Hi,
@Autumn2020 🙂
I’ve been diabetic for almost 20 years: diagnosed at 29; now a few months off my 49th. birthday! In that time I’ve gone through a lot of phases & battles concerning food! I remember the first thing I thought upon getting the news that I’m diabetic was “Oh no! I can never eat chocolate cake again!”: I loved chocolate cake, chocolate anything, & sweet things; I’d been getting more & more ill in the run up to my diagnosis, had pretty much stopped eating & was actually getting by on drinking Lucozade for energy! This would have been years before the recipe change because of the Sugar Tax & was actually used by hospitals & health centres etc. to treat hypos as it has so much sugar & glucose in it!
One of the first changes I made was change from using sugar to using Artificial Sweeteners & quickly got used to that super sweet taste with a bit of an aftertaste! And that is, in a nutshell, the problem I found with them! They’re very often much sweeter than sugar with virtually no calories! Over the years I found that I was eating more things with sweeteners in it & eating more calories overall as well while I battled gains in weight, dieting, regain the weight & it was always a struggle between the two!
I finally turned a corner at the end of Jan./beginning of Feb. 2018 when I started losing weight steadily, 1/4 stone every week, & was having a series of hypos when, seemingly all of a sudden, my insulin needs were more than halved by the time I’d reduced my insulin doses enough to stop having hypos.
It was because in May 2017 I read a post posted on my Health Centre’s Facebook page about the problems of Artificial Sweeteners that fool your brain into making you eat more. The article posted postulated the theory that the brain associates a certain amount of calories to everything you eat according to how sweet it tastes. With sweeteners actually tasting sweeter than sugar it expects more calories but, sweeteners are virtually calorie free so, there’s a huge deficit that confuses the brain thinking there’s so many calories that have gone missing & sends out signals to make you eat more calorie rich foods to make that up. That starts a cycle whereby the more sweeteners you consume, the greater the deficit your brain perceives & the more calories you end up eating! The article pointed out how a lot of people drinking diet drinks & eating sugar free things also, contrarily, ate very fattening high calories food as well. After reading that, it was like a lightbulb had been switched on in my head & I went “Cold Turkey”, chucking out everything in my house that had sweeteners in it & carefully reading labels to not buy anything with them in it.
It didn’t happen overnight but, slowly over time, so slowly that I actually didn’t notice, I went from eating over 4500 calories a day to eating about 1500 calories a day by the beginning of 2018: I sat down writing out what I used to eat back in May 2017, working out the calories, & what I was then eating in that last week of January & start of February 2018! When I did that I realised I’d gone from drinking 4 2 litres bottles of Coke Zero a week & eating oven baked things in batter, pies, roast potatoes, chips, potato crisps, biscuits & sugar free desserts etc. to things like steamed fish, my own home made vegetable soups, steamed vegetables & a lot less potatoes of any kind & actually taking honey or real sugar in my tea! I just stopped craving certain foods without the sweeteners in my diet & naturally gravitated to other things without feeling hungry!
Because that was the thing: I always seemed to feel hungry no matter how much I ate before I cut out the sweeteners in my diet; ended up eating almost constantly when awake & I couldn’t differentiate separate meals anymore! So, basically injected insulin every 2 hours as I couldn't wait 4 hours between meals like I’m supposed to: I was eating about every 2 hours!
I still read labels carefully & don’t take any sweeteners if I can help it: manufacturers sneak in sweeteners now into things that never used to have them because of The Sugar Tax!
I’m not a saint, never was & still not now, & I do crave things sometimes but, I have a little real sweetness in my diet every day from real sugar. I just add a bit more insulin when I indulge. I don’t binge anymore like I did in the past: craved something & resisted without the craving going away; then, resistance crumbles & I binge on whatever I craved!
I also found a new balance of taste in my cooking. I’m Chinese & there’s quite a lot of sugars in Chinese cooking than you might think: flavours are balanced & there’s often just as much sugar added as there is salt; hot flavours are also, balanced with sweetness too! But, by adding less seasoning you can find a new balance of flavours. The seasoning I actually use the most is black pepper: for more aromatic flavour; rather than the heat of white pepper. I usually don’t use any salt in cooking unless I want to bring out the natural sweetness in something. That natural sweetness can be brought out with just a little salt without adding any sugar. There’s a Chinese rhyme that translates to: for natural sweetness; add salt. But, it’s only just enough for the sweetness to come through: too much & it becomes salty; too salty & you need sugar to balance it out!
Herbs I find really helps to add more flavour to food without more seasoning. While the Chinese use a lot of spices, generally, in cooking; herbs are not used very often. But, I find that dried mixed herbs, I like Schwartz, really add something to a lot of dishes that then don’t need so much seasoning. So, I actually go for, & have, more flavour in my cooking now & less seasoning!
My tastebuds can, & have been, re-educated so, I enjoy it more when I DO have the few sweet things. I went from only eating sweet milk chocolate to eating high cocoa mass dark chocolate. Started off with the industry standard of 70% & it DID seem bitter at first but, got used to it & it actually gives a better chocolate high or hit! Then, slowly worked my way up to what I find still gives me the chocolate hit without it tasting too bitter: I like 85% now; other members‘ posts I’ve read have gone up to 90% or 100% which is too bitter for me! I eat a lot less chocolate now & hardly crave it at all & only have 1 square, or maybe 2, when I DO eat it: there’s much more of a chocolate hit from 85% dark chocolate than you’d ever get from milk chocolate; less satisfies more!
