I just can't help loving you, Diet Pepsi Jazz

These are the words I found myself whispering to the cold, curvy, gold-and-blue bottle I held cradled in my arms like a baby this morning over a silver-rimmed saucer containing my carefully calculated breakfast of one egg, one slice of buttered whole wheat toast with flaxseeds, and one two-inch section cut from the end of a strip of not-quite-crisp turkey bacon.

"Look at it," I said to Mr. A, petting the bottle's cool, sweat-beaded shoulder and rocking it back and forth a bit. "It's adorable."

So I think it's safe to say I've finally succumbed to a bit of madness brought about by the end of summer, the breakdown of mental capacity due to a deficiency of the brain-building essential nutrients found in the heart-healthy whole grain foods I now eschew (at least if the dire predictions of my pro-carb dietician are to be believed), and the neverending monotony of my current so-called "diabetic diet."

I hardly ever used to drink soda at all before all this diabetic crap started. Now I have about one a day. And it's diet.

I didn't love it at first. I mainly started drinking it because it's the only thing that lets me feel, even if only for an hour or so, like I actually got enough to eat for a change. A 20-oz. diet soda contains enough bubbles to fill up the space that's left after a lunch of, say, a 3-oz. grilled skinless chicken breast and a little plate of raw cabbage salad, for example, or the ten millionth bowl of steamed veggies, greens and tofu, or the sixty-five-billionth stick of low-fat mozzarella with six (count 'em, six) roasted cashews.

Thus it is that Diet Pepsi Jazz has become my latest obsession, my main squeeze, the entity I look forward each day to meeting – right after lunch – for the sweet (albeit artificially flavored), satisfying encounter my friends at work are starting to refer to as "Tina's afternoon delight."

It's the caramel-cream flavored one that's got me hooked.

And now I'm drinking it for breakfast. I guess I should probably feel ashamed ... everything about it is trampy and artificial, unreasonably effervescent and upbeat, marketed to a demographic I emphatically do NOT identify with. Even the label art is embarrassing – big square chunks of caramel flying through ribbons of what I guess is supposed to look like wholesome, delicious, dairy-fresh cream. Yuk. But I can't help it. I'm in love. And like ambivalent lovers across the universe, I'm also living in dread of the inevitable moment when it will all come crashing down around me – the day the market researchers declare caramel-cream artificial flavoring hopelessly "last year," and pull it off the shelves forever. But until then – I raise my glass to thee, Diet Pepsi Jazz Caramel-Cream-flavored soda. You rock my world.

Anyway. I realized today that it's time to start figuring out some new things to eat. Luckily with the change of seasons there's been new stuff in the produce section lately – which is good, but also kind of scary, because I haven't eaten any of the usual fall veggies and fruits since I started testing my blood, and so I have no idea how any of them are going to affect me. For instance, I usually eat tons of winter squash at this time of year – all kinds, but with an emphasis on very big, very hard, blue-skinned, dark-fleshed varieties. Steamed or baked with a little olive oil and served in my favorite Japanese earthenware bowl with a sprinkling of toasted pecans, chopped dried cranberries and cracked black pepper ... And what if I make that this year, and find out I can't have it anymore? Diet Pepsi Jazz can only take you so far. At some point, you still need to eat real food.

I miss being able to eat believing I can eat anything I want. I don't like feeling obsessed with food. The obsession does seem to come and go, though, I've noticed; it doesn't last. Right now I guess I'm feeling it again because of all this new, untested winter food starting to appear. Probably once I figure out what I can and can't handle eating, I'll be fine again.

In other news, yesterday was the first day of fall and last night, right on schedule, we had our first real autumn storm. It's been raining on and off all day and this afternoon I got really chilled all the way through for the first time since last spring, and had to walk on the treadmill for twenty minutes to warm up enough to write this post. Before that, I spent several hours trying to read, and being too cold to really concentrate, and yet not quite cold enough to get out from under my blanket and do anything about it, all the while occasionally drifting off into reveries about how cold and damp it gets here in the winter, and how much I prefer to be at the perfect temperature at all times ....

