Goddesses Never Age: The Secret Prescription for Radiance, Vitality, and Well-Being (36 page)

To measure and monitor your fasting blood sugar, buy an inexpensive glucometer at the drugstore. Even if you’re not worried about your blood sugar levels, try it anyway for a few days in a row just to see where you are with your levels. Take the test before breakfast, and don’t snack during the night. (If you’re experiencing insomnia and middle-of-the-night cravings, or if you have bowel or stomach problems after eating sugar, you probably have unstable blood sugar levels.) You can also ask your doctor to do a hemoglobin A1C test to determine your blood sugar levels over the past several months, which is an even more accurate measure. If your blood sugar has not been stable, look at what
you’re eating. Also, listen to your body. If around 3:00 in the afternoon you’re cranky and ready to eat the wallpaper, you’ve probably got uneven blood sugar levels.

The food you eat early in the day sets the stage for your blood sugar level for the next 24 hours, so make sure you get some protein and fat first thing in the morning. Think eggs with avocado and maybe some berries. For sweetness, use stevia, as I’ve said. You have to have some pleasures in eating. If you make a ritual of enjoying small amounts of chocolate, sweetened tea or coffee, and the like, you’re less likely to eat so much of it that you develop inflammation and unstable blood sugar. But know yourself—and remember what I said in
Chapter 2
about “moderators” and “abstainers.”
Many
people cannot stop after even one bite of chocolate.

Even if you think blood sugar isn’t a problem for you, it’s important to recognize that sugars affect your body at a cellular level. If you’re eating a lot of sugars and grains, even whole grains, your gastrointestinal system is probably leaking some food particles into your bloodstream in a condition known as leaky gut syndrome. Remember, the genetically altered grains of today are very different from those our grandparents enjoyed. They have much higher gluten content. That causes cellular inflammation, because the cells don’t know what these particles are and they want to neutralize them by surrounding them with fluid. Your hormonal system responds to all the sugars by having your pancreas pump out more insulin to get the extra sugar in your blood to go into cells, where it can be used. Some of that sugar is stored as fat, but much of it just travels around your bloodstream, looking for a cell that will take it in. Meanwhile, the inflammation in your body and blood vessels causes oxidative stress, which means you’ve got cells that are missing electrons scavenging electrons from other cells, destabilizing and injuring them.

As oxidative stress and inflammation get out of control, everything goes haywire and your body begins to break down and turn on itself. The next step is a prediabetic condition known as glycemic stress. This condition is reversible if you change your diet and release repressed emotions such as resentment and grief. Glycemic stress causes cellular inflammation, which first
shows up as physical discomfort, such as aching muscles, bloating, headache, insomnia, and weight gain. Over time, chronic degenerative diseases such as heart disease, arthritis, high blood pressure, Alzheimer’s, diabetes, and cancer are the result. Fortunately, this domino effect of sugar/inflammation/disease can be counteracted and reversed if you just lower your sugar intake and pay attention to the types and form of sugars you eat.

HOW TO AVOID FOOD ADDICTION

Are you a sugar addict? A sugar-fat-and-white-flour craver? Or are you addicted to a different type of treat? Notice the foods that “sing” to you—the ones you’re tempted to overeat. One of my friends recently posted on Facebook that she was finally facing up to her chocolate addiction. She’s realizing that when it comes to chocolate, she can’t eat it in moderation, whether it’s organic cocoa nibs or a chocolate bar. She knows that the only answer is to go cold turkey and never eat it again. Announcing it publicly is helping her gain the support she needs to stick to her decision.

For others, the addictive food might be mashed potatoes, or brown rice, or anything salty. If you’re tempted to overeat a food, it’s probably addictive for you. Don’t battle yourself and your cravings—just avoid the food completely. If it’s hard for you to commit to that, decide to avoid the food for at least a month and then see what happens. Getting it out of your system and breaking the habit might make you realize that you’d rather be free of the addiction than continue to fight it. If you’ve been addicted to sugar, you’re likely to find that fruits and vegetables taste much sweeter than they did before because you’ve down-regulated your sweet taste receptors. And by eating more natural foods and ensuring you get enough blood sugar–stabilizing protein, you will retrain your taste buds to appreciate real foods and your cravings will be reduced too.

Author Anne Wilson Schaef has said, “Addictions serve to numb us so we’re out of touch with what we know and what we feel.” If I tell you to take out of your diet refined sugar, alcohol, or high-glycemic foods—all of which increase beta-endorphin
and make you feel better temporarily—you may be able to do it. But if you don’t deal with the feelings that drive you to look to foods for life’s sweetness, to caffeinated beverages to get energy, and to a bottle of spirits to find Spirit, your underlying issues will make you crave these substances again.

It’s well established that food manufacturers tinker with the chemistry of foods to make them more addictive. Knowing this, be conscientious about choosing which foods to eat—and be honest with yourself about whether you really can handle them in moderation or if you have to let them go altogether. The only long-term, sustainable cure for food addiction is to generate natural feel-good chemicals in your body and at the same time work on your emotional body and the issues of your soul. Then you can align with the goddess within you.

