Tag: carbs

Sugar and Tobacco

This is NOT a blogpost about cash crops in the West Indies. This is more about biology.

I had my first cigarette when I was 21. I was about to graduate from my undergrad, and had decided to “experiment” a bit. Friends who were already smokers warned me that the thing is addictive, and that I need to be careful.

I still remember that cigarette, a Wills Classic Milds shared with a classmate who was a very occasional smoker. I remember feeling high, and weak in the knees in a way I had never felt before (I was yet to taste alcohol, but when I did a couple of months later, it was underwhelming compared to tobacco). It was extremely pleasurable, but I remembered what my smoker friends had told me. It was addictive shit.

That day I made a decision that I’ll smoke a maximum of one cigarette per calendar year, something I’ve lived up to. It’s never been more than one, though in some years (especially in the early years), the 1 was made up of several fractions.

The thing with tobacco is that it is addictive. The high is incredibly high (for a non-smoker like me), but when that passes you have withdrawal symptoms. And you crave for more. If you don’t have friends like me who have warned you about the addictive nature of it, you can get addicted (alcohol doesn’t react that way – beyond a few drinks you don’t want to drink more. And I don’t have annual limits on alcohol consumption).

A few prescription drugs act the same way – most notably (in my experience) antidepressants. They are biologically addictive and when you stop having them, the body starts having strong withdrawal symptoms. So you need to be careful in terms of getting on to antidepressants because getting off them is not easy.

Caffeine is the same as well – and I continue to be addicted to it. Two days without coffee and I get the same kind of withdrawal symptoms I had the last time I was getting off antidepressants.

And thinking about it, it’s the same with sugar (or any other high carb foods). When you consume too much sugar (or carbs), the body needs to produce a lot of insulin to be able to deal with it. The insulin thus produced is like a demon / genie (based on the sort of myths you favour) – once it has devoured the excess sugar, it devours the “regular blood sugar” as well, leading to a massive sugar crash.

It was possibly my psychiatrist who pointed this out in a consultation a few months back (and so I officially have a medical prescription that says “follow a low carb diet”) – that these sugar crashes are what lead to bouts of  low mood and depression, and that the way to keep my mood good is to not have sugar crashes, which means not eating much sugar.

Similarly, she told me that the reason I sometimes wake up in the middle of the night ravenously hungry and unable to sleep back is likely due to a sugar crash. And so I need to have a low-carb dinner. I found this the hard way last night when I had noodles for dinner (my blood sugar levels are especially sensitive to pulverised grains  (including the supposedly “healthy” ones like ragi, jowar, etc.) –  whole rice is fine for me, but not rice flour), and found myself awake at 4 am and unable to sleep. As it happened, I resisted the temptation to eat then and slowly fell back asleep at 6 (luckily today was not a “gym day”).

As if this morning’s sugar crash wasn’t enough, after lunch today I ate some sweets that a colleague had got to office. Sugar crash duly happened an hour later, and how did I react? By reaching for the same sweets. Yet another crash happened as I got home – and  I reached for some sweets my wife had got today. I’m writing this awaiting another sugar crash.

Thanks to the functioning of insulin, sugar can behave like tobacco. You eat and feel good, and then the crash happens. And you eat more. Spike again, crash again. And so on and so forth.

When I examine my own periods of putting on weight or becoming mildly depressed (now that I think of it, they are correlated), it’s because I get into this eating cycle. Eating more carbs means I get more hungry. And I eat more. Which makes my hungrier. And that goes on.

The only way is to wilfully break the chain – by skipping meals or having very low-carb meals. Once you’ve done this for a considerable period of time (I managed this easily between last Thursday and last evening), your body feels less hungrier, and you get on to a sort of virtuous cycle. And you progressively get better.

And then it takes one noodles meal or a sweet offer to get back into the vicious cycle. Some people have famously “quit smoking hundreds of times”. I’ve also “gone on a low cab diet hundreds of times”.

Festive lunches

There was a point in time (maybe early childhood) when I used to look forward to going to weddings just for the food. Maybe my parents’ network was such that most weddings we went to served good food, or I was too young to be discerning, but I would love the food at most functions and absolutely belt it.

Of late things haven’t been so kind. Maybe the general standard of wedding lunches has fallen (the last “function” where I remember the food being spectacularly good was my sister-in-law’s wedding, and that was in early 2017), or I’ve become more discerning in terms of the kind of food I like, but it’s not the case any more.

Recently I had written about how several functions serve lunch and dinner really late, and that we should make it a habit to eat at home before we go for such functions. The other problem is that even when food is served promptly, it frequently leaves me rather underwhelmed.

It doesn’t have to always do the quality of cooking, though. For example, most of the food at the wedding I attended today was cooked really well, and was tasty, but it was perhaps the choice of menu that has left me rather underwhelmed and hungry even after eating a lunch with 3 different sweets!

The problem with Indian wedding food is that they are massive carb fests. The main dish, if one were to call it, is rice (people like my daughter don’t mind at all – she belted a whole load of plain rice today). And then there are accompaniments, most of which seem watered down (and really, what is it about functions just not serving huLi (sambar) nowadays? At least that’s usually reasonably think and has lentils in it).  And then there are sweets.

There are some fried items but they are served in such small quantities that you can’t really get “fat nutrition” from it. There is a token amount of ghee served at the beginning of the meal, but that’s about it! There’s not much protein and vegetables in the meal either.

So you “belt” the meal and fill yourself, only to find yourself hungry an hour later. And this has happened on the last four or five occasions when I’ve eaten “function food”.

Maybe it has to do with my regular diet which has of late become more “high density“, that I find these low density meals rather underwhelming. Maybe all the wedding meals I enjoyed came at a time when my regular diet was low density as well. Maybe people were more liberal with ghee and vegetables back then (this is unlikely since people in India are, on average, far more prosperous now than they were in my childhood).

Oh, and did I mention that my daughter belted copious amounts of plain rice at today’s lunch? An hour later she too was complaining of hunger. I guess I’ll let her figure out about density of food her own way!