Epstein fury and some backsliding.

Damn that guy taking up space in the White House anyway. I was all set to write a mea culpa blog post about how working this session screwed up my low-carb eating plan, and then I woke up yesterday morning, as we all did, to the news that Trump's latest gambit to draw headlines away from the Epstein files is to team up with Bibi Netanyahu to bomb Iran -- which country's nuclear capability we supposedly obliterated in June of last year, or so said Trump at the time.

The warmongers in Washington named the attack Operation Epic Fury, but it took no time at all for the memesters to change it to Operation Epstein Fury.

Already some US service members have lost their lives in retaliatory bombing, and Trump has said more are likely to die. Isn't this the same guy who said that if he was re-elected, he wasn't going to start any wars? His supporters believed him. And now, here we are.

I am so tired of this timeline.

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Anyway, I'm not going to let him derail my plans for this post. My original topic is not good news, either, but I'll put in a little palate cleanser at the end. 

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So yeah, the last week or two of this year's legislative session was hard. I whined about how hard it was here a couple of weeks back. What I didn't mention in that post was how the stress and anxiety, coupled with freely available, carb-heavy food, pinged my bad eating habits of yesteryear. I'd been amping up the snacking anyway, but this session put me back where I was toward the end of my time in DC.

Well, not completely back to those days. This year, I wasn't leaving work in the middle of the afternoon to head over to some shop to stock up on candy and a bag of chips, then polish off all of it at my desk before quitting time. But it was bad.

This past Monday, I had my regular appointment with my endocrinologist. Before session, my A1c was 6.5; on Monday, it was 8.9. Optimal for diabetics is less than 7.0. So yeah -- not good.

She told me to go back to a strict low-carb diet -- protein and veggies only. She outfitted me with a continuous glucose monitor that doesn't require a prescription and had me download an app that would let her see how I was doing. And then she asked me if I wanted to try Ozempic. I sighed and said okay.

Not my pen. This is a stock photo.
Artmim | Deposit Photos

I sighed because it felt like going backwards. When I left DC, I was not only taking Ozempic, I was also on a drug called Invokana that basically filters out all the extra sugar in your blood and sends it out through your kidneys. Neither one was too pricey when I was on the law firm's Cadillac insurance plan, but once I retired, hoo boy. It was those eye-watering prescription prices that made me try low-carbing in the first place. And low carbing worked -- until it didn't.

But it worked far longer than it might otherwise have. A fairly recent study found that most people regain the weight they lost, as well as losing all the other benefits they gained from being on a GLP-1, within two years of stopping the drug. I didn't lose weight when I was on Ozempic before because I was binge eating. But it took me five years to lose the benefits of taking it.

One thing it did help with, I believe, was quieting the food noise in my head. After I moved out here, I remember telling someone that I didn't have a craving for sweets anymore. Now I think that was because of the Ozempic. If it quiets the food noise again, it would be worth the eye-watering prescription price, at least until I can get back on the low-carb track.

I do like the continuous monitor. It's kind of fun, watching the numbers go up and down. I will likely feel different if I backslide again and the graph starts going the wrong way. But I'm pretty sure my numbers will be much better when I see my doctor next. I'll keep y'all posted.

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Okay, here's the palate cleanser. We've had really nice weather here, with highs in the upper 60s. Tigs and I spent some time out on the porch this afternoon, and he alerted me when some birds showed up at the feeder. (I hope you guys can watch this -- I'm never sure about Apple's video format.) 

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These desperate moments of blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. Hang in there.

Big Tobacco -- sorry, Big Food -- fights back.

djmilic | Deposit Photos

Toward the end of my time in DC, I was in a bad way. I had been on and off diets for about 50 years, losing hundreds of pounds, only to gain them all back, plus some. I was on two high-priced drugs for type 2 diabetes, one of which was Ozempic. I knew that diets didn't work, and yet every doctor I saw told me I needed to go on another one. When I resisted, I was called noncompliant. The whole dance stressed me out and gave me a binge eating disorder. 