If you have very powerful cravings for sweets, there are two reasons. The first is that you ate something for breakfast that spiked your blood sugar temporarily. After that breakfast bagel sends your blood sugar up, it inevitably comes down in a blood sugar crash. The second reason is that your taste buds have become used to all the highly processed foods out there that have thrown off your gut flora balance and your brain chemistry. As you eat healthier foods, you’ll crave sugar less. Then a handful of berries really will satisfy you in a way that a cupcake or ice cream won’t. And if what you’re really craving is the sweetness of life, go outside, sit in the sun under a tree, and have a conversation with someone who makes you laugh. By now you know there are plenty of ways to experience pleasure without reaching for a substance that will spike your mood artificially.

And if you love your soda pop, you’ll have to cut that out. It’s liquid candy and it’s common to be addicted to it. Don’t drink the diet versions, either; they use artificial sweeteners and trick your brain into craving real sugars. Diet soda with aspartame has been linked to obesity, probably because that no-calorie drink tends to make you crave something like a high-calorie piece of bread with a sugary spread on it, or a cookie. But aspartame is also an excitotoxin that kills brain cells and is associated with everything from seizures to multiple sclerosis.
⁸
Many women become addicted to caffeinated diet colas and mistakenly believe that because these beverages have no calories and less caffeine than coffee, they are no problem. Wrong! Drink water as your main beverage. If you want a little variety or fizz, try some natural mineral water, or put a slice of lime or lemon in your water, or drink a little seltzer with juice flavoring or fresh mint and stevia (which is low calorie) or herbal tea. You have plenty of choices. Don’t make regular soda or diet soda one of them.

As for alcohol—and yes, alcohol is a sugar—it’s not going to kill you to have wine once in a while, but are you having it once in a while? Be honest. You don’t need it, and it has a greater downside than upside. If you’re telling yourself that research shows moderate drinkers live longer and enjoy better health, remember there are plenty of things those healthy, long-living wine drinkers could be doing that simply correlate with drinking a little alcohol. It’s probably the relaxation time on the porch, or the time spent with friends, that makes their drinking health-protective. The fact is that even moderate alcohol use significantly increases the risk of breast cancer. Thousands of women “run for the cure” and wear pink wristbands, yet they drink enough wine to double their risk! And recent studies have indicated that most women are not interested in hearing about the alcohol–breast cancer connection.

Alcohol, which can be highly addictive, is also a depressant. What’s more, when your estrogen levels are low during perimenopause or after menopause—or during the few days before your period—alcohol is especially effective at lowering your mood by depressing your brain chemistry. What is your mood before, during, and after drinking? Do you need the drink to find the courage to be charming and witty, to dance on the bar or flirt with a stranger, or to say no to someone else’s idea of what should give you pleasure? Ageless goddesses don’t need an excuse to have fun!

If you’re a recovering alcoholic, avoid sugar. It will trigger cravings for alcohol and depress your brain chemistry. Don’t substitute one for the other. And keep in mind that alcohol, like other sugars, also worsens and even causes hot flashes.

GRAIN BRAIN AND WHEAT BELLY

If you’ve heard of menopause belly, or wondered why it’s so common to misplace your cell phone and keys when you hit midlife, let go of the idea that the problem is your hormones or “early old-timer’s disease.” Don’t think that way or talk that way. It isn’t your hormones, or early dementia, or a “natural” part of midlife that’s got your belly sticking out and your brain muddled. It’s what you’re eating. The culprit is probably grain, as two terrific books—
Grain Brain
by neurologist David Perlmutter, M.D. (Little, Brown, 2013), and
Wheat Belly
by William Davis, M.D. (Rodale, 2011)—explain in detail.

For most of human history, people ate very few grains—perhaps a little wheat, barley, rye, kamut, spelt, and other grains that grew here and there. People weren’t planting and harvesting crops, so these grains weren’t a major part of their diet. When the agricultural age came in thousands of years ago, we started eating considerably more grains and our bodies adjusted to them—to some degree. But as Dr. Perlmutter explains in
Grain Brain,
using glucose from grains as our brain’s primary energy source, and using grains as our primary food source, is not ideal. As I said earlier in
the chapter, fats are brain food: it’s better to fuel our brain cells and the mitochondria, or power stations, within them by using dietary fats, mostly from plants. All that grain in our diets—even when it’s eaten in whole form, with the hull mostly intact—turns to glucose and acts like sugar in the body and brain. The extra sugar from grains is also stored as excess fat in the body. Cattle are fed grain to fatten them for market; our bodies grow fat on grain too.

There’s increasing evidence that most of the diseases we’re experiencing in the West lately, from cancer to autoimmune disorders, Alzheimer’s, and autism, are caused by inflammation related to our diets. Think about how you eat grain. Are you eating a whole-grain slice of bread smothered in honey or concentrated fruit spread for breakfast or a snack? Cereal with dried fruit? Do you have grains at most meals in place of vegetables? You’ve probably taught your brain to run on regular, not premium, fuel.