The physician scared me with the 90-day blood sugar test (A1C) last December, which I marked on my calendar as The Day of Terror. The last two A1C tests have dropped to normal after my reading and re-reading Joel Fuhrman's books.
The irony of that December visit was having perfect cholesterol, but bad blood sugar. Insulin is not a cure for diabetes, and the rest of the blood sugar medicines are questionable, lacking the pedigree of being an old med. However, there are good reasons to use the right medicine for a difficult and dangerous disorder.
I was completely against statins - which block the liver from doing its job - whether I had good or bad cholesterol. What was doing the cholesterol removal work the pill people covet? I never took a pill for it.
There are two types of cholesterol - one light, the other heavy. The heavy kind takes the dangerous, sticky, light cholesterol away, out of the body. Walnuts and almonds have that beneficial cholesterol, and I was eating walnuts on ice cream (to die for! combo) every day. I only had to remove the daily ice cream and similar desserts to lower my blood sugar and tonnage as well.
My diet advisor not only urged me to switch to walnuts, but also sent a bag of them to use as medicine. They worked! - proving the basic Joel Fuhrman contention. Plant-based foods are good for us as an alternative to our normal grease-salt-sugar diets (milk, cheese, meats, desserts, fast foods, snack foods).
Fuhrman also claims that we can hunger for vegetables, fruits, and nuts the way we light up for candy, the milk-cream products, factory grease (like oils and shortening), sugars and fake sugars, and salt. That is true - we can.
I still eat some meat, but sparingly. I avoid fast foods, colas, desserts, and oils. Vegetables have plenty of oil, more than enough, plus lots of protein and cures for various maladies
Fruits have replaced desserts for me, almost completely. Many times, I have slipped, but the best way to counter cravings is to have an apple or two, oranges, pears, blueberries, and fresh pineapple to satisfy the need for immediate food.
The genius in God's Creation is giving us the sugars we love and binding them with soluble and insoluble fiber. A ripe pear is heaven-on-earth, non-fattening, and good for us. Fiber is a necessity, for many reasons, and I favor food fiber over a container of ground up fiber to be mixed in with orange juice! The yuk factor alone keeps me in the fruit section rather than the pharmacy's over-the-counter meds.
Some fruit spoils but the creatures outside are not as fussy as we are. I consider each purchase of blueberries a potential feast for birds. When other fruits get bad, I toss them out for squirrels, birds, and our slow-mo possum.
I am one of those nutrition dummies who thought of one food being good for one thing. In fact, the body God created for us (John 1:3) constantly mixes the ingredients of our cells and our food to give us maximum benefits. As Dr. David Menton told me, we give up a massive number of dead cells every day, from all parts of our body. Our bodies match what is needed from mixing those cells with the fresh food we eat, a process beginning in the mouth, continuing in the stomach, and intensely strong in the small and large intestines.
Our bodies look for what we need, generate useful answers, and give up what is not needed. That is truly a marvel we overlook, although we can see a parallel set up in the micro-factory system of plants, where each machine has its own part to play, such as moving moisture to every living cell.
When I look at food now, I think of whether it is something that benefits me, gives me energy, protects me against disease, and tastes good. Shopping for what I want makes that very easy to do and ramps up my appetite for what is tasty and doctor-shocking.
Dr. H. said, "A lot of my clients have said, "I am going to lose 30 pounds, but you did it and kept it off." I assured him that another 15 pounds are next. We had some laughs about some of the most ineffective, trademarked, "diets." It is not a diet to eat good, useful, and healing foods. It is a change to studying what is beneficial and delicious.
I tried eating fresh spinach and got sick of it but it broke me reacting to craving. I now use chopped, frozen spinach in the daily vegetable dish:
- 1 can of chickpeas, rinsed well.
- frozen, chopped spinach, kale, or turnip greens (pause to think of my sainted father laughing over that conversion)
- frozen onions and green/red peppers
- one handful of walnuts
- sweet peas
- stir fry mixed vegetables
- tomato paste.
Some of these are optional on a given day, but chickpeas are normal (sometimes replaced other beans), satisfying for protein, stocked with other benefits.
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