We've been talking about installing a wood stove and using it to heat the house this winter. I spent two winters when I first got here living in a house that had a wood stove as its only source of heat, and liked it a lot. There's something very comforting and ... appropriate-feeling about chopping a little wood every day when it's cold outside, and keeping an eye on your fire throughout the day, and smelling those robust, wintery smells of pine pitch and ash and woodsmoke on your clothes when you come in with an armful of split oak or almond or madrone. We have about two cords piled up on the east end of the yard and a dying 50-foot Monterey pine that needs to come down before winter really gets underway, so I think this will be a good year to get back into the groove of heating a house with wood.

Of course, it's still only the middle of September; around here that means we'll have at least one more really hot spell before it gets cold again for good. Today though I am feeling cool, cloudy and cozy, tucked in and comfortable, and ready for some changes. Maybe I'll even put the flannel sheets back on the bed.

P.S. I was invited this week to become a director on the board of another local non-profit – one that deals with at-risk youth. The center offers several programs I'd be interested in working with, including a bicycle-building clinic and a food and nutrition program. The organization has experienced a bit of controversy over the last couple of years, so I'm doing a little research before I decide whether to join the board or not. But it sounds promising.

Speaking of bicycles – right now the only thing I'm loving more than my daily Diet Pepsi Jazz (I just can't stop saying those three beautiful words) is my daily bike rides. I love that bike like I don't know what! I love it so much I just bought it a present – the brightest 10-LED tail light the world has ever seen. It's so bright it hurt my eyes the first time I switched it on, and left me seeing stars for 15 minutes (after which I was able to again see well enough to read the instructions on the box, which read in part, "DO NOT look at or shine this light directly into eyes"). I'm going to go out now and ride up and down the road a bit, just to see how cool it looks in the dark. I predict: SUPERCOOL!

"...and it was all good, the core and heart of that time."

That's a quote from one of the last pages of a memoir I just finished re-reading – an old one, not a new one – and it struck me so deeply I wrote it down in pale blue ink right next to where it was printed in the book, for emphasis.

This fall I've been thinking back a bit on some of the adventures of my late teens and early 20s, and about the effects some of my actions may have had on people I cared about, and while I still can't think of anything I did that I can say I really regret – and I consider that a great blessing, the ability to see my younger self with compassion and understanding – there was a time a few weeks ago when I was really sort of mourning the loss of a friend I used to love a lot a long time ago, and I guess thinking about that person was what got me started on this little course of nostalgia.

What's clear to me today is that it really was all good at the core and heart, that whole entire time of my life. I didn't always know it at the time, as clogged and clouded as I often was with guilt and denial and other people's projections ... but I know it now.

Fall always seems to bring out these feelings in me. Vague nostalgia, timelessness, gratitude. I spent a slow, silent, golden day today doing mostly nothing at all but listening to the wind in the trees and watching the sun move across the sky, and snoozing and snacking and not thinking about anything, but Feeling a lot – just emotions, without a lot of real thoughts attached – watching them come and go like clouds. One of my favorite kinds of days.

Not much else to report right now. I took a day off work to go play in the city with my little brother and his family who were here visiting this week, and that was good. Tomorrow I'm starting another retreat series at the Buddhist center I've been going to. And now I have to go to bed so I can get up early for the first class.

All about insulin

So now that the initial diabetic freakout has passed I've begun doing a little more in-depth research about diet, nutrition, hormones, neurotransmitters – the whole "body" thing. Today I want to take note of a few things I've learned that I want to remember. I always thought I knew a lot about all this stuff ... and I still think I did ... but I didn't know there was so much more to know. It's exciting to have a new topic to look into – something that really matters, for a change! None of this "I wonder how spores really work," or "What happens again when you mix bleach and ammonia?" The random years of trivia I have stuffed into my brain ...

