diet

Overcoming diabetes

Two years ago, I was 58 years old, weighed 200 pounds and was in a wheelchair because of chronic ankle pain when my doctor told me I had diabetes. Six months later, I was 20 pounds lighter and my blood glucose level had lowered so much that I was considered pre-diabetic. This meant that diabetes was no longer harming my body.

One of the first things I did was to cut out refined sugar, honey and junk food from my diet. This was not easy, as I grew up with a mother whose idea of making you feel better was to give you food like waffles with maple syrup and Sephardi delicacies like zangoola – deep fried pastry filled with treacle – on Hanukkah. But, with the help of a dietician, I lowered the amount of carbohydrates and sugar that I ate. She said that I could have artificial sweetener in my tea, so I decided to do that.

I noticed that food tasted better when my overall diet had very little sugar added. I also made sure to have a lot of vegetables with my meals. I treated myself to a simple spinach omelette with feta cheese and tomatoes almost every week.

I ate strawberries, blueberries and cantaloupe instead of high fructose fruits like watermelon. But I made sure to cheat a bit, too, at least once a week, with a few squares of fruit-and-nut dark chocolate. Whenever I went kayaking and got a good workout for an hour-and-a-half, I rewarded myself with a small chocolate ice cream.

If I can’t see it I won’t eat it! My husband eats ice cream and I asked him to put it at the very back of the freezer so I can’t see it. He also has a special cubbyhole where he puts his snacks that are high in carbs.

I spent some time on the Diabetes Canada website and found a chart there that tells you what food to eat some of the time, what food to eat most of the time and what foods to avoid altogether, which was very helpful.

Going to restaurants is still possible. When I order salads, I always ask the server to leave the dressing on the side, since dressings are sometimes high in sugar. I also found out that all sit-down restaurants have a nutrition guide, which will tell you how many carbohydrates or sugars are in their foods.

The second thing I did was find a diabetes clinic that had a case manager and an endocrinologist that I could see for free. I can’t say how important it was to find a specialist who knew so much about the disease and was so optimistic that I could lower my blood glucose level. He gave me a blood glucose monitor for free for two weeks and, during this time, I found out which foods spiked my levels and which foods didn’t. Everyone is different.

It took about six weeks but after trying three different drugs I was finally given one I could tolerate and that I could get on special authority so I didn’t have to pay for it. My pharmacist insists that it was the drug that lowered my blood sugar level from 6.8 to 6.2 in six months. I think other factors helped, too.

I found that exercising for even 15 minutes a day made a difference in my weight. There are unlimited exercises on the internet that you can do while sitting. And if you Google “exercises for seniors,” you will find many examples.

I started swimming twice a week. Swimming increases blood flow and tones almost all of the muscles in your body. Also, I figured that during the two hours I was getting ready to swim, then swimming, then going into the whirlpool and sauna – if that didn’t take the pounds off, at least I wasn’t eating for that amount of time!

I tried five different indoor swimming pools in Vancouver and they all had lifts that take you out of your wheelchair and into the pool. It’s different at outdoor pools though. It’s best to call ahead and see if they have the equipment that’s required.

I found social media helpful, as well, especially Facebook, since there are a few different pages for people who have diabetes. It was helpful to know that I was not alone – while also being cautious, since there were people who really wanted to make money off of my condition.

Now I am 60 years old and I can walk again. I am hoping to lose more weight so that I will be able to walk pain-free. I’m still getting medical treatments and I am hopeful that I will slowly but surely get rid of my diabetic belly. Here’s to hoping!

Cassandra Freeman is a freelance writer living in Vancouver.

Benefit of weekly fast

Recent studies are again pointing to the potential of weekly intermittent fasting, where one greatly reduces or eliminates calories on a set number of weekdays, to fight disease and prolong life. Jewish tradition has long advocated weekly intermittent fasting, though the practice has become rare today. Maybe it’s time to bring it back.

“Periodic fasting shows the most promise in getting rid of bad cells and making good ones for regeneration and can be applied to all kinds of diseases,” Valter Longo, director of the Longevity Institute at University of Southern California, told the Washington Post.

Variations of periodic fasting have become popular, such as the 5:2 diet, which advocates five days of normal eating and two days of restricting calories by 75%. Studies suggest that such fasting may be beneficial for treating autoimmune diseases, asthma, rheumatoid arthritis, metabolic syndrome, and even cancer.

The 5:2 diet is associated with Mark Mosley, a BBC journalist who popularized it in the United Kingdom. In the United States, a more restrictive version of the diet, known as the “every other day diet,” which advocates restricting normal calorie intake by 75% every other day, has been studied and championed by Dr. Krista Varady at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Though she cautions that the 5:2 diet will only work if one does not binge on the other five days, an effect she says is avoided more easily on the “every other day” fast for reasons still being studied.

All of this reminds me of the ancient Jewish practice known as the Behab fast. Behab is formed of the Hebrew letters bet-hey-bet, numerically two-five-two, which refers to the second day of the week (Monday), the fifth (Thursday) and again the second (Monday). Without the repetition of the Mondays, the name of the diet is basically the 2:5 diet (5:2 read from left to right, ahem), though there is no known connection between Moses and Mosley.

Despite there being other fast days during the Jewish year, growing up, I had never heard of any fasts outside of the dreaded Yom Kippur deprivation, and my family’s idea of intermittent fasting was restricting oneself to little noshes between fresses. On family vacations, the favorite topic around the restaurant table was where we were going to go for the next meal. If the Behab is correctly thought of as an Ashkenazi custom, my family had long forgotten it.

