top 5 reasons yoga is great for hypoglycemics

I'm back! It has been a long time since my last post, but I have a good excuse. I have been taking an intensive yoga teacher training course, getting a 200-hour certification in Hatha/Kundalini yoga at Karuna Yoga, which is a wonderful studio if you are in the LA area. Between all the lectures and yoga classes and homework (!), (oh, and my regular day job), I haven't had time for much blogging, cooking, or even going to the farmer's market. But, I have lots of new ideas for posts.

I will get cooking again soon and post some new fall recipes, but I thought it would be appropriate if my first post back was about hypoglycemia and yoga. I believe that anyone and everyone can benefit from yoga - not just the fit and flexible. Practicing yoga can be as simple as closing your eyes and taking a few deep breaths. Sequences and practices can always be modified, and should always be done with an awareness of what you need right now. In my personal experience, yoga has really helped me to manage my blood sugar better, and to feel healthier overall.

So, here are my Top 5 Reasons Yoga is Great for Hypoglycemics:

1. Yoga helps improve your energy while other forms of exercise may exhaust you. This is not to say that running, cycling, etc. are bad - in fact, they are great, but sometimes they are not what you need if you are having blood sugar problems.

2. Yoga enhances the functioning of the glandular and nervous systems, especially by decreasing stress hormones (cortisol, adrenaline) and increasing relaxation hormones. Being in the "fight or flight" mode triggered by an excess of stress hormones will interfere with the body's ability to use blood sugar efficiently. Here's a short article about yoga and diabetes that touches on this.

3. Yoga fosters greater body-mind awareness. If we can tune into our bodies, we are better able to sense when symptoms of low blood sugar are appearing so that we can do something about it. This awareness also helps us to realize which foods are making us feel good and which foods are making things worse.

4. Yoga postures help increase the circulation of blood, oxygen, fluids, and nutrients to organs throughout the body. When all of our systems are working well, the blood sugar stays balanced.

5. Yoga develops the focus and clear thinking that we need in order to stick to a sugar-free, white bread, white rice, white flour - free diet. It's hard! Some self control and mental discernment helps.

I'm sure I could come up with more to add to this list, but I don't want to be pedantic about it. Yoga is great - enough said! I am working on a practice sequence tailored to the goal of keeping blood sugar stable, and I will post that in the near future. Namaste ;)

It's Cinco de Mayo - make salsa verde!

Oh yeah! Cinco de Mayo is one of my favorite sort-of holidays. I mean, I would like it better if work was canceled, but I can't really complain about a day that results in copious amounts of Mexican food. In honor of Cinco de Mayo, I'm posting a tried-and-true recipe for homemade salsa verde. Mike and I have made this so many times, we haven't referred to printed instructions in years.

First, however, I wanted to offer a few tips for any other hypoglycemics reading this blog. Enjoy Cinco de Mayo, but avoid flour tortillas - the corn tortillas will be kinder to your blood sugar. Watch out for the Mexican rice, too! Beans would be better. And, last but not least, stick with a good Mexican beer (Corona, Tecate, Dos Equis, Negra Modela...yes, I know my beers!), and STEP AWAY from the margaritas! The mix is mostly sugar water, and hard liquor really concentrates the sugar in the alcohol. I have a theory that a hangover comes from low blood sugar plus dehydration - don't help me prove it. :)

OK - back to the salsa. Where I'm from in Alabama, everyone is quite familiar with green tomatoes, but tomatillos...not so much. One of the key differences is that tomatillos are ripe, even though they are green and small. Tomatillos should be easy to find in the produce section of most major grocery store chains. I usually pick through them, peeling back the papery husks just enough to make sure the tomatillo inside is bright green with no soft spots. Mike stands patiently by, holding the produce bag, knowing that the tomatillo selection process will be worth the wait.

