aI had always shunned - if not derided - the idea of being a vegan as too hard and impractical for someone who was more focused on muscle maintenance and growth than looking skinny or saving animals from slaughter. And then I contracted diabetes. 
       Last fall, it was undeniable that I had suddenly become diabetic, but because the Type of diabetes I had (Type 1 vs. 2) was uncertain, I assumed along with everyone who told me so that I had Type 2 - the kind that can be "cured" with sensible diet and exercise.
      In fact, a well-meaning chef-friend of mine had been reading Michael Greger's book "How Not to Die" and there were several pages devoted to studies showing how a plant-based diet had been shown to be especially effective in reversing the effects of diabetes. "Basically, Chris," my chef-friend said with a confident nod (just like my internist), "you've f*cked your body all these years with your high protein diets." And now I had diabetes as a result, it appeared. Well, no more of this, I thought. I'll be a vegan for life if it will make my diabetes go away. 
       So, I loaded up on plant-based protein powder, meat- and milk-substitutes, looked up recipes for easy vegan stews and dishes my wife would enjoy (despite that fact that SHE hadn't signed up for a vegan diet), and started frequenting a coffeehouse nearby, called Hip Cafe, which quietly devoted itself to mostly vegan bakery and sandwich offerings, giving me a place to meet with people without being tempted by foods with animal products like butter, dairy, meat, etc. Doing so had a big learning curve and took a lot of extra work, but thankfully the retail grocery world has evolved to a point that people with certain diet-based restrictions can find a certain level of convenience foods and restaurants to help them along.
       All this lasted about 2 weeks, thanks to a wine trip last fall with a group of friends in Sonoma County. My new regimen stuck out right away when we went grocery shopping together or ordered dishes at restaurants. This led to friendly curiosity among my wine friends, who also happened to be eye doctors and pediatricians (medical professionals who don't specialize in diabetes, per se, but run into it a lot due to the prevalence of juvenile diabetes and eye complications from the disease). Curiosity was soon followed by concern, when they heard about my sudden unintentional weight loss and extremely high blood glucose numbers. And after consulting with some fellow doctor friends in between wine tastings, our pediatrician friend urgently advised me to seek a research university-based hospital for more tests to determine root causes for my condition and then declared "well, veganism isn't going to help whatever you have going on right now." And just in time! I was about to pass up some slices of a giant 3-inch-thick marbled ribeye that was being cooked for dinner that night, along with other buttery side dishes and dairy-filled desserts. For more on what happened next, see my Mayo Clinic Hacks.  

I was looking through my old blood test results recently to see what my glucose levels have been over the years. To my surprise I was able to see lab results as far back as 2013, through an app called Healow that my doctor's office uses.
     The only thing I remember being out of range way back then were my cholesterol levels, because they've always been out of range and the doctor or his nurse were always trying to get me to take prescription statins. But that's a story for another blog.
     My second surprise on the 2013 test results was to see that my fasting glucose 10 years ago -- a decade before I would be diagnosed as diabetic -- was 109 (the 'reference range' for glucose values back then was 78-100)! It's possible that I asked if that was okay, but typically my doctor would say "it's just a little over. You're in good shape and exercise and eat well, so we'll just keep an eye on it."  One less thing to worry about, right? In retrospect, I wish he had ordered an a1C follow-up test to see how much sugar was accumulating in my blood, but I wouldn't have known to ask at the time. 
    Looking back, I see that in 2019, my glucose was 114 (and now, the 'reference range' has become 106 at the top of the range vs. 100 a few years earlier). But the first time I can remember my brain engaging with the term "glucose" and learning about something called an a1C test was in 2021, when my glucose test came back as 123 mg/dL and my doctor decided we should look into that. The a1C test came back as 6.3 ('reference range' is 4.0 - 6.0%). I remember him saying that I was "pre-diabetic" that year, and again,  we would keep an eye on it and to come back in 6 months for another blood test. 
     I let 6 months pass and decided to wait for my next annual exam. I was exercising, eating a low-carb diet, and weighed 175 pounds on a 5' 9" frame, so I didn't think there was much else I could do to improve those numbers on my own. A year later, my glucose and a1C numbers came back exactly the same as the previous year, but this time, my doctor said: "It looks like you're officially a diabetic." We were going to keep playing the waiting game. But this time, I asked if he thought Metformin could be helpful. He replied that this "would be a pro-active way to manage my glucose. So he agreed and gave me a 500 mg daily dose. 
       To learn what happened next, go to: Hack #3

Little did I know when I started reading Barry Sears’ Zone Diet book back in the early 2000s, that it would teach me a way of eating that would make it easy for me to "hack" my body's insulin production and level out glucose levels more naturally, long before I had any idea that my health and well being might depend on it twenty years later.
     Sears' book appealed to me because I was feeling tired and having trouble concentrating at work in the afternoons, and found that a snack only slightly helped me get over the 3:30 hump. As Sears explains in his book, "food" to the brain is blocked temporarily when the stomach gets a meal full of carbs to digest and has to pump lots of insulin into the body. This made sense to me, because I was eating mostly bread, chips, fruit and only a couple thin slices of meat at lunch.
       Sears "prescription" to avoid this is to eat a better balance of protein / carbs / fat at every meal or snack to avoid the insulin rush. In particular, he talks about things like juice, corn, desserts and other foods with a high glycemic index that most affect these insulin spikes. This learning permanently altered what I would eat for breakfast for the next 25+ years, except on rare occasions that I decided to treat myself to sweet things.  
     This book taught me not only the idea of “macronutrients” and how to balance them by counting grams of carbs, proteins and fats in foods, but also made me more aware of "hidden" sugars in jars of pasta sauce, flavored yogurt, juices and other common "healthy" (processed) foods that could make me feel tired or sleepy if I ate or drank these foods by themselves instead of in balance with proteins and fats.
        His claim was that when we eat a balance of macronutrients, it optimizes brain energy metabolism by slowing down the body's production of insulin and glucose, which, when we eat a lot of carbs at once, can temporarily "block" metabolism of the type of energy the brain needs.