A2C: Allergic to Carbs

I haven’t written on here in over 6 months. A blog where you discuss the trials and tribulations of weight loss doesn’t exactly work if you aren’t genuinely trying to lose weight anymore.

And that, is exactly what happened.

After my last 211 weigh in I was able to get even lower. I was able to drop down to, at my lowest, 202. I saw the scale say it. Admittedly I was probably dehydrated, no food in my intestines, and about to have faint, BUT DAMN IT IT SAID 202. With the encouragement (Yes, I am easily manipulated) of friends and family (Everyone decided i was too thin) I went back to my old ways. And over the next 6 months or so I have managed to regress quite a bit. Thankfully I am not close to where I started (I was 252 point something or other, but that was also after a few days of dieting. Im pretty sure i was close to 260) and currently I am back to 224.

At first I thought it was acceptable.

As I said, I was told I looked too skinny. As you can see from the picture on the right I WAS quite smaller than I had been. My mom literally expressed concerned for me.  A friend said I had a lolli pop look about me. And did I mention I was hungry? I was tired of being good and constantly on top of my diet and getting my ass out there to exercise. I just wanted to go eat, drink and be merry with no constraints. And that folks, is what I did for the better part of 6 Months. I would go back to the Low Carb/Diet life for a week here, few days there, but I would inevitably go BACK to all of the bad habits that got me to 260 in the first place. Funny enough, I think I forgot WHY I was trying to lose weight. I wasn’t thinking about all of the health problems my mom has and the fact that I was right on track to experiencing everything she went through, plus perhaps, a bit extra. It became more about how my friends responded to my new frame. What clothing I could put on that I couldn’t dream of before. I was trying to be a model as opposed to healthy Elon.

And now here I am. January 6th, 2010. 224 Pounds.

I haven’t actually said out loud how much I gained because I didn’t want to acknowledge my failing. I was still much smaller than everyone remembered me being so I’ve sorta rode this out silently. But reality has in fact set in again. My mother continues to have health issues due to complications with her diabetes and for a few days I wasn’t feeling well at all and I thought perhaps my Blood Glucose was elevated.  Upon testing it I found that i was actually not that high. I wasn’t within normal range but i was no where near as high as what my body was telling me i felt. Which, I found…strange…

I did some research and I came across the guidelines for Diabetes. I had never been to a Dr. specifically for my Diabetes. I worked in a hospital, and felt sick one day, and my mom tested my Glucose and it was sky high (Her meter actually just said “High” and then the her friends down in the nursing station tested it and it said “High” again. At this point it was a far gone conclusion that I must be diabetic.

But with my recent testing of my blood glucose levels it didn’t add up. A non-medicated, non-exercising diabetic should have had higher readings, i thought. So I continued researching and found the way that Diabetes is actually diagnosed is through 2 tests. A fasting glucose reading and a 2 hour glucose tolerance test. you have your blood glucose levels tested after ingesting 75 grams of Glucose (i.e. 1/3rd cup of sugar i.e. a little more than a 20 oz Coke…i’m not kidding) If you fall under 180 (some say 200) on the test you are NOT diabetic. You are Pre-Diabetic (theres 2 forms of pre-diabetes but I dont remember the acronyms right now) and those 2 forms can be dealt with way easier than ACTUAL diabetes. You can push off diabetes for YEARS.

After doing the tests myself (I have a glucose  meter and I have access to medical grade 1/3rd cup of sugar) I found that i am in FACT pre-diabetic. I believe my smaller frame adds to that cause. Perhaps really fat Elon would have failed that test. Slightly Chubby Elon falls under the line. Upon further reading it says that if you dropped 7 to 10 percent of your body weight you would be in even BETTER shape to deal with this crap. (Read: If perhaps I was still at my lowest weight since I lost weight, I’d be in BETTER shape to deal) and all of a sudden, my focus returned.

My Mom is a living, breathing, 20 years older version of me (we look alike in all honesty) and I watch her suffer a lot. I can’t sign up for that. I’d rather just not be alive than go through the surgeries and the complications and all of the terrible things that seem to all stem from Type 2 Diabetes, which although hereditary, still controllable and preventable. So I’ve cut the blog back on. I’m on my 2nd day back on the Low Carb wagon. I’m in my exercise gear ready to go for a 5 mile run/jog/walk/some sort of movement. I’m trying to remember the focus i had on this very blog 7, 8 months ago.