TOMATILLO SALSA

1 1/5 lbs. tomatillos
1/2 fresh jalapeno
1/2 avocado
1/4 cup fresh cilantro
2 Tbsps. minced garlic
2 Tbsps. olive oil
1 Tbsp. ground cumin
1 Tbsp. ground coriander
salt and pepper to taste
additional cumin and coriander to taste

1. Remove and discard the husks from the tomatillos. Wash the tomatillos, dry them, then cut them into halves or quarters (depending on the size of the tomatillo). Place half of the tomatillo pieces in a blender or food processor with the half of a jalapeno pepper (seeds removed). Process until enough room is made in the blender/food processor for the rest of the tomatillos, avocado half, cilantro, and garlic. Blend everything together until is has a salsa consistency, basically smooth and not too chunky. It will be a gorgeous green color, like the epitome of spring.

2. Heat the olive oil in a large skillet. Add the cumin and coriander to the oil, and let it heat for 30 seconds. Lean in close and get a whiff! Pour in the salsa, and stir to distribute the spices throughout.

3. Cook the salsa for approximately 15 minutes over low heat, stirring often. Start with a teaspoon each of salt and pepper, and add more, if desired, as you stir and taste. Add more cumin and coriander, a half teaspoon at a time, until you are satisfied with the flavor. I probably use two more teaspoons of each at this point, but I never measure (sorry!). I just keep shaking the spices in, little by little, until it tastes bright and fresh, but not sour.

Homemade salsa verde is delicious hot on nachos, chilaquiles, or carne asada, and is also great as a dip. This recipe will make enough salsa for a party, and it keeps well in the fridge for at least a week.

Dang! I missed the grilled cheese invitational.

I recently stumbled upon the hilarious website for the LA-based Grilled Cheese Invitational cooking competition. I went back to the site today, only to realize that the contest was yesterday! It looked like fun. Maybe next year I will come up with an awesome whole-wheat grilled cheese "sammich" - nothing too healthy, but I would probably have to enter in what they call the "Kama Sutra" category, which is for cooks who want to go beyond basic bread, butter, and cheese (they call that "Missionary Position").

Go check out the website, it's quite giggle-worthy. And please help me think of something cool to do with the grilled cheese idea!

guest blogger Mike talks about living near hypoglycemia

Introducing Filthy Sucre's second-ever guest blogger...my husband, Mike! He's been mentioned on the blog many times as guinea-pig-in-chief, so today he's going to weigh in on what it's like dealing with someone else's high-maintenance blood sugar!

Living Near Hypoglycemia

Mike here, the Filthy Sucre husband and photographer, with my take on living near hypoglycemia.

I don't have to eat 5 times a day. I could eat a white bread, gummy bear, and chocolate fudge sandwich if I wanted to, and it wouldn't bother me - except for the taste, the stomach ache, and he eventual berating from my dentist. I can eat any and all Thanksgiving food without a thought, including all the cookies, brownies and snowball cherries.

I am not a hypoglycemic.

I know someone who is...and she lives with me and writes this delicious blog. Though she has her hypoglycemia largely under control now, she was much like Dr. Jekell/Mr. Hyde, only it was more like "Ms. I've Eaten/Ms. FEED ME NOW!" And very occasionally, she's still that way. Seriously...sometimes we have to drop everything so she can eat. There's the cranky impatience, the irritated mumbling, and the vicious grumbling. Sometimes I get exasperated about the situation, but I know that Addie can't help it and I try to be supportive by cooking dinner immediately. After all, low blood sugar - really, really low blood sugar - can cause migraine level headaches and nausea that can take a couple of days to work through. I don't want that for her.

I've never experienced hypoglycemia on that level, but I have had episodes.

The first time that I experiened a hypoglycemic reaction and knew what to call it was in college. I grew up on Dr. Pepper and Mountain Dew, but gave up soda when I got to college - the carbonation made it hard to play French horn comfortably at all those rehearsals. One night I didn't have a rehearsal and somehow found myself with a Dr. Pepper in hand once more. Wow, did I notice the sugar! My heart was pounding, and I felt vaguely nauseous. And it was soooo sweet - unnaturally sweet. The kind of sickly sweet that only high fructose corn syrup can deliver. I had no idea what I'd been drinking all those years. It was a revelation. I've had nothing but diet cola since then.

