How we were

A small settlement hunches by the edge of the sea. The huts are made of driftwood, branches of knotted pine, some stone maybe, probably hides. The people are tall and fair with faces roughened by wind, brine and the pale northern sun.

They fish in the icy sea with spears and nets. They hunt the great shaggy, horned ruminants of the harsh rocky north. The reindeer and elk devour the tough wild vegetation and possess several stomaches to digest it. The people cannot.

They sometimes eat red algae collected from the sea or seeds or berries or sprigs of green herbs. These are good for health as any village healer knows. But they fill no bellies. That is the role of the great whales driven ashore by the first rough boats or wild bore brought down at great risk in the darkest parts of the pine forest.

After some time—a long span of centuries or even millennia—they find that if caught the deer and its relatives can be kept and that they will give good nourishing milk that the people can eat and that will usually go sour in a way that is good. They find the eggs of wild birds at first and eventually they keep these at home as well.

And that is what they eat. For thousands upon thousands of years.

How we changed

The new ways of tilling soil and growing crops came late to the shores of the North Sea, the Baltic and the North Atlantic. They came because the stuff that grew out of the soil was sweet and oddly addictive and because the new ways were good for chieftains.

The little settlements moved as needed for food or protection. But growing crops required control of land and for the first time there was food that would last more than a few months, food that could be stockpiled and given out to warriors and followers.

In the settlements there were people of greater or lesser strength, but strength was measured in mind as well as body. There were strong hunters, skilled gatherers, good cooks and experienced healers. Some of those of importance were men and some were women. Some were even very old, weak in body but strong in experience. No one ruled absolutely. Surviving alone, without a clan, in that harsh land wasn’t feasible. No one could have all the necessary skills.

But when the time of tilling and planting came, there were lords who fed the warriors and at first the lord had to be among the strongest. But later a lord might be sickly and idle, but still own the land by the social contract and structure of society, still own the stores of food given in rent, still control the might of men. And it was about men then. Women’s work was degraded and devalued.

Still the women gathered the plants and berries, and the forgetting of the old ways was slow. But over the generations the people of the north, though they thought of themselves as fierce and free, became surfs. Not so much slaves to this lord or that. Those were overthrown on a regular basis, but slaves to the grain and later the potatoes and sugar beets.

Then there came famine, when crops failed and that was all they had to eat anymore. In Ireland, fifteen percent of the people died of starvation and a similar number were forced to leave their homeland, when crop disasters and overlords conspired to calamity.

And today the descendants of those who lived on those northern shores are still among the relatively few people on earth who can process lactose, the sugar found in unsoured milk. They are also a bit taller. They get fat easily on the modern diet of starchy vegetables, beans, lean meat, skimmed dairy and processed grains.

But this isn’t a healthy kind of fat stored for the lean times. It is concentrated near our middles. Arms and legs remain relatively slender until the last stages of obesity, heart disease and diabetes set in. It is not the well-proportioned fat of some more southerly peoples and the sad statistics of northern Europeans are mirrored among many indigenous communities of northern latitudes as well.

Allergic to sugar

I was always one who fancied that I listened to the call of my ancestors… and ate healthy. I ate whole grains and beans and veggies. I kept meat to a portion or two a week and dairy to low-fat and limited amounts. That was how I was taught. I did have a hard time resisting the siren’s call of sweet tastes. Maybe the cells of my body remembered a time when the hard-won taste of honey was the only way to get such sweet on the tongue and it was exceedingly rare.

And ever since I grew to adulthood, I grew a bit heavier every year with most of that weight around my middle, despite being known as a “health nut” with my pot of legume soup for every occasion and a moderately active lifestyle growing a lot of veggies in my garden. So, it was a shock when I registered with a new doctor in a new country and got a diagnosis with it.

BG 190….A1C 6.9…. Numbers I had no reference for. But a disease my eye doctors had taught me to fear above all others: Diabetes.

It’s a danger to anyone’s eyes because of the way high blood sugar destroys nerves and sensitive tissues. But with my eyes as fragile as they have been since I was born, it is a screaming emergency.

“It’s well controlled,” the conventional nutritionist tells me. “You could eat less sugar or a plant-based diet. But yes, it will get worse, just more slowly. There’s no cure.”

I read their brochures, which advised me to carry jellybeans in my pocket to ward off extreme blood sugar dips and told me to expect blindness, amputations and heart attacks sooner rather than later. I was told I could put off the inevitable by dieting, even though my metabolism would inevitably slow down and require ever more restriction and hunger to maintain even an moderatey elevated weight.

For a few days, I felt truly hopeless.

I’m still considered “young” for this. Most everyone in my diabetes support group is over sixty. I’m only forty-five. I’ve heard that the descendants of people who lived through famine are more likely to get diabetes, even if they eat a healthy diet. Older family members always said I inherited my looks and build from my grandma Janet (of the Irish wing of the family). Maybe that was to blame, I do wonder.

