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Mar. 10th, 2025
How I fucked up my body - a brief history
Mar. 10th, 2025 12:12 pmIt starts with sugar. I like sugar. I like sweet things. I seem to acclimatise to the taste of near-limitless amounts of it over the course of only a few days. So once I start eating sweet things I then find that non-sugary things (like salads, vegetables, etc. that don't have a sauce/dressing on them) taste ridiculously bland, or even bitter. If I'm used to drinking sweetened drinks (with sugar or sweetener in them) then I find water tastes actively bitter.
And stopping is hard. Because not only does food taste bad, but cutting out sugar means that I'm grumpy, shaky, sleep badly, and get headaches. All for somewhere between 3 days and a week, until I acclimatise. At which point vegetables/salad start tasting actively sweet to me, and water tastes delicious. Which is great. If hard to sustain, because if I have even a small amount of sweet(ened) food then it all ramps back up again quickly and I have to make a really hard decision to go through the cold-turkey again.
Thankfully, my body has largely solved this for me. I first had hypoglycemia aged 13. I got hot/cold shakes and felt distinctly wobbly. But easily solved with a couple of sweets, and no long-term issues. Except that over the 40 years since then this has grown more and more severe. If I've had *any* sugar in my diet recently then I have a blood-sugar dip for the next few days, with grumpiness/headaches. If I have sugar multiple times over multiple days then this will lead to the return of the hypoglycemic attacks. These can only be staved off by not eating sugar at all*.
Well, I say sugar, but I've now reached the stage where drinking a pint of diet-coke (or anything else with artificial sweeteners) triggers an insulin response large enough to have me feeling wobbly/shaky.
So, sugar is an issue. And so, back around 2000, I cut it out. I took a low-carb diet approach. And still, frankly, do. It controls my weight, and it stops my body's reaction to simple carbs from leading me inexorably back to insulin problems. But to start with I took a hard-line approach, cutting out all sources of sweetness, including milk.
Now, I'd generally been fine with milk. I wasn't a fan of raw cheese - I was as a small child, but between the ages of 7 and 11 I slowly lost the taste for it. I remember liking several kinds, and then just very bland cheese, and then just processed/cream cheese, and then none at all. And lots of cream tended to make me feel weird (slightly foggy headed, and not actively nauseous, but definitely receiving signals from my body that I'd had enough). But milk in cereal was just fine. Except that it was quite sweet. Milk is about 5% sugar, and I was cutting all of it out to see if it helped**. So out it went.
Now, if you're aware of lactose intolerance you've probably already seen what I wrote about cheese and cream and know what happens next. Around 2/3 of the global population don't have the genes for adult lactose digestion. I'm one of them. Once we're weaned we stop producing lactase. "Weaned" is a complex thing though, and it turns out that if you keep having some milk in your diet then your body will keep producing lactase fairly indefinitely. But once you stop it's gone for good***. And if you don't know that, and 6 months after you cut dairy out of your diet you stop being so strict, you might not realise that the reason you intermittently get an upset stomach is because of the dairy. And if you keep doing this for months, unaware that random bits of butter, cream, milk, etc. that are in the food you're buying are triggering effects, then it will completely fuck up your stomach lining.****
All of which led me to, over the years between 2005 and 2015, develop IBS. When I moved into my flat in 2005 I could eat from the KFC over the road. Ten years later, I no longer could. Wheat would set me off. And it wasn't alone. It took me a couple of years of researching***** to discover FODMAPS. Which back then was hardly known about, and nowadays the NHS seems to be entirely on-board with. And what's there matches up with my experiences extremely well - Wheat: yes, fructose: yes, sugar alcohols: yes. Thankfully, I don't seem to be triggered by onion/garlic, so life is still worth living. But realising that I can't actually eat a whole apple without my stomach swelling up was horribly disheartening.
Thankfully, there are a lot of food nowadays that excludes wheat. My local supermarket (Sainsbury) sells wheat-free sandwiches that are tolerable. Marks & Spencer sells gluten-free bread that I actively like (the brown seeded loaf)! There are even a variety of pastas (and ready-made meals) and sausages that are gluten-free by default. Compared to how life would have been 20 years ago, dietary things could be a lot worse. And the biggest improvement there is that I can buy lactase tablets and if I take one or two of those with a meal with dairy in it, then I'm just fine.
I do miss sugary things a lot. And checking ingredients lists is a pain. But pizza is possible. And thank fuck for that!
*I've been checked multiple times for diabetes. I don't have it. Whatever it is I do have is probably closest to Reactive Hypoglycemia, which basically means "If you eat carbs your body fucks you up". And is actually many different syndromes, for which the treatment is "Stop eating sugar and most carbs"
**It really did. I remember that I was in the middle of a meeting, about a week into my low-carb diet, when suddenly the voice in my head that had been screaming for a week about how I needed to get something sweet *right now* suddenly went away, and it was amazing.