1. Eating too much of anything can raise blood sugar – not just eating too much carbohydrate. Eating too much sand could do it, or paper – anything with bulk. This is because when your small intestine gets really full, the cells that line it begin to stretch, and in doing so they release chemicals that signal the pancreas to dump insulin into your blood (to help handle the large amount of "food" you ate). And then, because your pancreas knows that insulin lowers blood sugar, and that lowering it too much is potentially life-threatening, it also releases other hormones that signal the liver and to a lesser extent the muscles to dump glucose into the blood. In a normal person this is a good thing, because it keeps everything balanced. In a diabetic person, it's not so good – because as a diabetic, you're by nature broken down in the glucose-lowering part of this pancreatic equation, so all you get is the glucose-increasing part. I already knew the liver could release glucose (it's called gluconeogenesis, if you really want to know) but I didn't know that bit about the stretching of those intestinal cells. It makes me think back sadly on all those times I worked 12-hour days without taking any breaks to eat (or ate nothing but a few handfuls of m&ms from the bowl on the old light table), then came home late, exhausted and depressed, and tried to catch up on a whole day's worth of food just before bed ... Sometimes I still can't believe I ever allowed me to do that to myself.

2. Eating carbohydrate along with fat causes you to gain more weight faster than eating fat without carbs. In fact, I'm learning that this whole "don't eat fat!" hysteria of the past 30 or so years is most likely responsible for much of the so-called "obesity epidemic," because when people think they can't eat fat, they bulk up on carbs, and THAT is what causes people to gain weight (it also wreaks havoc on your blood lipids, but that's another topic). Again, it's all about insulin: this is the hormone that allows excess calories to be stored as fat, and it's only released when you eat carbohydrate – not fat. Not dealing at the moment with protein (the third component of food), the thing I want to remember here is that eating carbs with fat causes more insulin to be present in my blood at the same time as all those calories, which means eating those two things together will probably make me fatter than just eating fat alone. Something else that seems relevant here is that I am not in fact insulin deficient – I'm insulin resistant, which means I actually have more insulin in my blood that I probably should – which is why I've been so predisposed to gain weight all these years. What hung me up there was the fact that it never occurred to me that just because my body can't efficiently use insulin for glucose transport, doesn't mean it can't still use it for fat-building. It can, and does.

3. Understanding this "thrifty gene" concept – not really news to me, but interesting – is making me feel not so guilty about having gotten so fat. The current conventional wisdom has it that fat people are basically just lazy, gluttonous, disgusting, and entirely responsible for their own repulsive and reprehensible bodies and lives. And yeah, I could've exercised more over the years, and eaten different things, and less of them. But I'm finding some interesting studies that indicate that the ability to gain that much weight in the first place is a sign that there's something more going on. It's not just a behavior – it's a genetic variation that allows some animals to survive up to six times longer without food than other animals. Here's a quote:

"... Although it may be simplifying somewhat, the mechanism essentially works like this: Those who naturally craved carbohydrate and consumed it whenever it was available, even if they weren't hungry, would have made more insulin and thereby stored more fat. Add to this the additional mechanism of the high insulin levels caused by inherited insulin resistance, and serum insulin levels would have become great enough to induce fat storage sufficient to enable them to live through famines."

Somehow just reading that passage again made me want to cry ... It really wasn't my fault that I was hungry all the time. All those years of feeling guilty about my hunger ... unnecessary. And my response to that guilt – to repudiate it, renounce it, reject it – because I did and still do believe that guilt is one of the most toxic emotions to indulge in (once its initial usefulness in identifying and correcting areas of disharmony has been explored) – my response was to say, "Screw you, Guilt – I am hungry, and I am going to eat until I'm not hungry anymore!" I was only trying to take care of myself. But all that overeating – also unnecessary. I just didn't know. I didn't know that there was any other way to deal with intense hunger than to eat. Because I always knew the hunger was real – not "emotional eating" or "stuffing my feelings" or any of the other terms supposedly well-meaning people use to try to make you feel like being HUNGRY is your own shameful fault because you're too weak, or emotionally out of touch with yourself, or unwilling to face your personal demons, or whatever – basically, too much of a loser to simply exercise a little self-control for once in your life, for crying out loud.