Nightmares kept me tossing and turning two nights running, strange images of dark woods and crashing waves interspersed with jeering faces, hands holding cinnamon rolls and cheesy garlic bread and voices taunting: “Fat!” “Lazy!” “Your fault!” “Glutton!” “You deserve it!” “Everyone will be sure you just didn’t follow your diet and that’s why you’re blind!” “You’ll be totally blind soon enough!” “And you’ll die young!”

I was so tired I could barely think straight and every time I closed my eyes the shame and fear closed in. So, I did what I always do in the worst troubles. I made a big, healthy pot of beans—food to tide over hard times, food to share, hearth food.

Then I forced myself to eat almost nothing else but beans and veggies for the next four days. I got rid of all my crackers, cookies, chocolate, cereal and wholegrain bagels and kept the rice around only for my kids.

I sat at the kitchen table forcing in bites of the bland beans, fighting back tears and feeling ever more exhausted and then oddly dizzy. In fact, I found that every time I had a bowl of beans, I felt dizzy, tired and even a bit sick for several hours.

That was when they told me the beans were spiking my glucose. Beans! It is one thing to have to cut out ice cream and chocolate and bread. But beans?!?

Okay, the doctors didn’t actually tell me to cut out beans. They just nodded sympathetically. This is the disease. You can struggle and make it a little better. But you can’t win. You’ll never win until you’re dead. The dead don’t have to eat.

And every time I sat down at my altar to call to my gods and my ancestors I felt their disappointment, rather than support. I drew Tarot cards and got Death, three times in as many days. I rarely get the Death card, at least before now. Was that supposed to be literal? I felt so tired I thought I might as well just curl up and die.

But Death in the Tarot is almost never about actually dying. It’s about the urgent and unstoppable need for deep and irrevocable change, often a leap into darkness. It was the time of Samhain when Death is a presence and we draw our ancestors near. I tried to listen. I stayed watchful for signs.

Addiction can be broken

I ran across a link to a study… and another study and another. In a large controlled trial a group of obese adults was divided into two groups. One was given a low fat-diet and the other a low-carbohydrate diet. Both lost weight, but the low carbohydrate-dieters lost three times as much. And their blood glucose stabilized.

Not every study is like that. I found several big ones that claimed low-carbohydrate diets aren’t that great or come with health risks. But without fail these studies mysteriously excluded everyone with diabetes from their data and included, as “low-carb dieters,” those who eat massive amounts of fatty junk food as well as meat.

It seems that being “allergic to sugar,” which is what some doctors now call the disease, disqualifies you from being a good candidate for a diet that really does take all the sugar out, even the somewhat disguised sugar in beans and whole grains and carrots. And if you want to prove something is harmful, it is best to ensure a large proportion of those doing it wrong in your study.

My dreams changed. I saw the settlement by the sea, one, then another and another. Back that many generations each of us has thousands of ancestors. My ancestors came from all across northern Europe. I saw them by their fires, cooking and eating, and in the waves of the sea dragging a whale ashore.

I also saw my guide, whom I met two years ago during an intense week of ancestral journeying just before Covid hit. I thought I had a guide who was a fisherman with a spear because my ancestors have been such deluded colonialists in recent centuries that that was just how far one had to go back to find someone of good honor. Now I realize there may well have been another reason I got him.

OK, if that is what must be, I will listen.

I stopped eating sweets, grains, even whole grains, potatoes, beans… the lot. I made curry with coconut, yams, veggies and a little chicken and gave my kids all the rice. I ate a lot of salad and little bits of meat. I had only unsweetened applesauce and a bit of dried fruit. And after a few days that applesauce tasted so sweet I had to check three times that it was really unsweetened.

But my body crashed harder than ever before. For four days, I thought I either had the flu, breakout Covid or uncontrollable diabetes. Once I drank a few swallows of carrot juice and the dizzy, sick feeling I’d had with the beans came roaring back. I didn’t even crave sweets. The thought of sweet foods made me nauseous.

But I remembered how I used to eat a sweet or carbohydrate-heavy snack every time my energy flagged in the afternoons, like other people drink coffee. No wonder I was sick. This was withdrawal. Allergy? Maybe addiction is the better term.

Then, on the fifth day I got up out of bed, and I felt better than I’d felt in years. But I was also hungry all the time. I kept healthy snacks in my pockets and tried to eat small portions. I still chose low-fat options out of habit, even though some of my reading was telling me that wasn’t going to help.

Finally, I found studies showing that the changes I had made were still not enough. Yes, that would keep me hanging on a little longer. It had taken my BG down ten points. I’d lost five pounds in ten days. But it was hard, miserable, hungry and still a losing battle, if a slow one.

By now, I was beginning to see sense in my dreams. My body had rebelled against the sweet and starchy modern foods or had simply been beaten down by them. Looking back, I can see the chronic exhaustion and rising health crises of the past fifteen years in context. I always ate something a bit sweet to boost my energy temporarily, but it was like an addict taking a little hit of a deadly drug to stave off withdrawal.

