And tomorrow is Good Friday. Happy Holy Week everyone, if that is an appropriate greeting.
The Numbers for Today.
- Fasting Blood Glucose Level: 101 mm/dl. A silly milligram bigger and I have used that gag way too often.
- Weight: 189ish, still
- Exercise: 45 minute bike ride and it was a struggle for some reason. No pep, just wanted to dog it.
- Mood: 7.5. Work today, off tomorrow. Could be worse.
- Breakfast: Oatmeal with craisins and a fruit medley. I figure there are at least four servings in that bowl.
- Lunch: Leftovers BBQ tempeh sandwich with coleslaw.
- Dinner: Thursday pizza and a salad. Two pizza flavor, the Mary & Dave kitchen sink pizza and a margarita pizza. I can have leftover margarita pizza for breakfast tomorrow. Did I mention I am off tomorrow? Well, I am.
Yesterday I linked two a couple of articles on the growing problem of the world getting fatter and getting type 2 diabetes. As I and one of the articles mentioned, the one from the New England Journal of Medicine, said, it's a complex problem, not necessarily one of eating too much as we do here. For most of us, it's the downside of getting wealthier, which is usually a good thing. There are worse problems to have in life.
For most of us, it not a destiny but a choice, sins of commission. I chose to eat and drink way too much and exercise not enough and inevitable happened; I became a pudgy type 2 diabetic. I have solved a lot of the problem by eating less, making better food choices and exercising. I benefited from simple, routine detection. Yet there is line in the article that has bugged me for a while now.
FTA: Some developing countries face the paradox of families in which the children are underweight and the adults are overweight. This combination has been attributed by some people to intrauterine growth retardation and resulting low birth weight, which apparently confer a predisposition to obesity later in life through the acquisition of a “thrifty” phenotype that, when accompanied by rapid childhood weight gain, is conducive to the development of insulin resistance and the metabolic syndrome.
At first I did not understand this what this meant. I admit, I am not the smartest guy in the blogosphere. I like to think I could have been a great doctor if it weren't for all of that science stuff.
I eventually figured it out that this meant that kids born with a low birth weight can develop a trait of hoarding calories for the bad times that could come. Storing up energy when no food is available. It's a survival mechanism. The body is planning for the bad times to come. Low birth weight is not a rare problem in developing countries.
Now put that low birth weight baby in a society that is growing wealthier and food is becoming plentiful. In a few years he's pudgy and well on his way to developing all sorts of obesity related problems. Yet there is not wealth enough to detect or sufficiently treat the problems from diabetes, heart disease, hypertension and renal, liver and pancreatic problems. There are just a lot of sick people eating too much and dying too soon.
So what, right? Well, yeah, I guess. Learn to eat better and get on a Zumba program or whatever. That does work. But add to this a genetic predisposition, like the Han Chinese, have to type 2 diabetes and we have a serious and expensive problem to deal with in a few years.
The answer? I have no idea. Eat less and order DVD's from people hawking late night diet plans and exercise schemes, I guess. They do work, after all, if you keep at it.
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