A good week. Walked a fair amount, average 3.1 miles a day. 

How much more delightful it is in this beautiful spring! 

This is McCrillis Garden, Bethesda.

I'm in the middle of the pack among my buds on FitBit Friends...ahead of my son-in-law Alex for about 12 minutes (yes!) though that ended. 

Friendly competition is just fun, not a strong motivator. It's a supporting motivator. 

What does motivate me is steady and even good blood glucose levels -- 107 or so on waking, 88 two hours after a balanced meal -- protein, vegetables, good grains. 

And I can feel in my flesh and blood and my brain is aware of it -- I can feel the balance of good glucose levels. 

I started seriously staying away from sugar (sensible on salt, sensible on fat) in October. By now this being able to recognize blood sugar balance is a fragile young habit. I have to protect it. 

Candy, cookies, cake, chips shoot up my bodily feeling. When the energetic feeling begins to fall, I chase the "up" again with more candy, cookies, cake, chips. 

The digestive guru, the pancreas, has to put out more insulin...until one day it can't. 

My motto is:

Don't stress
the pancreas.


http://www.pancreapedia.org/reviews/anatomy-and-histology-of-pancreas

This week, a new book whose author was interviewed in the Washington Post made some good points about the value of trying to control eating -- dieting. 

Deliberately, I don't call what I'm doing dieting. I call it healthy eating. 

I don't know if I'll read Secrets from the Eating Lab: The Science of Weight Loss, the Myth of Will Power, and Why You Should Never Diet Again. 

But the Post account of the book by Traci Mann, professor of psychology at the University of Minnesota who has been studying eating habits, self-control and dieting for 20 years, was enlightening.

 Some intriguing points:

-A warning about the honeymoon period after losing weight. Why the weight so easily comes back on. "I just lost 20 lbs!" yet 6 months or a year later it's crept back again. 

-A realer deal about the diet industry.  While programs like Weight Watchers can do some good, making the good last is the challenge. "Failure" fuels the diet industry. 

-Traci Mann cites three causes of diet ineffectiveness -- neurological, hormonal and biological.

-A brain problem is that when trying to lose weight, attention is overly alert and responsive to food cues, making resistance harder. 

-A hormonal problem is that loss of weight including body fat means loss of hormones that help control appetite. 

-A biological problem is that metabolism slows down. Over the long term (once the honeymoon is over), the body learns to operate on fewer calories, the ingested calories left over after the slower ops tends to be stored as fat.

-The unfairness -- injustice, really -- of blaming people for being overweight and obese.  This point really needs to be be made over and over. It's not to throw up our hands and surrender, but it is to stop blaming people and look for better ways to help everybody. 

Calling for those trying to come to a healthy weight to simply use willpower ain't it. 

A particular issue for me is the attractiveness of sweet, fat, and salty food. Here's what she says:  

"Let's say you're in a meeting, and someone brings in a box of doughnuts. If you're dieting, now you need to resist a doughnut. That is going to take many, many acts of self-control. You don't just resist it when it comes into the room — you resist it when you look up and notice it, and that might happen 19 times, or 90 times. But if you eat it on the 20th time, it doesn't matter how good your willpower was. If you end up eating it, you don't get credit for having resisted it all those times. In virtually any other arena, that would be an A+, but in eating that's an F."

I've got a real problem with "sustained resistance" to chips, pizza, scones, pies, cakes, candy, etc. An interesting tangent is that I can resist all lunchtime or at a party, and have so much attraction to sweet/fat/salty food "built up" that in the past, 6 hours later I'd drive to the Safeway, buy ice cream, cookies, and eat all. 

Having stable blood sugar helps me keep from doing that these days.

A question I'm asking lately is: Will this (anything) help me or hinder me? Will it help me fight against diabetes taking over? If not, get lost.