Not all of us are hypoglycemics, but I'd imagine that nearly all of us have had the odd hypoglycemic moment even if you didn't realize it. If I have to, I can make it until 3 pm before eating lunch and be nothing but really hungry. Almost all the time. I can start a meal with dessert. Almost all the time. I can drink wine at a cocktail party on an empty stomach to be polite. Almost all the time.

But now I find that I don't really want to. Addie's diet-of-necessity has clearly affected my sensitivity to sugar. Not that I can't handle it in a larger sense, but I notice the effect it has on my body. And there are a lot of other good side effects to following a hypoglycemic diet: less sugar means fewer calories and the ability to keep weight down pretty easily; avoiding processed flour means more whole grains; fewer gummy animals and more real fruit means more vitamins and more fiber...the list goes on. I'm just plain healthier than I would be if my wife didn't have hypoglycemia.

When Addie decided to change her diet in earnest, it wasn't easy for me at first. She had to cut everything out and add things back in slowly to see what affected her and how. I grumbled and complained about losing my sourdough bread and potatoes and...well, the list goes on a second time. There was another option for me: I could get my own stash of food, but I decided that I wasn't going to pay for two loaves of bread and try to cook two different meals. I'm a lazy cheapskate that way. So I lived and learned...and now I like it.

I think the lesson here is that there is a sugary subset of food that no human - whatever the level of thier health - should consume: high fructose corn syrup, white flour that has all the nutrients stripped out, too many starcy foods, Thanksgiving and Christmas food...for the final time, the list goes on.

I feel better. And for that I have to thank Addie - the hypoglycemia monster that I love.

if you don't hear from me this week..

Don't panic! Mike and I are doing a cross-town move this weekend, so I'm not going to be wired to the Internet for a few days. That means no blogs for a while - please continue eating as normal.

Actually, my blood sugar is part of the reason we are moving now. Since I've been working on the Westside, I've been having to get up early to traverse the 405 at a snail's pace each day. Just being awake that much longer in the day has increased my chances of getting all hypoglycemic to a notable degree. So, the exhaustion and sad quality of life have prompted us to live closer to work. Finally!

I can't wait to try out my new kitchen (now with dishwasher!!) and blog about the recipes. Stay tuned.

filthy sucre so far: cool word cloud

Mike made me this amazingly cool word cloud of the Filthy Sucre blog so far. (If you click on it, you can make it bigger.) To make your own, go to www.wordle.net.

One thing is clear: I need to calm down about beets.

more on beets: are they high in sugar?

After posting my raw beet salad last weekend, I started seeing beet articles and recipes everywhere - kind of like when you buy a new car, and suddenly it seems like everyone on the road has the same model as you...

I know beets are in season in much of the country, but clearly, I am a trendsetter. However, this one post from the kitchn gave me pause, because it says that of all the vegetables, beets are highest in natural sugar...hmmm.

I didn't feel like the beets affected my blood sugar, but I did a little research anyway to see if I really should be eating them or not. (It's a recent like-affair I have with beets, anyway.) I found this website about glycemic index, which "ranks carbohydrates based on their rate of glycemic response." It's a little suspect in my book, though, because the list has Snickers bars ranked better than brown rice. I think we all intuitively know that can't be right. Way over to the side on the chart, you can see the "glycemic load" of the food, which is actually more useful than the "glycemic index" number because it factors in fiber content. If they had listed the foods according to glycemic load rather than glycemic index, people would not have been tempted into justifying that Snickers as healthy. Then there's the whole part of the site where they explain the limitations of the glycemic index, which are pretty significant due to the small test groups used to generate the rankings. As a result, widely varying - even anomalous or outlying - results have been averaged together along with the other measurements, and that's the number you see assigned to each food on the chart. As they point out, russet potatoes have scored as low as 56 and and high as 111. This would help explain why spaghetti (42) and macaroni & cheese (64) got such different rankings on the chart, which I thought was weird. You'd think the protein in the cheese would help the mac...otherwise what's the big difference? The main ingredients are pretty much the same before you add sauce. FYI, beets scored 64 on glycemic index and 4.3 on glycemic load - high in sugar carbs, but high in fiber with a lower glycemic load than either apples or bananas.