If motivation is what keeps this blog updated. I think I have it. Lets see how it goes shall well we?

I love food. I don’t think this could ever be argued. Especially after seeing almost 260 pound Elon it would be hard to really question. But now that I’ve been slimming down (The scale said 214 this morning. I’m not updating my weight on the sidebar there until I get a 2nd or 3rd day weigh in. I’d be too happy) I’m always asked what do I eat, how do I eat it, what do I cook?

This past weekend I gave everyone a taste

There was a bit of confusion from some. “Elon, can you eat anything you cooked here?” and the answer? Not really. Some of it I can, but things like the Vanilla Buttercream Expresso Brownie drizzled with a white chocolate ganache? Not so much. But I will cook it and serve it to others.

“BUT CARBS ARE EVIL! YOUR BLOG IS CALLED ALLERGIC TO CARBS!”

Yes. Yes it is called that, thank you for being so observant. But just because I feel I have issues with carbs doesn’t mean society does. Okay, perhaps a lot of society does, but not EVERYONE. My good friend Aaron ate 2 of those Expresso Brownies and he’s thin as a rail. He always has been. I have a tons of friends who keep a very healthy weight and lack health problems in general while enjoying a few cocktails along with some fries or other carb laden stuff. They’re fine.

I’m not.

I have various issues. Being diabetic and overweight is not a very carb friendly lifestyle. Gary Taubes, author of “Good Calories, Bad Calories” puts a lot of interesting ideas out there about obesity. One of which is that its a disorder (this is an idea that quite a few Obesity experts believe as well). I certainly believe it strictly on anecdotal evidence. I see friends who drink and eat and are perfectly fine. I have a friend who’s fat, and i mean WAAAY fatter than I was and yet he has no health issues. He’s not diabetic or ANYTHING.

There are a lot of roads traveled in this world when it comes to nutrition, diet, and health. The idea is to know your path. I didn’t have a few drinks with friends yesterday because for me, I know i’ll gain 10 pounds of water weight. It’ll drop in a day or 2, but who wants to go through all of that. But I would NOT stop someone from having a drink or giving them one of my stacks of beers i have in my house (bought a lot right before i started dropping the weight.) I’m on my own path to a better health and a happy life.   I enjoy conversing with people who are on a similar path and  iI have no problem sharing information with someone who may be suffering from the same crap I was . My mom, who IS overweight and diabetic gets an earful from me about this stuff. Aaron, the skinny dude eating 2 brownies? Not so much.

Low Carbers PICK YOUR BATTLES.

I'll have 2 steaks.

So as I continue to lose weight I have become an ambassador to friends and family.  Not an ambassador of “Black People” (although, I do bring greetings from them too  ) But instead, it seems I now represent all Low Carbers.

Sorry. My sarcasm meter is on HIGH today. I will make sure to update more often so that when i do show up here I’m not so mean .

I realize that the title of this blog might seem odd to people.

“You can’t be allergic to Carbs asswipe.”

See, in my head, people who read this are also unnecessarily mean and use the term “asswipe” as if it were the year 1997.

The title of this blog came to me during my research (read: hours and hours of surfing the web) and I came across an article discussing the idea of a low carb diet. I had done the whole “Low Carb” thing around 2004 and dropped down to the lightest I’ve been since I started getting fat (A svelte 225) but I followed up this diet with a carb frenzy and was so confused as to why I gained the weight back. The site I came across pointed out that diabetes can be controlled via a Low Carb diet. This wasn’t something that I was completely unaware of.

Back in 2003, my first stab at the low carb diet, I did it because my mother, nervous that I might be in full blown diabetes tested my glucose with her meter and it read “Hi.” Now I thought perhaps this was just he machine saying hello to me since this was the first time it received my blood and that the creators of this device were extremely polite. To find out that this was not the case. The machine had the capability to read up to 550. Any glucose reading past that was was read as simply “Hi.” It was suggested that if you happen to get one of these “Hi.” readings, you might want to go to a hospital ickly-quay. Me, being young and thinking that I may, in fact, be Superman, decided that a hospital stay would be ridiculous and that I would just figure out another way of handling things. A co-worker of mine had mentioned this whole Low Carb thing and after hearing that I could eat a pound of bacon and I’d lose weight, it seemed like the obvious choice. I did it and boom. My sugar readings were rock solid.

