CHAPTER 40

2025-4-18

Q: Teach me how not to save money? A: Just spend all your income. If we use the same principle and method to treat the sugar entering the body, theoretically high blood sugar levels will not occur.

After having lunch with my buddies for Guangdong style tea and dim sum. we went hiking in North Vancouver. The trip will definitely take more than three hours, and the calories provided by the dim sum will be partially offset.

When we drank tea together, we chatted and joked a lot. That would have drained my brain power. Brain fed on sugar only. Knowing that, I spoiled myself by consuming BBQ bun, Custard Bun, Rice Noodle Roll and Mala Cake, etc.

My younger son started practicing fitness more than ten years ago. He was very concerned about the intake of protein and calories, so he prepared his own meals. Since the passing of my wife, my retirement life has become simpler. I dined out less, cooked and ate more at home. I inadvertently lost more than ten pounds. While losing weight, I still had to maintain a balanced diet.

I remembered the care workers who served my parents at the nursing home said that if the residents could finish one full meal every day, even not ate much at the other two meals, they are basically guaranteed to absorb the most important nutrients. I adopted this approach. If I can eat a sufficient main meal in a day, which must include high-quality protein, the types and portions of food for the other two meals will be based on the main meal to achieve a balance of nutrition and portion. As for the amount of carbohydrates, it is calculated according to the calorie consumption of the day.

Therefore, if you have a big dinner with friends, the meals before and after the big feast should be light and small. This arrangement also has the benefit of reducing the workload of the digestive system. You should not sit for a long time after a meal, especially after eating desserts, fruits or drinking soda. You need to leave the table and move around, do housework, take a walk or exercise.

Before I was diagnosed with diabetes, I used to walk during lunch time to relieve stress at work. It took me half an hour to walk between the office and the Science World, which is two kilometers, or about 3,300 steps. The effect is that people relax, their appetite is stimulated, and food is absorbed faster. There is a high chance that the blood sugar index will rise faster due to exercising on an empty stomach. After the diagnosis, I ate before the walk. Given my physical condition, the effect was that my blood sugar level would drop by one degree for every fifteen minutes of walking. I believe the results vary from person to person.

In the early stages of my illness, in order to make my diet more concrete and visual, I used a clay pot for rice to measure the amounts of food. The standard is that the food should reach the top of the pot, with half of the container being vegetables, one quarter being protein, and the remaining one quarter being grains or carbohydrate products, amounting to about one bowl of rice.

The order of eating (roughly) is also helpful. Drink the soup first, then eat the vegetables, then eat protein foods, and finally the rice. This way of eating can be quite boring, so don't force yourself. In the beginning, I felt aggrieved that I had to transform myself from a big rice bucket into a small rice bowl, so I cut the harder vegetables into small pieces and mixed them with the rice, turning the steamed rice into valued rice to satisfy the feeling of chewing it. In order to eat more mouthfuls of rice, I changed the soup spoon to a teaspoon and ate each mouthful of rice slowly, just like farewelling my girlfriend on a long journey, reluctant to let her go. For the taste, when the milk tea is served, I drank half a cup before adding sugar, so that the remaining half cup will be sweeter, as a treat for myself.

There is a misunderstanding that rice and sugar are the only enemies of diabetics. In fact, all grains are, especially refined grains, which are absorbed by the human body faster than rice, such as spaghetti, pizza, instant noodles, wide noodles, rice rolls, bread, biscuits, rice noodles...and so on. The sugar content of glutinous rice is not higher than that of ordinary white rice, but its starch is easier to absorb. Because of the cooking method, porridge is easy for the human body to absorb, so it is suitable for recovery after illness.

Finally, it is better to eat smaller meals more often and keep exercising to burn off the sugar than to eat all at once in the morning and then wait for the body to use it up gradually. Because the body stores a large amount of sugar at the same time, and the pancreatic function of diabetics is already damaged, they still have to cope with the huge workload, just like an old worker having to work overtime.

In summary, it is not that some kinds of food are not allowed for diabetes patients, but they need to arrange what they can eat and how they can eat according to their own situation and environment.