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.

And a how do you do to all

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.