Whew! Lots of emotion still attached to that one, I see.

Anyway, I always knew it wasn't that. I really was hungry. Plus, facing down demons is something I know I am good at doing. And willing to do as often and for as long as necessary.

4. This one is actually not so much related to insulin, but I'll mention it anyway: I'm enjoying losing weight. It amazes me that it can be so easy to do, now that I understand more about how my own personal body works with various kinds of food and exercise. Lifting weights, for example. I've just added that to my bike-riding routine as a way of building more muscle, because muscle uses more glucose than other kinds of tissue, which decreases blood glucose, which decreases insulin resistance, which decreases the amount of insulin in your blood, which decreases your tendency to store calories as fat. I'm still losing weight pretty slowly – about a pound a week on average – actually, more than that, because I just counted and it's been only 19 weeks (wow!) since my diagnosis, so if I do the math (one moment ...) that actually works out to around 1.75 lbs a week. Not so bad. Nevermind for now that I'm only about halfway to where I need to be with all this ... I am halfway there, and that feels pretty good.

Valley oaks

The other morning on my way out I noticed the tree service was back at the two-acre lot down the road that just sold for a little less than one million buckeroonies.

A few weeks ago the new owners had had a large, healthy, beautiful eucalyptus tree removed. Eucalyptus are not most people's favorite trees around here – they're not native, they burn easily and explosively, and when they get big and old and heavy, they tend to fall over or break off enormous limbs that can take out cars, roofs or anything else that might happen to be lying around underneath. Some faithful readers may remember that a couple of years ago one of our eucalyptus trees cracked nearly in half during a winter storm and dropped a branch big enough to chop into a nice-sized stack of firewood. Though it's not the greatest wood for burning – or building things, either – it's not good for much at all, in fact.

Anyway, be all that as it may – I've always loved eucalyptus trees and have at times gone to more than a little effort to keep them alive, healthy and safe from the tree-cutter's saw. They're beautiful trees, silvery, smooth and fragrant, and so graceful in the wind. At my last house there were five or six very large ones (four stories tall and maybe 6–8 feet across at the base of the trunk) standing with their feet in the creek, and in the evenings I would often go outside to dance with them as they/we swayed like slow-motion seaweed at the bottom of the ocean. It was one of my favorite meditations before going to sleep. I could watch them from my bed, as well, if the moon was shining. I love those trees.

But our neighbor apparently doesn't love them. And yesterday morning I found out he has a thing about oak trees, too. The evidence came in the form of a large white truck and a crew of four guys with chain saws, charged with the unsavory task (so they explained to me) of removing two mature valley oaks that the new owner feels might mar his view of the vineyards, bay and distant mountains.

I rode up on my bike, all prepared to make a stink – beg them to hold off cutting until I could call someone from the county, etc. – only to find they were just as disgusted as I was. As tree guys, they don't like to have to kill beautiful, healthy trees, especially oaks, which are considered more or less holy around here and which in fact are illegal to cut if they've been awarded the status of a "heritage tree," though I'm not sure what a tree has to do to earn that distinction. The trees that were anhilated yesterday – not just dismembered and chopped down but utterly disemboweled from the earth until not even a particle of root remained – were probably between 40 and 50 years old, according to the foreman. But that was not enough to protect them. Down they went.

I would have loved to have those trees growing on our land. And I don't know if I ever want to meet this new neighbor; I dread finding out what kind of house he's planning to build.

I feel like I've been kind of complaining a lot about where I live, lately. I don't mean to. Mostly, I love it here – that's why I live here! This valley has been my home for more than twelve years now and I feel like I'm still in the honeymoon stage when it comes to discovering new things I love about it. For as long as I've lived here I've been shocked anew at some point each and every day by how really freaking beautiful it is – "I actually get to live here!" is what flashes across my mind – and the trees are a huge part of what I find most beautiful. The oaks, especially.

