How I fucked up my body - a brief history
Mar. 10th, 2025 12:12 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
andrewduckerIt 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.
no subject
Date: 2025-03-10 01:08 pm (UTC)I get the impression that the majority of the general western european population seem very resistant to the concept that they might have to give up dairy, wheat, eggs (in particular) for their health.
The fruit thing sucks though. I never used to be able to eat raw apples, but it seems it was a "missing gut bacteria" issue with me and I gradually acclimatised myself over the course of my first year of owning 10 apple trees! Totally different to your case.
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Date: 2025-03-10 01:10 pm (UTC)Will observe, now that I know.
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Date: 2025-03-10 01:55 pm (UTC)So I've had stomach issues since my mid twenties. Turned out my body likes to produce stomach acid akin to alien blood so I have to use proton pump inhibitors regularly to avoid my stomach melting. This is likely inherited since my father had the misfortune of having 60's medicine when his stomach went awry and got ulcers, eventually having a third of his stomach cut away. It is very likely I would have ended up the same way if proton pump inhibitors hadn't been invented and they knew more when I started having issues. I don't have to take them every single day but have learned to gauge quite well when they are needed, longest I've gone without using any is a three months but that was an extreme case and I wish I knew why it happened lol.
When I had my gallstone issue I cut out as much fat as I could and stupidly included nearly all dairy in that ( could not give up butter, I would literally prefer to die I think). A couple of years of that and my stomach/gut rebelled and I had IBS like issues. However on a hunch I switched back to having dairy in my diet (including probiotics) just not as much and over the course of a couple of months the issues were almost gone again (been close to two months since my last "episode"). A related issue for me is artificial sweeteners which hit my system like an extra hot vindaloo (in effect if not immediate pains) and with the amazing sugar tax I now spend more time than ever perusing labels to avoid any of it as they sneak it almost everywhere now. I mean they're even taking perfectly good fruit juice, removing a load of sugar and putting the artifical stuff in instead. Luckily I don't really drink too much juices or soft drinks anyway thse days. To give you an idea of how easily that can get me a single packet of crisps with 50/50 sugar/sweetener can set my bowel to squirt setting lol. Some of them aren't as bad as others but all have an effect, primarily if there is more than a microscopic amount my tastebuds get a metallic taste on them that sticks around for several hours so at least I generally can be prepared for the later outcome. When I used to frequent bars I could taste if the postmix of the drink before mine was poured used a diet beverage (postmix machine are horrendous at the best of times anyway and should really be avoided at all costs as I did many years ago when my issue got worse).
Yup our gut biome is still a mysterious puzzle for medicine and they're painfully slowly working out everything it does and what it can effect. As you can imagine I read of new stomach discoveries when I come across them since I've now spent over half my life with issues. It doesn't help of course that there are so many different issues that can happen and with different triggers for everyone outside some well known common ones.
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Date: 2025-03-10 05:18 pm (UTC)It seems that lactose intolerance may be curable
Date: 2025-03-10 05:19 pm (UTC)https://www.oh-mygut.com/can-lactose-intolerance-go-away/ suggests that there are different types of lactose intolerance, not all of which are permanent.
I was having stomach problems, probably *not* including lactose intolerance, so went on an elimination diet to find the culprit. While off dairy I discovered that soya spreads really do not agree with me, but probably also lost my lactose tolerance as a side-effect :-(
I didn't manage to eliminate everything that was causing me problems either.
The NHS also put me onto FODMAPS, but I now understand (though may be wrong) that you should be able to work back up to eating them, but this should be done with a qualified professional (dietician), which does not happen on the NHS (surprise!).
**** Could you be mixing this up with either Coeliac or Croen's disease ?
I hadn't heard about lactase tablets. Thanks.
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Date: 2025-03-10 06:10 pm (UTC)Lactase tablets reminded me of the "aliens discuss humans and their weird cheese-eating habit" scene in Becky Chambers' The Galaxy, and the Ground Within.
I am glad you get to have pizza.
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