The thing is I never really sat down and thought about what eating a low carb diet did. It wasn’t until my mom was sick, and i had been feeling really shitty, that I decided to handle my glucose readings. But here’s when I had the epiphany. I was reading about the fact that the ADA admitted that a low carb diet could help control diabetes but they didn’t want to recommend it because it was too hard to follow. Another article written by About.com’s Low Carb expert Laura Dolson then said “No one is going to tell someone with a wheat allergy that it would be too hard to give up wheat.”

It hit me so hard. She was absolutely correct. My g/f has a nut allergy and let me tell you, a SHITLOAD of things have nuts in them. The idea that she’s just going to die because figuring out what has nuts in it is just too hard is ludicrous. We make sure that things that we buy aren’t made in a factory that uses tree nuts. WE READ LABELS, we ask restaurants, we do what we do. And I asked myself, whats the difference between her not eating nuts and me not eating carbs. The answer? I’ll take way longer to die, but It’ll happen and it’ll probably be really painful.

Now whether you believe carbs aren’t that great for you is a completely different argument. One that I will be making here in the future…alot.

I’ve blogged about various things in my blogging lifetime.

Anything that happens to come to mind that I find interesting or think that perhaps my thoughts on a subject needs to be published to the masses (Ego much?) but very rarely have I been as interested and intrigued by something as I am about the concept of…well…food.

I’m a fat man. I have been a fat man for many, many years now (and by many, I mean around 10.) I was an extremely thin child and then somewhere around 19 to 20 the weight caught up to me. but it didn’t hit me hard. I remember weighing in around 21 and being between 213 and 220. I thought I was heavier than I used to be but still wasn’t fat right? (I wore my extra pounds well)

Fast forward a few years. I stand at a whopping 252 pounds. Oh, and on top of it I’m flonkin‘ diabetic(Type 2, blech). I knew that I might be diabetic but I wasn’t absolutely sure. Then my mom got sick (diabetic complications) and I decided to start testing my blood sugar. after a week of fasting numbers of over 300 I realized that I was on the same path as my mom, my uncle (who died at 49 due to complications of his diabetes, oh and he lost his leg before finally dying) and I knew for a fact that it ran on my fathers side as well. What am I going to do?

Well something clicked.

Okay, not really clicked, but more like scared the shit out of me. My mom had a triple bypass surgery when she was 41 due to about 3 heart attacks she had in a 12 hour period. This is very, very interesting since my grandmother DIED a the age of…drumroll please…41. Heart attack. But since it was back in the 60’s the technology we have today wasn’t really around and hence my mom was saved by our technological magic. I assumed I was on the road to the magic #41 heart attack. But my Mom is okay NOW, mean, besides constant heart pain and numerous hospital stays. But she’s a girl. I’ll be more okay. But then I found out that my Mom’s surgery has an expiration date. Meaning the veins they replaced are going to have to be replaced between 8 and 10 years of her initial surgery.

I. Did. Not. Know. That.

It’s funny how denial isn’t just a river in Egypt. Once I realized that this was something that happens every 10 years or so, my brain suddenly remembered quite vividly the absolute hell that was my mom’s initial heart surgery. It took her 6 to 9 months to recover from it and she was still shaky then. I have never seen someone as sick as my mom right after the surgery when they had tubes going down her throat and she couldn’t even speak. It looked as if she had gone been thrown out of a 40 story building and hit a few things on the way down. I hired a nurse to stay with her so that she would have someone around because there was no way she could survive on her own with some sporadic visits from friends and family.

And I was on my way to that. An uncontrolled fat diabetic with heart disease in his DNA.

So on February 3rd, 2009 I embarked on a mission to lose weight and get my blood sugar under control. I, like many, many Americans, don’t have health insurance so I didn’t really have the option of tons of medication to get me better. I actually was able to procure some metformin (I know people who know people ) and it actually wasn’t working. DIABETIC MEDICATION WASN’T CONTROLLING MY DIABETES.

So I kicked up some diet and exercise. I needed to get some weight off of this frame. Being 70 to 80 pounds overweight could NOT be helping the situation. Now what I haven’t mentioned is that I also suffer from ADD. So on occasion I will hyper focus and over read. I’ve done nothing for the past 2 months but research virtually 12 hours a day on diets and weight loss and funny enough it all lead me to diabetes and things of that nature.

That’s why I’m here right now. I’ve read too much. I know there are blogs out there about this stuff already but I feel there needs to be more. Hence my entry into the battle. I have more to say on what lead me here but I think this is a good start. My name is Elon James White and I’m allergic to carbs.