I have a killer sweet tooth. I don’t think I have ever had something that was too sugary. Tomorrow is halloween, and with all the candy and sweets around it is a fat kids dream. One of my clients made me rice krispies treats, I think I shared a couple, but with the amount of sugar I ate, I could smell the insulin in my sweat. I believe so many of us are flirting with diabetes. We are simply eating ourselves to death.
I was reading an article today in the Boston Globe, about research on the diabetes/depression link. That the two are strongly related. There doesn’t seem to be any difference between type I and type II and the correlation with depression. The scientists can’t figure out which comes first or what causes both (together)- but I don’t think it is all that difficult. I believe the remedy is pretty simple- get your fresh air and exercise (don’t they have a pill for that?), eat your vegetables, do something to help someone else. My grandmother knew the answer years ago.
As I sat at a party and watched people stuffing food down their throats, I was reminded of a tourist trap in New Hampshire. They have trained bears. I seem to remember when I was younger that for a quarter you could buy a marshmallow and send it down a tube to feed the bear. These bears sat in a concrete pen and would do some tricks a few times a day. The tourist trap doesn’t let you feed the bears anymore, I believe because the bears were getting diabetes (like it is a virus that can be passed around- type 1, is genetic and sucks. type 2, probably still a lot of genetics, but for a lot of people, we have to work really hard to achieve full blown sugar-in-our-urine diabetes) the bears sat in a cell all day, did tricks for marshmallows, and lived a life of depression and inactivity, surely not the life a bear was created for.
Hmmm…. I don’t want to stir up too much, but how many of us are like the bear- made for something else, but having no idea what a bear is supposed to do? Our whole life has been doing tricks for marshmallows. Seeing bears with more marshmallows because they can do better tricks because they came from better families or better schools, or ‘knew’ someone. Or we can put in overtime on our tricks, earn marshmallows and half. Maybe if I earned more marshmallows then my ______ (enter specific name here, who are we trying to impress? Father wounds?) would like me. Come home and try to learn better ways to earn more marshmallows….
Fight with our spouses over how we are going to use our marshmallows. I can’t afford to give marshmallows to a starving bear, because I am saving for retirement! (besides, it is not my fault he doesn’t know any tricks, isn’t that what we have welfare for?) You are not going to live to retirement if you keep hoarding the stupid puffed death-balls. You can’t afford to take a week or two off to go to another country, because you are only allowed so many vacation days (and you used them on ________ insert specific use of vacation time) before the bear trainer will get mad, after all when you earn marshmallows, he gets rich. While children in africa eat dirt to stop the pain in their hungry bellies. I wonder what the research is on the link between diabetes and depression in the third world?
Maybe these bears have diabetes and depression because they simply are not living the life they were intended to live.