For me, the clincher is this statement: "And finally, different people have different insulin responses (i.e. produce different levels of insulin), even with an identical glycemic response. It seems to me that this fact captures the essence of hypoglycemia - having a body that doesn't react to sugar like everyone else's. That's why, even though I'm not a doctor or a nutritionist or whatever, I do OK just going by how I feel after I eat a given food. I don't have a chart with a magic number for each food, but I've learned a lot along the way. My verdict on beets: fine as a side dish, but I won't be going on any all-beet diets.

While I'm still on the beet topic (beeting this dead horse, you might say), here's an article from The New York Times that includes facts about beets being good for you (and under-recognized, apparently). And, here's Martha Stewart's recipe for Raw Beets with Orange Coriander Vinaigrette, which sounds pretty good. I love coriander, and the picture on the recipe is really beautiful (Martha would have it no other way, of course). I would skip the honey entirely, or use agave nectar instead. Honey has more sugar than sugar, if you know what I mean.

And, I know I'm always encouraging people to buy food that's grown locally, but I can't resist passing along this beet producer you may have heard of in Pennsylvania. If you're in the Scranton area, be sure to check this place out - it will be...unique.

so hypoglycemia helps make a lame movie character lamer...?

Well. I don't know what to think about this. I have a Google alert set up for "hypoglycemia," and it has been going crazy this week as the film reviews for Paul Blart: Mall Cop have been coming out. Yes, that's right. Mall Cop. Apparently, the hapless suburban mall security guard is hampered in his dream of making the big time (becoming a state trooper) by his hypoglycemia, which makes him pass out at inappropriate times.

Clearly, we hypoglycemics are not being taken seriously. If we were, someone would've made a Lifetime movie about us by now. Instead, we get Paul Blart and about as much street cred as nearsightedness gets you. Well, I have nearsightedness, and I can confirm that the hypoglycemia sucks much, much more. It's not like I can just put on blood-sugar-fixing glasses that look cool and double as an accessory. No, I have to carry nuts everywhere. Did you know there's an arthritis foundation? Just saying.

Back to Mall Cop. So, it's probably not going to win any Oscars. On the bright side, this might finally be enough to get rid of Segways once and for all. The Hollywood Reporter made a valiant attempt to analyze it, while the Washington Post reviewer said, "If I were home sick and came across 'Paul Blart: Mall Cop' on cable, then discovered that the remote was wayyy on the other side of the room, I could lie on the couch and watch the entire thing without being unhappy." (For real, click the link, I'm not making that up.)

Maybe if I'm wiped out on my couch with low blood sugar, I'll do the same.

hypoglycemia is not just being hungry

It's true - I cannot go for long periods of time without eating. I once ended up with low blood sugar because I did not have a snack before seeing The Lord of the Rings in the theater. No joke. I can't wait until 10:00 to have dinner, I can't skip meals, and if I sleep in until 11:00 (lazy, I know), I'll still have a small breakfast even though I'm planning lunch in an hour-and-a-half.

But, aside from the fact that the body needs fuel at regular intervals, hypoglycemia is not just about being hungry. It also kicks in when the body gets too excited about producing insulin, like if blood sugar levels get too high too fast. That's what would happen if I decided it would be a good idea to have a plate of pancakes and syrup for breakfast: first my blood sugar would rocket up to the stratosphere thanks to all the sugar and refined carbs, and I would feel kind of buzzy (not in a good way) and might have a rapid, fluttery-feeling heartbeat and a feeling like I'm having to work extra hard to focus my eyes. Then - that's right, we're not done yet - the pancreas freaks out and produces an overabundance of insulin, which pushes the blood sugar waaaay down...and I get a migraine, sometimes nausea (which makes it hard to eat anything that might help), I get shaky and I tend to mumble when I'm trying to talk. Not fun. This is called "reactive hypoglycemia," and it truly is a rollercoaster (and I don't even like the real kind of rollercoasters, much less this metaphorical one). I'll have the eggs, thank you.

