to regulate and mitigate the effects of high blood sugar.
I love food! I have the joy of being married to a German wife who cooks such wonderful dishes. She bakes some of the most delicious German cakes in the world. I’ve never had a heavy sweet tooth and the reason her cakes are so good is that they are only mildly sweet. In contrast, American deserts are so sugar-laden that they taste like I’m dumping tablespoons of sugar directly into my mouth.
My favorite is her Erdbeerkuchen (Strawberry Cake). She bakes a thin fluffy torte in a flat pan that creates a scalloped lip when flipped out. She then loads the torte with precisely upright-placed whole strawberries at the perfect ripeness. Then she boils water to mix a powder that produces pale red gelatin and pours it over the strawberries. She then refrigerates the cake a couple of hours for the gelatin to set. We then get to enjoy her treat with an afternoon coffee in the very German tradition.
In addition to the cakes, I love Sauerbraten, Schweinebraten, Rouladen, Ente, Ganz, Bratwurst, Weisswurst, Gelbwurst, Schinkenwurst, and more. (Except Blutwurst.) I really enjoy German food. I even learned how to make homemade Sauerkraut. Many stores and bakeries in America sell what they call German Rye bread. However, I was always disappointed because the texture and the flavor didn’t match my memory of German bakery bread. Therefore, I decided to learn to bake German-style rye bread. Experimenting over several iterations, I finally baked a perfect sourdough Roggenmischbrot that looks and tastes like a loaf purchased in Germany. (Follow the link for instructions.)
For all this love of food, though, I discovered in early March that I now have Type 2 Diabetes. I had been flirting with it for a few years but this time I really jumped up into a high A1C diabetes level.
Research has shown that Type 2 Diabetes is the result of the body becoming resistant to processing glucose (sugar) in the blood. All carbohydrates get converted to glucose which is the source of fuel for the body. In simplistic terms, the hormone insulin serves the function of feeding cells with glucose. Excess glucose is converted to fat and stored in fat cells.
When the body begins to resist the insulin’s ability to feed the cells, elevated blood sugars results. Type 2 Diabetes can be managed through diet and exercise. Failing to manage this disease can result in:
I’ve been fighting this for over three years. It’s been a difficult battle as I need to enlist my wife’s help to cook things outside our usual German and American menu. My wife loves to cook. So much so, that I have to beg her to eat at restaurants because she gets such joy from cooking our meals.
Do you know how many different ways she can cook potatoes? At least a dozen! However, with the latest high A1C result, I’ve asked her to only cook one small potato for me and some other vegetables or salad to replace all the potatoes I used to eat. The same reduction in portions goes for pasta and rice as well.
I adopted the Keto diet three years ago when first informed I was diabetic. As a result, I drove the A1C back down to pre-diabetic levels over six months without medication. The difficulty is in maintaining the diet in the face of the constant stream of potatoes, pasta, bread, and rice served with almost every meal. I regained diabetic status because I surrendered to the onslaught of carbs. And that doesn’t count the almost weekly delicious dessert.
How can one win this battle when almost every weekend your spouse bakes? I’m both delighted and tortured with sweetbread with raisins and rum-infused icing, cheesecake, apple cake, coffee cake, Apfelstrudel, Black Forest cake, and on and on and on. And every summer she stocks the freezer with ice cream too. I’ve actually thrown away half-filled tubs of ice cream to keep from indulging and told her not to buy more. But another tub appears for me to spoon out what is effectively poison for someone with Type 2 Diabetes.
To deal with my dessert dilemma, I have chosen to limit myself to one dessert serving per week. She has agreed to take the rest to her coworkers or to share with an elderly neighbor we occasionally provide food for.
The reality is, I’m responsible for what I stuff in my face. The Keto diet offers the ability to regulate and control Type 2 Diabetes. However, I can’t treat it as a temporary diet, rather I must consider this type of eating a lifestyle change. I still love food, but I can’t blame my wife’s cooking for my predicament. I’m the one that must revise my view of food to adapt to and adopt the changes that I hope will result in a healthy outcome.
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Melissa says: Eating healthy foods and losing weight was so much easier for me when I was single. Mealtimes are communal, so it is difficult to make changes when the whole family isn’t on board. It sounds like you have a good plan to share the yummy foods with coworkers. My problem is that anything healthy that I cook will be vehemently refused by the kids. I wish there was a simple solution that would make everyone happy and meet everyone’s needs. I haven’t figured it out yet.
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