Then a therapist told me about health at every size. The idea is that the scale is not the be-all and end-all -- that your weight doesn't matter as long as your blood pressure, etc., are fine. I glommed onto the idea like a life preserver. The therapist sent me to a dietitian, who recommended a book called The F*ck-It Diet: Eating Should Be Easy. (The publisher put the asterisk in the title, not me.) A lot of what the author wrote made sense to me, so I decided to try eating whatever I wanted, whenever I was hungry.

My fasting blood sugar shot up to about 180. (Note to those who know nothing about blood sugar readings: a fasting reading of between 70 and 100 is normal; 200 is high; at 400, you need to go to the E.R.; and if it's as high as 600, you could go into a coma and die.) I started to maybe think I was being sold a bill of goods -- that as a diabetic, maybe I couldn't eat whatever I wanted. When I broached the subject with the dietitian, I was a titch confrontational -- but the upshot was that she didn't know whether a fasting blood sugar reading of 180 was dangerous for a diabetic or not. We parted ways immediately. Very shortly thereafter, I also parted ways with the therapist who'd sent me to her.

This was not my first run-in with dietitians and nutritionists, although it was the most egregious. So this past week, I wasn't terribly surprised to see this article in the Washington Post: "As obesity rises, Big Food and dietitians push 'anti-diet' advice". It's a gift article, so feel free to click through and read it. The bottom line is that big food manufacturers like General Mills are co-opting the health-at-every-size message and turning it on its head. They claim to be empowering people to reject fat shaming and eat anything they want -- including, of course, Big Food's highly-processed products. To get there, they're enlisting dietitians as social media influencers, even to the extent of paying them to promote the manufacturers' products. (That link is also to a gift article. Both are the result of a new partnership between the Post and The Examination, a nonprofit news organization that specializes in coverage of public health issues around the world.)

The worst part is how these food manufacturers are distorting the health-at-every-size message. Its roots are in the 1960s civil rights movement, according to the article; the original goal was to promote equal access to healthcare. By 1995, the movement had come up with "intuitive eating" as a way for people, including those with eating disorders, to learn to listen for internal hunger cues that diet culture had taught them to ignore. 

As interest in intuitive eating increased, Big Food began to pay attention. Clearly, the industry is scared that the anti-diet movement, along with the success of drugs like Wegovy (aka Ozempic formulated for weight loss) in tamping down desire for junk food, are going to upend their business model. After all, obesity has been deemed a healthcare crisis. So the industry is manipulating the movement's message by "essentially shift[ing] accountability for the health crisis away from the food industry for creating ultra-processed junk foods laden with food additives, sugars and artificial sweeteners," as last week's article says.

This looks suspiciously like the sort of propaganda that Big Tobacco employed for decades to convince its customers that its addictive, cancer-causing products weren't really that bad, and were even healthy.

Last fall, according to the Post/Examination article, the Federal Trade Commission cracked down on a number of influencers and food industry trade groups for not being explicit about who was funding the influencers' posts. But that just means the influencers have to be clear about who's paying for their messaging. They don't have to change their advice.

I'm not trying to discredit all dietitians. I'm sure many of them offer nutritionally sound information and don't take kickbacks for social media posts from anybody. But we've received so much terrible information about nutrition from "experts" over the years -- eggs cause high cholesterol (LOL, nope), margarine is better than butter (actually, the trans fats in margarine make butter the better choice), high fructose corn syrup is fine (not so much), dairy fat is bad (that one's being disproven, too) -- that, well, just be careful about whom you listen to. Especially if it's a paid influencer on social media.

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By the way, I didn't lose any weight on Ozempic. See, Ozempic makes your appetite go away. But a big appetite was never my problem; my problem was binge eating due to stress. I ate whether I was hungry or not. It wasn't until I retired, moved cross-country, and started low-carbing that I've lost weight and kept it off.

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These moments of doughnut moustrapping have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. Stay safe!

More on low carbing and such.

 

Bubble Beanie | Deposit Photos

Before I move on from the topic of low carbing (trust me, I will move on!), I wanted to clear up a few things.

After last week's post, I had a few questions about whether low carb is the same thing as gluten free. Short answer: It's not. Here's why.

