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Many of my older family members had succumbed to diabetes in one way or another. We're a family with strong ties with diabetes. My mom was only 67 when she passed away due to multiple organ failure. Prior her last visit to the hospital, she downed a lot of those sweet lanzones fruits and she just spiraled down from there. After eating the lanzones fruits she had been bedridden for a month before finally being admitted to the hospital. She has had check-ups of course before admittance but it's all pointing to high levels of sugar. Our initial take was food poisoning.
She was given insulin and other ways to bring her sugar down but then her organs had degenerated to the point of no return. She's the type that would eat even not recommended for her because she knows she has meds to counter if ever her diabetes flared up. However, this time, that one month of being bedridden was enough to deteriorate some of her organs, the lungs and spleen, to cross over to the other side.
Sadly, too, I had many other family members who have had their struggles with diabetes. I have 5 other siblings, and 3 of them are on maintenance meds to keep sugar at bay. One of my siblings passed away during the pandemic. Well, my other brother is far away I can't tell if he's doing okay with sugar.
As for me, I am not on any maintenance meds at all. It's because I have approached combatting diabetes right from the source. I was a subtitler once and one of the videos I did was about a doctor who was known as Dr. Diabetes because according to him fighting diabetes is a matter of understanding the disease. His impetus is to get patients off maintenance. If your doctor is just prescribing continuously to keep you on maintenance meds, you have to rethink if your doctor is truly considered about your well-being. On the video I did, a lot of people were shocked that it is possible to get off maintenance meds and lead a more normal life. As I understood the disease, no sugar means nothing to treat.
Applying the metaphysical approach and going for the root cause of the problem will still point to sugar as the main culprit causing to trigger the disease. On one fine day I just decided I will give up sugar, or at least refined sugar. Normally I would put a teaspoon of sugar to my coffee, chocolate drink, powdered milk, food I cook(stew based). I was also heavy into putting sugar with margarine on bread. Another thing I do always before was put sugar and evaporated milk on top of pancakes.
The first one to go was the chocolate drink because sugar is pre-mixed on almost any commercial chocolate drinks out in the market. I suddenly had lactose intolerance when I was in college and so I had to ditch milk too. That leaves coffee as my only drink of choice. All the food where I put sugar of course just had say good-bye forever.
Then slowly I started reading the nutrition facts of every drink I buy. I would notice Coke and other soda drinks had really high sugar content. Did you know that there are 39 grams of sugar in a 12 oz can of Coke? That's really too much.
My initial dilemma was finding a drink aside from water when I'm out of the house. Usually when I look at the nutrition facts of popular brands I would usually see a high amount of sugar. Sometimes I would try the 9 grams one because that's the lowest I can see if zero sugar drinks are not available. With 14-gram sugar drinks, I would get a reaction already like headache and pulsating veins, but 9 seems okay with me. Thank God for Coke Zero and Pepsi Max and other zero sugar drinks. They really made my transition easier.
My first few months of having a zero sugar diet was truly hard. Black coffee was just too bitter for me. So to transition I would put in a lot of non-dairy creamer just to counter the bitterness. But I think like after two years I got to appreciate black coffee. I got akin more to the distinctness of each coffee blends from different coffee houses and can truly compare which ones have a truly richer coffee flavor. I have also totally ditched the coffee creamer now.
I started a no sugar diet life since 2005. I would still have a pinch of cake now and again though but without the icing/frosting and also a teaspoon of ice cream on special occasions. But that's my limit, a pinch of cake just to taste if the cake is good and to make a comment about it and a teaspoon of ice cream just to feel a bit cooler when the weather is really hot.
For people I'm meeting for the first time, they tend to get weirded out by my skipping of sweet foods and would hear comments like, "Sad life," "Weird," "What's the point of eating?" and stuff of that vein.
However, what sugar consumers don't know is that our taste buds will adjust to the removal of sugar. When I actually taste something with sugar, the taste is so horrible now that I wouldn't want another go. Also it will make me thirsty right away. I can tell if someone served me regular Coke or Coke Zero because I will get thirsty. The bland taste for other people will really be very delicious for me. I don't taste blandness, though.
So far since Coke Zero or Pepsi is still sweet to the taste but I don't get grossed out, so I surmised it's not the sweet taste per se my body rejects but it is truly the sugar. There are lots of sugar free drinks now so switching shouldn't be that hard unlike when I started.
So far, with no exercise, I smoke, I eat mostly meat (chicken, pork and beef), I can say I'm pretty healthy. I just do away with sugar. The only drawback now is I cringe when I see someone eating a mountain of sugary food. I feel like they're eating something poisonous.
Before I end this post, one of the things I noticed is stats for cancer and other dreaded diseases were like one in a million or more back then, but with the onset of commercial food and drinks the stats for people with cancer and other dreaded diseases are 184 cases in 100,000 patients(Philippine statistics). This is just my observation but before I know like only a handful of people have Lupus, but now I have like 7 acquaintances who have it. I can't imagine how many people have a full blown diabetes right now.
Give up sugar and you will be stopping the entry of poison in your body. Thanks for reading and God bless!