Keto and carb addiction

AloeSvea

Well-Known Member
Messages
2,057
Type of diabetes
Type 2
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Other
I know I might 'just' be quibbling with words and meanings - but I do think it important in a 'carbs as addictive' thread, that we remind ourselves that all food is 'addictive' - in that we have a VERY strong drive to eat it! :) And, we literally die if we don't!

My feeling too, is there is a strong English cultural drive, if you like, to underplay suffering which hunger is (this underplaying suffering is hillariously joked about in the long-running Monty Python sketch 'it's just a flesh wound', for example). My understanding is it worked as a very good survival technique during many famines, illnesses, plagues, and 'ordinary' cyclical periods of intermittent hunger as part of a caste system where huge amounts of the population worked hard for other people, and didn't get enough to eat, and were abused in many ways, and died too young because of it. (I say this as someone who had Engllish forebears who lived like that, and the ones who survived got on a boat and escaped to the other side of the world back when that was happening.)

We experience hunger keenly, actually, because our species needs that in order for us to leap off out of the cave/off the sofa/rock top where we are nice and otherwise comfortable, and get us fed (and our children fed). This makes us a very normal mammal of course!

If you are experiencing hunger, especially for us metabolically damaged folk, this is absolutely normal! Even if you aren't intermittent fasting, which many of us in these threads are of course.

And the drive for carbs? If not well-fed, which is something we discuss often in our low-carbing threads - ie - how to ensure that we are well-fed - the desire for carb-rich (therefore easily accessible energy-rich) food, is all very normal and natural.

I hope you don't mind me popping in here at this point, and saying this, but my hope is, as a non-English outsider, I can assure readers that are experiencing hunger, and even suffering for it, and feeling like this is unusual or something bad (as addictions are 'bad') - is in fact absolutely normal! A drive for carbs I would even consider - absolutely normal! We all have a drive to consume as much as possible carby fruit, veg, and starchy veg, and honey, for instance, when in the natural environment, when we come across it. It is not a sign of inadequacy that must be underplayed, and even perhaps, feeling shame for experiencing! We who are metabolically damaged have paid a big price for this perfectly normal drive in an abnormal food environment. Let us not forget that the drive is a part of our species that served us well when all we had to be well-fed was the natural environment, and then the somewhat changed one with horticulture, and agriculture, to the enormously changed industrial food environment we have today. And, here we are.
 
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jpscloud

Well-Known Member
Messages
796
Type of diabetes
Type 2
Treatment type
Tablets (oral)
First slip up for a weekday last night. Dusted off and starting again!
 

jpscloud

Well-Known Member
Messages
796
Type of diabetes
Type 2
Treatment type
Tablets (oral)
I know I might 'just' be quibbling with words and meanings - but I do think it important in a 'carbs as addictive' thread, that we remind ourselves that all food is 'addictive' - in that we have a VERY strong drive to eat it! :) And, we literally die if we don't!

My feeling too, is there is a strong English cultural drive, if you like, to underplay suffering which hunger is (this underplaying suffering is hillariously joked about in the long-running Monty Python sketch 'it's just a flesh wound', for example). My understanding is it worked as a very good survival technique during many famines, illnesses, plagues, and 'ordinary' cyclical periods of intermittent hunger as part of a caste system where huge amounts of the population worked hard for other people, and didn't get enough to eat, and were abused in many ways, and died too young because of it. (I say this as someone who had Engllish forebears who lived like that, and the ones who survived got on a boat and escaped to the other side of the world back when that was happening.)

We experience hunger keenly, actually, because our species needs that in order for us to leap off out of the cave/off the sofa/rock top where we are nice and otherwise comfortable, and get us fed (and our children fed). This makes us a very normal mammal of course!

If you are experiencing hunger, especially for us metabolically damaged folk, this is absolutely normal! Even if you aren't intermittent fasting, which many of us in these threads are of course.

And the drive for carbs? If not well-fed, which is something we discuss often in our low-carbing threads - ie - how to ensure that we are well-fed - the desire for carb-rich (therefore easily accessible energy-rich) food, is all very normal and natural.

I hope you don't mind me popping in here at this point, and saying this, but my hope is, as a non-English outsider, I can assure readers that are experiencing hunger, and even suffering for it, and feeling like this is unusual or something bad (as addictions are 'bad') - is in fact absolutely normal! A drive for carbs I would even consider - absolutely normal! We all have a drive to consume as much as possible carby fruit, veg, and starchy veg, and honey, for instance, when in the natural environment, when we come across it. It is not a sign of inadequacy that must be underplayed, and even perhaps, feeling shame for experiencing! We who are metabolically damaged have paid a big price for this perfectly normal drive in an abnormal food environment. Let us not forget that the drive is a part of our species that served us well when all we had to be well-fed was the natural environment, and then the somewhat changed one with horticulture, and agriculture, to the enormously changed industrial food environment we have today. And, here we are.

You are so wise, I love your posts!

And I do completely agree, but I think the satiety factor of keto is really important to those of us who feel otherwise helpless to control our appetites, and worthy of more exposure via this and other threads.

It's that abnormal food environment you mention that is my undoing!