For centuries, the Behab fast was used in the Ashkenazi world for repenting for inadvertent sins throughout the week – “advertent” sins would get their own specific fasts. The choice of days corresponds to the days the Torah is read, not counting Shabbat, of course, when fasting is not done. The custom of reading Torah Monday and Thursday refers to the belief that those are the days of the week Moses ascended Mount Sinai and descended again, respectively.

Despite the association with Ashkenazi custom, the Behab fast goes back earlier than Jewish settlement in Europe and is probably the fasting mentioned in the New Testament, which Jesus criticized as an attention grab. The early Christian Didache, a manual of discipline that almost made it into the Christian Bible, admonishes its readers not to do as the hypocrites (read “Pharisees”) do and fast Monday and Thursday, but rather to fast Wednesday and Friday! Among Jews, the fast was eventually restricted to periods following Pesach and Sukkot and, in recent centuries, has become obscure.

The original purpose of the Behab fast was not weight loss, of course, but repentance and spiritual purification. Regardless of where one falls on the spectrum of Jewish belief, it’s easy to envision fasting a couple of days a week as an act of repentance in our (culinary) consumer culture, and one of walking more lightly on the burdened earth – and it just might add a few years to our lives.

Matthew Gindin is a Vancouver freelance writer and journalist. He blogs on spirituality and social justice at seeking her voice (hashkata.com) and has been published in the Forward, Tikkun, Elephant Journal and elsewhere.

Seven sins of weight loss

Hands up if you like to eat!

Now hands up if the fact that you like to eat has made you want to throw the other half of the apple pie you just ingested across the room because IT WON’T LET YOU LOSE THE WEIGHT YOU ALWAYS WANTED TO LOSE!

Recently, as part of the Jewish Book Festival at the JCC, Dr. Yoni Freedhoff, known (maybe only by me) as Dr. Diet, presented about his new book The Diet Fix. The book details why more than 90% of diets fail, leaving people with frustration and/or apple pie all over their living room. (For a review of the book, see jewishindependent.ca/jewish-book-fest-in-a-week)

As someone who personally struggled with excess weight for most of his adult life – likely as a result of too much McDonald’s for most of his teenage life – before managing to kick it back to the drive-through a few years ago, I was intrigued to listen to and meet Dr. Diet to see what new concepts he could teach me. I wanted to see what he could tell me that, quite frankly, I hadn’t already learned from my dear friend Google.

While he didn’t get into the meat and potatoes (or cake and cookies) of dieting tricks, strategies and science, he did talk a lot about the psychology of dieting and how our society responds to it. More of a what-NOT-to-do presentation.

The good doctor presented what he called the seven deadly sins of dieting. Essentially, this is a list if misunderstandings or misdirections society has placed on the path to eating healthy and losing weight.

In no particular order (except for the one he presented them in), here they are for your consumption.

1. If you’re not hungry, you’re not losing weight. WRONG!
Starving yourself isn’t the key to weight loss, Freedhoff explained. As a matter of fact, he suggested that waiting until starvation kicks in before feeding yourself will more likely make bad cookies…I mean, choices (darn auto-correct!).

2. You must make sacrifices to lose weight. WRONG!
If you are constantly making sacrifices you aren’t likely to make this work on any long-term basis. It should be a choice of preference, not a sacrifice.

3. You need willpower to succeed. WRONG!
The reality is that we only have a limited supply of willpower. So if we are depending on that for success we are likely to fail at some point. Try having a long, hard, stressful day at work, then coming home looking for willpower in the crunchy, salty snack cupboard.

4. You should accept blind restrictions. DON’T DO IT!
A lot of people follow fad diets. They read that this new Garcinia Cambogiolawala plant can help you lose weight if you eat only that and a pickle for five days straight.

Despite my undying faith in pickles, if you don’t know why or how a diet will work, don’t do it!

5. You need to sweat it out. SO WRONG!
Reality weight loss shows like Biggest Loser preach that if you’re not pushing your self to barf-inducing levels you won’t succeed. On the contrary, Dr. Freedhoff said, if it’s not enjoyable, much like point #2 and #3, it’s not likely to last long.

As a point of perspective, he added that it takes running a full marathon to burn 1 pound of fat. Yet it takes only one hour sitting on your tuchus at the neighborhood pub to put it back on. The line, “You can’t outrun your fork” is one I will use again and again from now on.

6. You need perfection to succeed. WRONG AGAIN!
According to Dr. Freedhoff, people accept doing their best in just about every facet of their life except dieting. When someone is on a diet they believe they must be perfect in order to succeed. Obsession leads to unrealistic expectations. Once again, it won’t last. And you don’t need to call them cheat days. Maybe just try “living life days!”

7. We must calmly remain in denial. DENIED!
We avoid dealing with our true feelings about how we are struggling with our weight or eating habits. If we fool ourselves about what we really want to do or can do we are just denying ourselves the chance to find confidence in our abilities to succeed. The consequences of struggling are guilt, shame and despair. Which often leads to? Binging!

Bottom line: It seams that what the Diet Doctor is saying is that it’s more important to tackle our weight issues with our heads than it is with a program or a set of diet rules.

Set clear goals that you know you can work with long term and take them on one step at a time. Otherwise, well, we’ll see you again at the next diet meeting!