John

Don’t read further if you are expecting a cheerful holiday message.

No one is perfect. We have traditions, often started before we were diagnosed with diabetes. Cooking the turkey, popcorn at the movies, Christmas chocolates. As I said. No one is perfect. Just remember what this stuff does to your bloodsugar/weight and resume the lifestyle described in these pages as soon as you can, monitoring your bloodsugar and checking regularly with your doctor. So far as I can tell, diabetes-related damage to your body cannot be undone.

Bit of philosophy here: You are going to die someday. Whether diabetic or not.. The trick is to be healthy as long as possible and to realize that no matter how perfect we are, we can only delay the inevitable shutting down of our various bodily functions. We, in effect, each make our own compromise with death. But for me, when my end comes, I would prefer a sudden and unexpected death to the slow, miserable death suffered by so many of us diabetics. I do not want to go blind, nor to have my toes and feet amputated.

If I may take some liberty, and speak only to those overweight folks who want to be thin, I suspect most of my readers have visited this site because they are overweight and further that they have previously tried various ways to lose weight, without success.

The reason? You are looking at weight from a physical rather than a mental mindset. You are fat not because this or that diet didn’t work. You are fat because your mind doesn’t work right. You have a mental disorder.

So read again Marcus Aurelius, elsewhere on this site. Read other books on the meaning of life and on stoicism. Read the essays of Montaigne and adopt his philosophy that you must first be true to yourself, that the opinion the masses may have of you is of no moment. Train your mind to accept hunger, even to relish it, for the rewards hunger brings are great.

Difficulties usually show up a day or two after a diabetic gets off his or her diet. And it often takes more than a day or two to get back to normal. If, for example, you decide that you will eat your rice only when your fasting bloodsugar is 110 or lower, you might have to skip meals for a while. Punishment for violating dietary and weight guidelines is never far away. Deal with it. After all, you are diabetic.

I suppose you could also eat bacon and eggs or some similar protein until bloodsugar returns to normal. I have tried that with limited success. Doing this certainly does not address the main problem, which is likely to be weight.

As many already know, or, to their chagrin have discovered, there is a shortage of organic short grain brown rice in this country.

The brown rice craze is nothing to sneeze at and may well be with us for years. Even now, California’s Sun West Organic Foods is said to be limiting its output and restricting brown rice orders to established customers. If this keeps up, this site’s usefulness will be severely hampered.

We are asking our readers and, far as that goes, all who know where this organic short grain brown rice can be ordered to let us know. We will post that information as it arrives.