I spent most of the 2.5 years since my diagnosis in denial. I tried everything except for actually changing what I was eating. I refused to give up my favourite “treats”. Right up until the point where I had symptoms that I couldn’t ignore – 18 hrs of nerve pain/numbness.
That was my wake-up call, and sheer terror changed my attitude. I suddenly found it genuinely and trivially easy to change what I ate to strict keto, exercise more, do some intermittent fasting – and as a result, achieved remission in 100 days. From 79 to 42 mmol/mol (9.4% to 6.0%).
It’s simple – but that doesn’t mean it’s easy – and I think a major reason people struggle with making the most important change (cutting out carbs) is that they are addicted to sugar. Either they don’t realise it or refuse to accept it.
Addiction is hard. I had the advantage that I stopped smoking over 25 years ago, and subsequently quit drinking as well, so dealing with my addictions is something I’m familiar with.
Ironically, it was during my battles with addiction that I first came across the idea of food as an addiction. It was reading Allen Carr’s “Easy Way to Quit Smoking” that finally got me to quit smoking, and his book on drinking was later to help me with my mild drinking problem.
But it was also around that time that I read another of his books, “The Easy Way To Lose Weight”.
In it, he talks about sugar as an addiction. He argued that we don’t actually ‘love’ these foods; we are simply addicted to the relief of the withdrawal pangs they create. He called it the ‘Little Monster’ in the stomach – that nagging feeling of hunger that isn’t true physical need, but a craving for the next hit of dopamine and glucose.
Carr’s genius was in pointing out that ‘junk food’ doesn’t actually taste good – we’ve just been conditioned to ignore the cloying, artificial reality of it because our brains are screaming for the energy spike. He was an early proponent of a natural whole foods approach – something “evolutionarily appropriate” – heavy on protein and fresh vegetables with almost all processed foods removed.
He was really promoting a paleo diet before that term was in wide circulation and at a time when the rest of the world was very much in the “low fat” craze that led to our current diabetic epidemic. He was certainly ahead of his time.
I did try paleo back then, but found it really hard. In hindsight, I think I was sadly too addicted to accept it fully. Where tobacco and alcohol are obvious poisons, and his arguments were irrefutable, I rationalized away his views on diet because the world around me was still telling me that pasta was ‘healthy fuel.’ I regret that profoundly today.
But there’s no question that having that knowledge in the back of my mind did eventually pay off – it really helped when it came to formulating my eating plan.
Our addiction is really not anybody’s fault except the food industry – ultra-processed food manufacturers have literally spent millions using scientists from the tobacco industry, to make their products addictive. This is not just a conspiracy theory; it’s a fact. Tobacco giants like Philip Morris and R.J. Reynolds bought food companies like Kraft and Nabisco and applied the same “craveability” chemistry to snacks that they used for cigarettes, seeking to achieve the “bliss point” which overcomes our natural satiety signals.
The first two weeks are the hardest because you’re essentially going through detox. But if you can push through that initial fog, the habit takes over. Tell yourself you’re just going to make a change for three weeks. By then, the addiction has lost its grip, and the new habits have found their legs.
I believe that you, too, can overcome your sugar addiction and achieve remission from type 2 diabetes. You just have to be prepared to make the change and commit to it. Your life and health literally depend on it.
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