8:53 Writing Practice on the deck 71° Boise
I hooked up to an extension cord and I'm on the deck this beautiful morning. I had trouble getting to sleep last night but finally made it, then woke up at 7:45 pretty ready to rise after I did my neck stretches and breathing. It was so hot yesterday but I got into the shed and set up the deck furniture and went through some stuff. I have the car loaded with items to donate at the Youth Ranch. I've kept that stuff in the shed for four years, it's time to set it all free. I'm obviously not going to have a yard sale anytime soon. Although, when I move my studio home again I'll need to release some stuff back into circulation but I'll figure it out then, when the time comes. I also got out boxes and looked through some of Stephen's things. There are only three boxes left of his entire life and I'll keep them for the rest of my life. I have one box of Granny's stuff and two boxes of Gerald's stuff. Then I have at least a box of two of my mother's things but no paperwork. She wasn't a writer. I have some of her collectibles and other old things. At 2pm yesterday, I was so hot and sweaty, I grabbed Rocky and went inside for the afternoon, leaving all the stuff out and scattered around. I had a long nap and then my dinner before coming back out to finish up out here. And when I finished, I put the cats in the house and took off on a quick bike ride around the neighborhood, talked to a few people, made some new friends and then came home to hop in a cool bath to get all washed up and fresh. It was bliss. All in all, a pretty good day!
In my studies on sugar, I've found out a lot about diabetes. Diabetes has become an epidemic around the world and there's literally billions upon billions of dollars being spent on research and maintenance. I don't think my mother was diabetic or even prediabetic, even after all of her years of horrible eating. There might be a genetic component in some people that causes it, with others it's diet and lack of exercise. Some of the research suggests a high fat diet to be the #1 cause and I have to find out more about that. The #2 and #3 causes are high carb and no exercise, respectively.
I've been trying to remember the foods and diets we went on over the years because there were many. Mom and I were born with the body types that bulk up easily. Seems to me we just cut out desserts and breads and ate everything else we wanted. There was never any focus on dietary fat. We ate real butter when it was available, homemade breads, home canned veggies and then foods made at home with our own fresh ingredients. There were canned items, soups and sauces, but never anything fancy. Plus that was before processed foods were so available and so full of non-food junk. The only processed foods we ate were Kraft macaroni and cheese, lunch meats and fish sticks, the likes of which are not available today --- haven't been for a very long time. We had simple tastes, most everything we ate was ordinary food from the store. But that was 30-50 years ago and food from the store was different then.
I remember being a little sugar addict early on. At age five, my mother married my step-father, Richard VanRoekel, and I lived with them alone for a while before they brought Gerald in. During that time alone with them, I was very happy, probably the happiest time of my childhood. Being an only child suited me just fine. I was spoiled a pampered during that time and allowed to eat candy and sweets like never before. Because of that, I had many cavities in my teeth and still have two fillings from those early years of candy and tooth decay. The rest have been replaced by crowns over the years.
I got my first jobs early, always willing to do chores for an allowance or help others for a payment. I could go into detail about these odd jobs I did beginning as early as eight years old but the main point here is, my motivation for doing the work and getting the money was so that I could buy sweet. By and large, sweets were my main focus in life. I would go to the little market and buy a Pepsi, some candy bars and a few comic books and take them home to my room and binge for hours. In all fairness, I didn't do that often but it was certainly my guilty pleasure in my youth.
Thinking about my sweet tooth, I wonder how I managed to stay so thin throughout most of my life? I didn't do radical diets. Not that I didn't try to do them, I just could never make them work for me. The only diet that ever worked was the low carb/high protein diet and I took to it like duck water. The main rules were 1) No counting calories. You can count carbs or calories, not both. 2) Don't worry about dietary fat from the high protein foods being eaten. Fat has calories but no carbs, so don't worry about them. At some point in the 1970s, the world went fat crazy and everyone was going low fat everything, but because of my low carb practice, I didn't pay any attention to that fad. Turns out that that was a good thing and maybe even the one factor that has lead to my life-long good health and ability to maintain a reasonable weight throughout my life in all its stages. Somehow I knew that the sugars were bad for me but the rest of my diet was actually saving me from most of that damage. At this point in my research, that is a speculation and theory. I hope to make a case with my theory and share it with others.
In the meantime, my mother stopped eating real food at some point in her unhappy life but it took her many years to actually die from it. I would guess 10-12 years. And she never developed diabetes. But she did damage her heart and that combined with poor lung function and lack of any exercise at all is what did her in, in the end. When I cooked for her (and she always ate what I cooked even though she claimed not to want it), she always responded well to the meals I prepared. In only a few weeks of eating better, mostly low carb/high protein, she would perk up and feel better, become more normal in her thinking patterns, more reasonable and less contrary. But this didn't happen until after my dad died in 2009. Mom came to stay with me for two months, her and Rocky, and it was hard but good for both of us.
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