Health Beyond Civilization

This post is about hypoglycemia, but it may also be useful for those who have other blood sugar disorders such as diabetes. And given the state of affairs in the developed world, what with the heavily sugared diet, I think almost everyone is at risk for blood sugar disorders.

I have hypoglycemia, a pre-diabetic condition that mandates that I avoid refined carbohydrates, including sugars, starches, and grains such as rice or bread. If I don’t, I very quickly notice it: My energy drops precipitously, I feel dangerously drowsy, and I start getting a pounding headache. If it gets bad, I’ll throw up or even pass out (but I’ve learned enough not to let that happen!).

Hypoglycemia is “hypo” (low) “glycemia” (blood sugar). Blood sugar, or glucose in the bloodstream, is a primary energy source to cells throughout the body. We get it from carbohydrates, roughly broken down into “refined” carbs (white rice, white flour products, white sugar) or “simple” carbs (usually, fruits), and from “complex” carbs (the many types of vegetables). Simple/refined carbs go more quickly to the blood and so give a quick jolt. Complex carbs break down more slowly. Generally, the sweeter it tastes, the quicker it goes to the bloodstream.

Diabetes is hyperglycemia; it happens when, for whatever reason, there’s too much sugar in the blood. Hypoglycemia is opposite, but related; basically both indicate that the body has trouble regulating and distributing energy, usually because there’s some kind of underlying energetic deficiency, which can be caused or aggravated by poor diet (and usually is, with diabetes).

I had always eaten lots of rice and pasta. Things started going awry during my first summer at Teaching Drum in 2000. Higher quantities of sugar were eaten there as part of a food addiction cycle that I’ve written about elsewhere. Then one day we were all fasting for the entire day in preparation for a sweat lodge ceremony that evening, and as the day went on I felt more and more horrible as my blood sugar plummeted. I was barely able to stumble my way the half-mile down the trail to where the van was parked, and the ride in to the house was very difficult because every bump on the dirt road threatened to make me puke.

When I finally got to the house, everyone else left for the sweat, and I staggered into the house, opened up a can of tomato soup, ate a little, lay down, and passed out. When I woke up I felt tons better.

That was the first episode. They came very rarely back then, but with increasing frequency and varying intensity. Possibly the craziest was one evening in 2003, when I had just finished half of a half-gallon carton of ice cream and then took a hot bath. I stood up from the bath, and suddenly my head felt very heavy. I told Abigail to hold my head up, she thought I was joking, and the next thing I knew I was lying on the floor and she was freaking out, wondering if she should call 911.

I should say that throughout all of this there was a thread of food addiction that was, if not introduced by my experience at Teaching Drum, then severely aggravated by it. Having a family history of diabetes and compounding it with extremely poor eating habits made this type of condition a foregone conclusion.

The final straw was in 2004, when, in a 24-hour period, I binged on a buffet that included a lot of rice, skipped breakfast, had a large macaroni and cheese lunch, and then purged it all out of me through my stool and felt exhausted for the rest of the day. That’s when I knew that something was seriously wrong and that I had to change it.

I radically and spontaneously changed my diet that very day. I quit rice, which was a big deal for me emotionally, not only because I’ve been eating rice as a regular part of my diet since, well, infancy, but because rice has undertones of familial and cultural tradition, as it would with most Asians. So quitting rice was a bigger deal for me than quitting sugar, although both were hard.

I did it all at once, though, and I did it cold turkey, and I did it on a very quick, not-very-thoroughly-considered decision. My wife Abigail joined me on it, because we seemed to share a lot of the same symptoms. In fact, I suspect many people are hypoglycemic and don’t realize it.

Now, I’ll be honest, the first few weeks really sucked. Here’s why. All refined carbs break down very quickly into sugar in the body. Sugar is quick energy. So basically, a regular diet of refined carbohydrates means a body that’s accustomed to a low-quality but stimulating energy source. I imagine caffeine, or harder drugs, play a generally similar role.