And now I can’t handle even the smallest doses without consequences.

The internet being what it is today, I soon found out that I am far from the only one, and there are growing numbers of people realizing the incompatibility between our bodies and modern food.

I’m still not sure it is everyone’s body though. When I was in Nepal, living temporarily in small mountain villages, the people there seemed amazingly healthy—though very small and stocky in stature. They ate plates of brown rice and spiced lentils with a tiny dab of boiled greens and the occasional sliver of chicken meat or boiled egg. That was all. And they were powerhouses of energy and strength..

But after ten days of it, I was trembling and bloated. It may be that different genetic legacies call for different approaches to bodily fuel.

Rebirth of the fire

There is a spectrum of regimens out there for those who find themselves “allergic to sugar” like me—everywhere from the carnivore (nothing but meat, eggs and dairy) to keto to paleo and real low-carb diets. Three weeks ago, I started on a keto plan specifically designed to reverse diabetes and protect eyesight.

Keto is short for ketosis, a metabolic switch where the human body gives up relying on sugars (i.e. carbohydrates, all of them end up as sugar in the end) and switches over to burning fat for fuel. It’s such a fundamental biological shift, and yet it is something our bodies have adapted to do over hundreds of thousands of years. And it is likely the state most of my northern ancestors lived with most of the time.

I once scoffed at such “diets,” suspecting that they were merely fads like the fruitarian diet or being gluten-free without any medical reason. I had read and heard a hundred times that the only way to lose weight is to cut calories. “Calories in, calories out.” So, exercise helps some too. And oh yeah, eat low-fat everything, because fat is… well, fat.

But pushed to extremes (and sick enough days to actually lie on my back and do research), it turns out I will try anything to get my energy back. I had already been doing meditations and energy working every day for more than a year to regain the life force and strength I lost sometime in my thirties.

It’s been three weeks now, since I’ve limited net carbohydrates to 22 grams per day. That’s seriously not very much. Today it’s 7 grams from two small super-low-carb peanut butter/cocoa waffles made with almond flower, half a gram from a spoonful of greek yogurt on top, 2 grams from a third of an artichoke, 3.5 grams from a spinach and tomato salad, 5.5 grams from a small piece of sugar-free avocado cheesecake and 3.5 grams from a bowl of chicken broth with moderate amounts of pumpkin and coconut milk in it.

That doesn’t include all the butter, coconut oil, olive oil, hard cheese and hemp hearts I dump on whenever I reasonably can because they don’t have “carbs” in them and they do have the healthy fats my body is supposedly now burning for actual fuel. It also doesn’t mention a large portion of elk sausage my brother shot, dragged, hung, skinned, dismembered, ground, spiced and froze last year. Elk meat doesn’t have any carbs either.

People tend to give me pitying pats and murmurs when there are things like muffins, pumpkin pie and pizza around. But unlike the previous more traditional diet, I don’t feel too hungry, just “ready to eat” by the time meals come around. I often feel quite full, in fact. I don’t have to carry snacks around. I actually really like some of the food I get to eat. (The elk sausage is fantastic, as is the avocado cheesecake and spinach salad. The super-low-carb waffles still need some fine-tuning.)

But best of all, I feel better than I ever dreamed I would again. I’m losing all kinds of minor ailments I used to battle constantly, like digestive trouble, foot fungus, hangnails, canker sores and restless sleep. Most of all, I have energy. I’m only tired when I’ve been run ragged by kids, bureaucracy, cooking, cleaning and hiking, and then fall into bed at night.

By the way, my blood sugar is down in the normal range, after skipping right over the pre-diabetic range and my cholesterol is dipping back into the healthy range as well. I’ve also incidentally lost another ten pounds and look like I did about ten years ago.

The hard part isn’t feeling deprived or having to fight cravings really. I sometimes think about the foods I can’t eat and wonder if I will really never eat a piece of my mom’s delicious raw-honey baklava again… for the rest of my life. Ouch! It’s the finality that hurts, not so much wanting to have some right this minute.

I have to say that the hardest part is all the cooking. There are keto packaged foods out there, but half of them are scams and actually fairly high in carbs or terrible additives. And all of them are ridiculously expensive. The only way I’m eating waffles and cheesecake is that I studied them, scrambled for strange ingredients and mad them like kitchen science experiments, and it’s a whole different kind of cooking, not to mention shopping. Most of the necessary ingredients are either things I’ve never used before or full-fat varieties that are almost impossible to find today.

The food is also often a bit too “weird” for my kids, so I have to cook separate meals in smaller sizes. It’s all new and coupled with the onslaught of school, health care and bureaucratic demands, I’m frazzled… but in a generally good mood for the first time in a long time.

My ancestors and my gods seem to approve. I get Tarot cards for victory and fulfillment on a regular basis with a few of the stern masters of structure and rules, such as the Emperor and the King of Pentacles, thrown in to keep me on the straight and narrow. I can feel the presence of the ancients and with my regained health I can walk in the mountains again.