It's Complicated

I have had a complicated relationship with food for most of my life.  Sometime during my childhood I learned to use food as a reward and as a comfort and it took me until well into adulthood to realize what eating my emotions really meant.  A few days ago I started a rather radical (for me at least) re-structuring of my diet, to try and largely eliminate carbohydrates in the form of bread, pasta and potatoes.  It started with Michele being curious about the Keto diet, which is the latest fad diet based on the low carb approach to eating.  It follows the trail of the Atkins diet, the Paleo (caveman) diet, and various other gimmicky shenanigans that have some true disciples and some serious detractors.
Michele put her/our curiosity out there on the Facebook and was promptly deluged with feedback from both sides of this particular argument.  None of it really served to overcome my general skepticism about fad diets, but we did have a lot of good conversation about the results. One of her nurse friends sent her this video of a TED talk:

This is the sort of thing that I needed to hear at this particular moment, because I am one of those people on the insulin resistance/type II diabetes train, and a life long fat guy.  It jives with what I know from my college biology courses as well as my life experience.  When I was first diagnosed with "pre-diabetes," I was able, by reducing my carb intake, to prevent the need for medication for about 6 years or so before I had to go on preventative medicine like Metformin and Invokana.  The result of limiting my carbs was a fairly rapid loss of about 25 pounds.  Over the course of time though, the carbs started to creep back in to my life and while I didn't go all the way back to the way I was before, my weight loss stalled in the 280 lb neighborhood.  For frame of reference, my heaviest recorded weight was 345 pounds (I'm 6'4, so this doesn't mean I was rotund, but I was far from healthy).
My doctor, a very reasonable man, has been giving me pep talks about losing more weight for years, and I have been hedging around the kind of change I needed to make.  I know it is the carbs, but I love bread and pasta and potatoes.  What I realized as I listened to that bubbly lady in the zippy blue pants is that I am essentially in an abusive relationship with carbohydrates.  Over the past two days I have experienced something very much like carbohydrate withdrawal.  I have some experience with withdrawal symptoms both first and second hand, I know the difference between a physical dependency and a habit.  I have been treating my eating problems as simple habits, but as I experienced hot flashes, and a sort of vague emptiness that wasn't exactly hunger, I recognized it.
Hello darkness my old friend, I remembered when I quit smoking cigarettes not too long after college, there was an intense period of several days where my body was dealing with the absence of nicotine. There were headaches, a bit of mild nausea, and some cold sweats, it wasn't like kicking heroin or anything, but it was unpleasant.  Pretty quickly though, that part was over.  What wasn't over though was the habit, the feeling like I needed to have a Marlboro pack in my pocket.  I carried my Zippo lighter around for a while just because it felt familiar.  I wasn't really sure that I was an ex-smoker for years, I could still smoke at parties and camping trips, or have a cigar with friends, and I knew that the habit could come back.  Then I started reacting to the poison for what it was.  Now I can't smoke at all without getting a splitting headache, now I'm reasonably sure that I'm a non-smoker forever.
I guess that it's going to be even more difficult than that with carbs.  Do you have any idea how invasive and pervasive carbohydrates are in our lives?  It's pretty severe; the conspiracy angle that our smurfy nurse talked about seems more and more plausible, and no, I'm not particularly hungry right now. I'm still not on board with any of those trendy diets, but I am on board with breaking up with carbs, I've got high blood pressure, type II diabetes and I'm at least 40 pounds heavier than I want to be, I've been hit enough, it's time to get out.