What we switched to was a set of foods that is higher-quality, but more difficult to digest: fibrous vegetables, meat, eggs, beans, and nuts. (This is not too different from the Zone and Paleo diets.) That meant a sudden drop in the amount of quick energy coming in to the body, and a period of adjustment before our bodies could switch to extracting energy from the new food sources. So for a few weeks, we were exhausted. And I had to eat constantly. I pretty much lay around all of the time watching movies and eating.

After that initial period, though, our energy stabilized, and has gradually increased as long as we’ve stayed on the diet. It’s pretty obvious, too, when the diet is not followed, even inadvertently. On one occasion at a party, I ate a couple of deviled eggs and then suffered a headache for the rest of the afternoon, because I forgot that deviled eggs usually contain mayonnaise, and most mayonnaise contains sugar.

What’s life like now? Our diet remains quite restricted. We cook almost all our meals, or else we eat at Indian restaurants because most don’t use flour or sugar in their entrees. We have to cook constantly because most prepared foods are off the diet. We can’t stockpile grains like we used to — and grains are not only easily stockpiled, they’re cheaper. So our grocery bill is higher. (Indian restaurants are expensive, too!)

It’s also kind of hard to have meals socially. It’s hard to have to explain to everyone what we can and can’t eat — there’s no quick recognition like there is if you say you’re vegetarian, and you kind of have to know a little bit of biochemistry to understand. Sometimes there’s also a weird disbelief about it, too; some people just don’t think the condition exists for some reason.

It’s hard to travel. It would be nice sometimes to have the freedom to just hit the road and go wherever the wind takes me, instead of planning the day’s meals and making sure to bring snacks just in case. I think of road tripping as traversing a desert, searching for those few oases that allow me the things I need. We won’t really be able to travel abroad unless we know for certain that our diet can be honored, because a single meal that’s off the diet can have devastating effects. I have some desire to go someplace like India or Mongolia, but even a weeklong trip seems a like a big stretch for now.

Do I wish things were different? It would be nice. On the other hand, it’s awesome to not feel like shit all the time.

So that’s the bad news. The good news is that it’s turning around.

I think that a good diet is only one piece of the puzzle, but at least in my case, establishing a good diet is, by itself, maintenance work. It keeps you stable but it doesn’t make improvements. Sometimes that’s all you can handle, and that’s fine.

Properly digesting the food you eat is another aspect of it, though. If fifty percent of what you eat stays undigested because you ate too much for your body to handle, that’s not only a waste of food, it still uses up your body’s energy to pass it through the gastrointestinal tract. That’s the same energy that would otherwise be used to regulate the body’s energy, so it exacerbates the problem. Therefore, the next step after good diet is good dietary habits, including such seemingly inane and simple things like chewing thoroughly, enjoying your food, and stopping when you feel satiated.

They sound simple, but almost no one does them because they seem too simple to matter. But in fact, for a hypoglycemic to improve, it’s a matter of policy. That spark of feeling you have when you eat something good indicates an aliveness, and it indicates that energy is being created. That flatness of taste when you try to force something else down your gullet when you’re full — even if it’s the exact same food — indicates that qi is being drained, rather than generated.

The next step is circulation of qi and blood. The purpose of blood sugar is to transport energy to service all parts of the body. This is greatly assisted by proper circulation, which means optimal movement, internally and externally — things like loose joints and enjoyable aerobic activity.

Also important is regulation of mental and emotional activity. A large proportion of the body’s glucose supply is used up by the brain, and I can attest that when my blood sugar is low, mental activity aggravates my headaches. Emotional distress, too, can affect this, since the adrenals are involved in regulating blood sugar, so learning to handle stress is important.

Directly working on the energetic health of the internal organs using methods such as qigong, acupuncture, and herbs, is vital. Personally I feel there’s no good substitute for qigong — although I should note that the category is broad and variable; some qigong really isn’t suitable or effective, while other practices, such as hatha yoga, could easily fall into the category of qigong if performed correctly.

Finally, there are deeper spiritual implications for hypoglycemia, which is different for everyone but, based on my own experience, essentially involves how well you “digest” the energy you take in to your life. Having a condition like hypoglycemia would seem to indicate that if there’s a problem with the way you process food energy, there may be a problem with the way you process other incoming energies as well.