Gluten is the thing that holds bread together. It's a protein found in wheat and certain other grains (there's a list at the link). Folks with celiac disease, which is an autoimmune disease, can't eat anything with gluten in it, because their bodies fight back by attacking the lining of the small intestine. Eventually it affects their body's ability to absorb nutrients from the food they eat. The symptoms range from bloating, constipation and diarrhea to migraines to anemia to anxiety. Not everybody gets all of the symptoms, and some folks get none of them. There's a test your doctor can give you to find out whether you have the disease.

Then there are the folks who don't have celiac disease, but they're sensitive to gluten. They feel better when they avoid foods containing it.

Lots of foods are high in carbs but have zero gluten -- for example, potatoes, tortilla chips, candy*, and regular sodas. Some types of flour are okay for the gluten-free crowd but have too many carbs for a low-carb diet -- for example, cornmeal and rice flour. By the same token, some flours are low carb but bad for the gluten-free crowd; I mentioned last week that vital wheat gluten is one of these. 

It gets crazier, particularly for folks with diabetes, because diabetics are virtually always told to eat whole grains like brown rice and whole wheat bread -- even though brown rice has a glycemic index (how quickly a food will raise your blood sugar, from 0 to 100) of 55 and whole wheat flour's glycemic index is 69.

Cornmeal's glycemic index is 70. Coconut flour, which shows up in a lot of low-carb foods, has a glycemic index of 50.

Now, 50 is supposedly pretty low. But compare it with almond flour's glycemic index of zero. And nuts, of course, have no gluten. So almond flour is a good choice for both folks avoiding carbs and folks avoiding gluten.

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A word about the graphic up top: I'd never heard of a paleo AIP diet before, so I looked it up. 

I'd heard of paleo, which is all about eating like our Neanderthal forebears did. You're allowed meat, seafood, eggs, fruits, veggies, and nuts and seeds. Verboten foods include beans and legumes, dairy, refined sugars, grains, any flour, anything fermented, and coffee. I couldn't tell you why some of these foods are off limits -- seems like even a Neanderthal could gather wild grains for porridge or something -- but anyway, that's how the eating plan works.

AIP was a new one on me. It's short for "autoimmune protocol," and it's basically an elimination diet to help reduce inflammation, which is suspected to cause some autoimmune disorders. First you do a version of paleo for a few weeks; then you gradually add back in certain foods and keep track of whether they make your symptoms worse.

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Speaking of nuts and diabetes: This past week, the American Academy of Pediatrics made me all kinds of crazy when they issued new guidelines for treating obesity in children. The AAP is now recommending that pediatricians prescribe weight loss drugs for kids as young as 12 and bariatric surgery for kids 13 and up. For the younger set -- maybe as young as six, or even two! -- doctors should embark on an intensive program of lifestyle therapy, including behavioral and nutritional advice, for both the child and the parents.

Do you suppose it's a coincidence that this new, intensive approach has followed so closely on the heels of the Food and Drug Administration's approval of Wegovy (a.k.a. Ozempic, an injectible drug for diabetes) as a weight loss drug for kids as young as 12? Yeah, neither do I.

The AAP says the old approach of waiting to see whether the kid will outgrow the fat isn't working anymore. Too many fat kids are turning into fat teens, the AAP says, with the attendant risks of heart disease and diabetes and yada yada. Okay, but much of the weight loss advice I've received from doctors and dieticians over the years has been simplistic, outdated, and just plain wrong. Do we really want to hand our kids over to Big Pharma and Big Diet? Because it'll be lobbyists from those industries that shape the assistance our kids get, and I don't trust those lobbyists to be helpful to anyone but their investors.

Remember when Big Tobacco promised to 'fess up about how unhealthy and addictive smoking is, and then finessed their way around that promise? If you don't think this thing with kids and obesity is going to go down the same road, you're living in a fantasy world.

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*You'd be surprised what manufacturers sneak flour into. Even some candies have flour in them -- caramel creams immediately come to mind. Gotta check the ingredients on everything.

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These moments of floury blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. Stay safe!