I have a dear friend who said that she always looked at her birthday as the start of her own personal New Year. I feel the same way. Sunday was my 67th, and I had promised myself that I’d take an A1C test then, which I did yesterday. After a glitch with the first test, I got a result with the second. (Don’t worry—I’m going to get my money back.) It was (ta-da-da-da-a-a-a-h!) 5.3. If the test is correct, then I’ve managed to get down to well below the new, lowered threshold for pre-diabetes of 5.7. (There’s some controversy over whether or not this stricter definition is warranted, as people are being put on medication at lower and lower A1C levels, but in my case I’d have to say that I welcomed the new guidelines because they were a swift kick in the pants.) Just in case I have new readers who are unfamiliar with this concept, A1C is a three-month average of your blood sugar levels and therefore much more accurate about your overall risk for diabetes than one-time glucose level measurements. I’ve gotten as high as 6.4, so, again assuming that the test is accurate, I’ve gotten things down over a percentage point. That’s great progress. Your results may vary, though.
Here’s the point I want to make: I haven’t done a perfect job of avoiding sugar over the past months, and indeed I don’t need to or want to. While I do put myself into Gretchen Rubin’s category of “abstainer,” that is, someone who finds it easier to abstain completely from a food or activity than to indulge in moderation, I do allow myself some exceptions. So I guess I’m a moderate abstainer. Every morning I have a tablespoon of maple syrup in my coffee, and I sometimes allow myself a small portion of chocolate after lunch. For a normal day that’s about it, and the amount of sugar taken in is well below the 25-grams-per-day recommended limit. But yesterday, for example, when Jim took me out for a birthday breakfast at one of our favorite local places, the Terracotta Cafe, I ordered chicken and waffles with apples, arugula and “bourbon-infused honey.” And I have to admit that I asked for a little extra honey. As far as I can determine, this was the best restaurant meal I’ve ever had. My guess for the sugar from the honey is probably 30-36 grams, if I had somewhere around three tablespoons of the stuff. So well over the 25-gram threshold, but I’ll limit myself to just the sugar from the maple syrup in my coffee for the rest of the week. It’ll all average out!
What we tend to do, what I’ve certainly done in the past,, is to adopt an “all-or-nothing” mindset, coupled with the “as-long-as-I’ve-blown-it-a-little-I-might-as-well-blow-it-a-lot” mindset. ‘Oh well,’ we think, ‘there’s no point in trying any more. I’ll just go back to my old ways. The new lifestyle just didn’t work for me.’ And there we are, right back where we started, or worse. There’s good evidence, by the way, that when you start a new, extreme change in your life, in whatever area, the initial momentum carries you along for quite awhile. This momentum accounts for the initial success of most stringent diet plans: it’s not the actual composition of the food itself but the overall calorie restriction that’s causing the weight loss. Oh, wait! Have I said that before? Anyway, after some weeks or months, the restrictions become very wearing and boring for more people and they drop out. If they don’t understand the underlying mechanisms that actually caused the weight loss in the first place, they’ll think that they have to go back on the extreme eating plan. Trying to get yourself ginned up to do that a second time is very difficult, and every new effort is even more so.
So much better to be able to make mindful, conscious choices, to allow yourself exceptions that don’t bring the whole process crashing down. So, for example, I’m slavering over the recipe for a carrot cake from the great Stella Parks that I’m planning to make for our Easter dinner. I have a new technique in mind for making Swiss buttercream (a type of frosting that is rich and creamy instead of tooth-achingly sweet) and will be using that to frost some cupcakes (mini ones) for our upcoming concert reception. I like what the redoubtable Stella says in a post on the awesome cooking and food website Serious Eats (where it’s possible to waste, er, spend, hours):
Sugar’s at the top of the food pyramid for a reason, a sweet cap to an otherwise balanced diet, something to be consumed in moderation.
For the most part, I accomplish that with portion control: thinner slices of cake, smaller scoops of ice cream, one cookie instead of two.
And, I would add, by treating sweets as treats. A treat is something you have occasionally. If you have whatever-it-is all the time, then it ceases to be a treat.
So one goal of my personal New Year is to keep that A1C number down, say to 5.5 or below. At some point I’ll get the test at my doctor’s office if I need to go in for some other problem, but I’ve found in the past that the home test and the lab test are very close. I also have a weight goal of 117 or below as an ongoing limit. As I’ve documented, things crept up a bit during my forced inactivity after foot surgery, but I’m headed back down in the right direction.
There are many other goals in place for my 68th year (yikes!) and beyond, but these are the ones concerning weight and health. They’re simple and doable. How about you? Do you have a good starting point you can use to kick-start your goals?