It’s been a full week of eating healthier and I feel great. I sleep much better – no more waking up several times a night. I also noticed a boost in energy and strength on Saturday during my usual circuit workout. Eating healthy is pretty easy and the only reason for that is this: FRUIT. If I couldn’t eat fruit, I couldn’t do it. What I’m doing isn’t technically ‘low carb’ because I eat fruit all day long. But the natural sugar in fruit is in the form of fructose, not glucose, so it needs to be processed by the liver and converted to glucose before it hits the blood stream – and that takes time, so the sugar in fruit is naturally a slow release vs. eating something like bread, rice or anything with refined sugar in it, which is essentially glucose from the start… so it hits your blood stream very quickly. I can usually feel it too – for me it feels like being drugged. It’s definitely relaxing at first as that feeling washes over me – which explains why food has been a sort of ’self-medication’ when I’m stressed out… but then comes dizziness, heart palpitations, low-lying anxiety feeling, and the need for MORE… NOW!
Before I understood how things worked and was eating a low-fat diet for years, I knew something was wrong with me when I’d have a pounding heart every day around 3:00, and I’d look up from my desk and couldn’t read the giant clock on the wall because my vision was so blurry [I have nearly 20/20 vision]. Scared out of my mind, that was when I started researching my symptoms and figured out I was insulin resistant/pre-diabetic [which was later confirmed by my doctor]. That was 10 years ago. It’s taken THIS LONG to accept it and to finally be ready to do something about it. I definitely cut down and paid more attention to how I was feeling since that time 10 years ago, but I never truly committed myself to eating healthy and exercising until now. 10 years… when I think about all the things I’ve missed out on because I felt I was too heavy to do something [like go skiing with friends], it’s kind of a bummer. Luckily I never dwell on the past for very long. And I’m learning not to look too far into the future either. Each day is another step in that proverbial ‘journey of 1,000 miles.’. =)