***It occurs to me that there's probably a way of turning this back on. Maybe at some point someone will fix that.
****I read something about this years ago, that I now sadly cannot find.
*****Thank Fuck for the internet. Seriously. There's no way I would have known about this without it.
And stopping is hard. Because not only does food taste bad, but cutting out sugar means that I'm grumpy, shaky, sleep badly, and get headaches. All for somewhere between 3 days and a week, until I acclimatise. At which point vegetables/salad start tasting actively sweet to me, and water tastes delicious. Which is great. If hard to sustain, because if I have even a small amount of sweet(ened) food then it all ramps back up again quickly and I have to make a really hard decision to go through the cold-turkey again.
Thankfully, my body has largely solved this for me. I first had hypoglycemia aged 13. I got hot/cold shakes and felt distinctly wobbly. But easily solved with a couple of sweets, and no long-term issues. Except that over the 40 years since then this has grown more and more severe. If I've had *any* sugar in my diet recently then I have a blood-sugar dip for the next few days, with grumpiness/headaches. If I have sugar multiple times over multiple days then this will lead to the return of the hypoglycemic attacks. These can only be staved off by not eating sugar at all*.
Well, I say sugar, but I've now reached the stage where drinking a pint of diet-coke (or anything else with artificial sweeteners) triggers an insulin response large enough to have me feeling wobbly/shaky.
So, sugar is an issue. And so, back around 2000, I cut it out. I took a low-carb diet approach. And still, frankly, do. It controls my weight, and it stops my body's reaction to simple carbs from leading me inexorably back to insulin problems. But to start with I took a hard-line approach, cutting out all sources of sweetness, including milk.
Now, I'd generally been fine with milk. I wasn't a fan of raw cheese - I was as a small child, but between the ages of 7 and 11 I slowly lost the taste for it. I remember liking several kinds, and then just very bland cheese, and then just processed/cream cheese, and then none at all. And lots of cream tended to make me feel weird (slightly foggy headed, and not actively nauseous, but definitely receiving signals from my body that I'd had enough). But milk in cereal was just fine. Except that it was quite sweet. Milk is about 5% sugar, and I was cutting all of it out to see if it helped**. So out it went.
Now, if you're aware of lactose intolerance you've probably already seen what I wrote about cheese and cream and know what happens next. Around 2/3 of the global population don't have the genes for adult lactose digestion. I'm one of them. Once we're weaned we stop producing lactase. "Weaned" is a complex thing though, and it turns out that if you keep having some milk in your diet then your body will keep producing lactase fairly indefinitely. But once you stop it's gone for good***. And if you don't know that, and 6 months after you cut dairy out of your diet you stop being so strict, you might not realise that the reason you intermittently get an upset stomach is because of the dairy. And if you keep doing this for months, unaware that random bits of butter, cream, milk, etc. that are in the food you're buying are triggering effects, then it will completely fuck up your stomach lining.****
All of which led me to, over the years between 2005 and 2015, develop IBS. When I moved into my flat in 2005 I could eat from the KFC over the road. Ten years later, I no longer could. Wheat would set me off. And it wasn't alone. It took me a couple of years of researching***** to discover FODMAPS. Which back then was hardly known about, and nowadays the NHS seems to be entirely on-board with. And what's there matches up with my experiences extremely well - Wheat: yes, fructose: yes, sugar alcohols: yes. Thankfully, I don't seem to be triggered by onion/garlic, so life is still worth living. But realising that I can't actually eat a whole apple without my stomach swelling up was horribly disheartening.
Thankfully, there are a lot of food nowadays that excludes wheat. My local supermarket (Sainsbury) sells wheat-free sandwiches that are tolerable. Marks & Spencer sells gluten-free bread that I actively like (the brown seeded loaf)! There are even a variety of pastas (and ready-made meals) and sausages that are gluten-free by default. Compared to how life would have been 20 years ago, dietary things could be a lot worse. And the biggest improvement there is that I can buy lactase tablets and if I take one or two of those with a meal with dairy in it, then I'm just fine.
I do miss sugary things a lot. And checking ingredients lists is a pain. But pizza is possible. And thank fuck for that!
*I've been checked multiple times for diabetes. I don't have it. Whatever it is I do have is probably closest to Reactive Hypoglycemia, which basically means "If you eat carbs your body fucks you up". And is actually many different syndromes, for which the treatment is "Stop eating sugar and most carbs"
**It really did. I remember that I was in the middle of a meeting, about a week into my low-carb diet, when suddenly the voice in my head that had been screaming for a week about how I needed to get something sweet *right now* suddenly went away, and it was amazing.
***It occurs to me that there's probably a way of turning this back on. Maybe at some point someone will fix that.
****I read something about this years ago, that I now sadly cannot find.
*****Thank Fuck for the internet. Seriously. There's no way I would have known about this without it.