A little-known fact about me is that my name is an oak-related anagram for one of my most favorite personal rules to live by. I was not at all surprised to find this out a few years ago while playing with an online anagram generator. I relate to oaks, is what I'm saying. They're special to me.

Another thing about oak trees that I like very much: they are innately wild. Unlike certain kinds of pines or firs, for example, which may be pleased as punch to spend their entire short and unsuspecting lives on a Christmas tree farm, or other types of trees like Japanese maples and a million different kinds of fruit trees that seem to genuinely appreciate people's efforts to cultivate and care for them – unlike these other, more domesticated trees, oaks will never be truly happy living in the strictly regimented rows of the orchard or native plant nursery, no matter how deeply loved they may be by the people who try to grow them that way.

A baby oak tree – otherwise known as an acorn – as soon as it sprouts, puts out a long, deep tap-root that sustains it for the rest of its life. That's why if you ever order oak seedlings by mail, they come in those long yellow plastic tube-like containers, instead of in a regular nursery pot. And that's why, if you try to keep an oak tree in a pot, or transplant it after it's started to grow in the ground – if you disturb that long, life-sustaining root, in other words, or try to force the tree to grow where it knows it cannot – you may end up with a tree that lives but you will not have a tree that's as healthy, free and glorious as one that's been allowed to choose its own location, sink its feet in as deep as they can go, stretch out its tight and cautious young shoots toward the sky, and begin a long and leisurely lifetime of growing at its own pace for as many as seven centuries or more, if left undisturbed.

I personally know an oak in this valley that is estimated to be over 400 years old. Grandmother oak, we call her. She's a real beauty.

A new ally arrives

One of the friends I had that lovely dinner with last week just had the baby she's been expecting, after only 30 weeks of pregnancy. I'm worried and haven't been able to find out any details except that she or he (one of the details I did not think to ask about) was born alive, and is presumably still alive, and that my friend and her husband have been unreachable.

Not knowing anything more than that, and not expecting a return phone call necessarily any time soon – obviously they have other things on their minds at the moment, and while we are friends, we're not what I would call very close friends – I've decided the most useful thing I can do is make a big vegetarian lasagna (thanking goodness that I finally have learned how to cook) and stick it in the freezer, ready to take over there as soon as I know when they're going to be around and needing to eat.

Because I am under the impression that babies born this early don't come home right away. And oh blah, I'm going to go ahead and speak the unspeakable, since this is my own private journal – sometimes, they don't come home at all. (Why this terrible fear and superstition about acknowledging the obvious? As if lightning might strike me down just for thinking it!) Anyway though – I'm not going to give any more energy to that thought, but instead focus all the power of my imagination on the hope – the belief – that this baby will come home, healthy and as soon as possible, and that all this will someday be just a sweet story about how he or she was altogether too eager to enter the world and get down to the business of living a long and beautiful life.

At times like this I miss the community I grew up in, where this kind of event would be met by an instantaneous mobilization of highly organized women taking shifts to cook, clean, run errands, care for other children (if there were any), and just generally make sure that the family in crisis was taken care of and freed up to focus on their own healing. I'm not part of any such network or community here, and I think that's pretty sad. I guess I don't really know how to create it within a group of people like the ones I know here ... everyone always seems so busy, and so private. It's actually just a fluke that I even know about this early birth at all – I happened to have a meeting today with a client who works with the husband, and he mentioned it.

It makes me sad – seems incomprehensible – that I would have to worry that something as basic as dropping off a homemade veggie lasagna, or a gift certificate to a restaurant I know they like, might be seen as nosey, intrusive or vulture-ish instead of as a simple gesture of support. And yet, I have been told I should watch my step in situations like this. Sometimes I think I will never really learn all the social rules I'm "supposed" to know to live around here.

However: I don't think these friends would feel that way, which is why they're friends. I guess all I can do is keep reaching out to people in the way I would like to be reached myself, and hopefully the people who want that kind of relationship in their lives will continue to respond. I have met a few.