Of course, diabetics also have problems with hypoglycemia, especially if they accidentally take too much insulin. I think it's easiest to think of hypoglycemia as basically an oversensitivity to the fluctuations of blood sugar. So, like a diabetic, I am trying to keep my blood sugar from going too low or too high by keeping digestion of sugars (carbs) nice and slow. In fact, at Johns Hopkins, they have a theory that treats hypoglycemia more based on the speed of the blood sugar change rather than the (somewhat arbitrary) ultimate level of glucose measured in the blood - that's what I'm talking about.

I also have to point out this amusing list of hypoglycemia symptoms in Wikipedia, especially with all its technical terms like "borborygmus" and "abnormal mentation." Hmm...that does sound familiar. It also says that a hypoglycemic episode can resemble drug intoxication, which is what Nicole Richie was getting at when her PR handlers released that statement saying she's hypoglycemic. Most people laughed it off, but I'm giving her the benefit of the doubt (as a potential blog reader).

One more link in this longer-than-intended-and-hopefully-not-too-technical post: This article, recently printed in an Arizona newspaper, offers a good description of the blood sugar-insulin relationship, but it's also an example of how hypoglycemia is usually considered only as an afterthought - a subset of diabetes. This is not to take away from how serious a condition diabetes is (my Grandpa had it), but it's just worth noting that there's comparatively little research or awareness of hypoglycemia as its own problem. That's how we routinely end up getting such bad advice ("eat some candy, you'll feel better") like at the end of the article I just linked to. So, my rule for the Filthy Sucre blog is that I will only post recipes that I have eaten, or could eat, without anything happening like in the hypothetical pancake story.

More recipes and more random-ness later!

I got a new cookbook!

I'm so excited! I was over at my friend Anne-Marie's apartment the other night, and was enthralled by a cookbook she had on her coffee table: The Farm to Table Cookbook by Ivy Manning. So, I had to go buy my own copy yesterday. (You should visit her website, because she has some of the recipes posted.)

Subtitled "The Art of Eating Locally," the recipes are all about what to get at the farmer's market in each season, and what to do with it when you get home. The pictures are gorgeous, and there are charts to help you figure out which heirloom tomatoes are which, and what all those different types of squash are. Some of the recipes - Whole Wheat Penne with Wild Mushrooms, Seared Broccoli and Sweet Onion Salad, Roasted Butternut Soup in Dumpling Squash Bowls - are already friendly to my no-sugar-no-refined-carbs-hypoglycemic diet (which is also good if you're diabetic, by the way), but others will have to be adapted.

Next, I think I'll post some quick tips for what to look for when you do tweak an ordinary recipe to fit the Filthy Sucre standard...

Filthy Sucre = I don't eat sugar or refined carbs. Weird, I know.

I love food. A lot. And I'm almost always hungry. And, I know there are lots of good food blogs out there, but I have a problem:

Doughnut at Starbucks for breakfast? Can't do it.

Spaghetti at that cute Italian place? Nope.

Big burrito with flour tortilla and Mexican rice? No, thanks. Not unless I want a blinding, nauseating headache with a side of blurry vision and fluttery heartbeat.

Unfortunately, I like all these foods. And most people seem to be fine eating them, even if a doughnut isn't exactly health food. But, I'm a hypoglycemic, so I'm always explaining what I can and can't eat.

My intention for this blog is not to convert you, the reader, into giving up sugar to the degree that I have. Actually, I already know a couple of other people who don't eat sugar or refined carbs, and I wanted to be able to share recipes with them. Also, as a hypoglycemic, I have learned over the years, through painful trial and error, what not to eat – if your body works like mine, maybe I can help you with some things I've learned. And, it's fun to complain (humorously, I hope).

I hope writing about food will also drive me to learn more about organic food and sustainability, which are topics of interest to me. Fresh, local, sumptuous food inspires me, and takes the focus off of the treats (and basics) I've given up, putting the spotlight back where it belongs: on gorgeous, mouthwatering, uncellophaned, unrefined food with pronouncable ingredients that make me feel good. That's more wholesome than apple pie.