Allergic to what now?

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.