Peaceable Man Files #51: Mastering My Ravenous Sweet Tooth

Random musings on my vagabond existence in the Endless Mountains of Pennsylvania and wherever else life takes me.

I have met the enemy, and it is sugar.

I just got back the results of my bloodwork for my annual physical exam, and all my labs were good except for one. That one not-so-great marker happens to be my glucose levels, which have been creeping up in recent years and are now in the pre-diabetic range.

Ugh.

The doctor advised me to decrease my consumption of sweets and carbs while increasing my exercise levels. Increase my exercise? I’m already going to the gym five times a week. Between that and walking Cassie every couple of hours, I’m averaging about 12,000 steps a day.

No, I don’t think I need to be any more active. The problem is not with my output but with my intake—i.e., my diet. I need to do what I’ve been unable to do for years, which is to master my ravenous sweet tooth.

This will not be easy. After all, my sweet tooth is a monster 65 years in the making. I have the mixed fortune of having been born into a family of excellent bakers—namely, my grandmothers and mother. Growing up, we always had a tin of cookies within reach (my favorite were the oatmeal raisin) along with pies, lemon tarts, brownies, and other goodies.

As well, there was the perennial stash of candy that Mom kept in the curio cabinet. And the dish of M&Ms and Hershey Kisses on the coffee table that would get magically refilled whenever it got low.

Then there was the ice cream. I don’t recall my first taste of ice cream, but it must have come early on in my life because I was hooked forever. Every night growing up, we would raid the freezer in the basement for a half gallon of ice cream—usually plain vanilla or Neapolitan.

To this day, if there’s ice cream in the house, I can’t stay away from it. And when I get my hands on a half a gallon of ice cream, I don’t just have a small bowl of it. I take away a heaping bowl, and often will go back for more. The only solution is to keep the ice cream out of the house, but that requires cooperation from my dear wife, and that is a whole other matter …

When I was a kid, all this sugar intake didn’t have a terribly deleterious effect on me, other than perhaps increasing my excitability and leading to frequent trips to the dentist to have cavities filled. But at 65, I don’t have the metabolism that I used to have, and I need to be careful.

My crusade to cut back on my sugar intake actually began 12 years ago when I was diagnosed with colon cancer and went through a colon resection and six months of chemo. Through research, I learned that sugar consumption is implicated in higher incidence of cancer as well as other kinds of nasty stuff, like obesity, type 2 diabetes, and heart disease.

I did make some dietary changes after my cancer scare, including cutting out all sugary drinks and anything made with high-fructose corn syrup. But other bad eating habits continued. The ice cream. The cookies and pies. The candy. The sourdough pretzels (Utz is my favorite brand). The bread with meals. The pastas. The occasional beer or glass of wine.  

It is so very hard to cut back on sugar consumption in a country where refined sugar is added to so many of the foods we find on the grocery shelves. Those processed foods, what’s more, are typically made with simple carbohydrates that get quickly converted into glucose by the body. We get a brief sugar high sans anything of nutritional value.

Here’s a scary statistic: The average American consumes more than 100 pounds of sugar each year. Our average sugar intake has doubled over the past century and grown more than tenfold over the past 200 years as our food supply has become standardized and mechanized. All of this has led to dramatic increases in obesity, type 2 diabetes, and heart disease.

I don’t want any of that stuff. I want to maximize the number of healthy years I have left while minimizing the number of medications I need to take to keep my numbers where they should be.

And so the gauntlet has been thrown. Can I change 65 years of eating habits? Do I have the willpower to master my ravenous sweet tooth?

The doctor wants to check my blood glucose levels again in a few months to see if they’ve come down. In the meantime, I’m on a mission to cut out, or at least greatly reduce, my consumption of sweets and sugars.

So far, so good. I haven’t had any ice cream in two weeks. I’m staying away from those cookies and candies we got for Christmas. Already, I’ve lost four pounds and am feeling lighter and healthier.

It will not be easy. In this battle against sugar, I’m fighting not only myself but also the powerful rip currents of the society I’m swimming in.

It will take all the willpower I have to win this battle. But I like a good challenge.

I’ll report back in the months to come on how I’m doing. In the meantime, that basket of Christmas cookies is going into the trash.