All I Post About is Sweet Wine and Desserts, So Why Am I Not A Diabetic? Because...

Epicurean Exploits - Food and Recipes
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Foodies and Winos,

So it has come up a number of times in replies to my posts including the latest one featuring my Chocolate Brownie Cheesecake Pecan Pie that people have been seriously wondering how it is possible with all the sweet wines and desserts I consume that I am not a diabetic.

First off, in fairness, I think that the board itself is kind of skewing people’s perceptions of what kind of lifestyle I lead. This board is called Wine Berserkers after all – not Healthy Eating Berserkers or Exercise Berserkers. It has sections specifically devoted to the consumption and enjoyment of wine, spirits and food. [cheers.gif] Not too coincidentally, those are exactly the things I like posting about on the board. flirtysmile

If all you ever talked about were wine and desserts with certain people, I guess they would start to worry that you’re a diabetic too! Hell, I’ve already posted about how my own family thinks I have become an alcoholic even though they drink more wine on a daily basis than I do! Why? Because I talk about how much I love the stuff and purchase it far more than they do.

As to why I am actually not a diabetic, it’s because I highly value my Harlequin romance cover male model looks and there are several lifestyle choices I have made in order to preserve those. Not being a diabetic is actually just a bonus side effect of executing the following:

  • Asian genes. Don’t be jealous. Nothing you can do about this and it’s not as if it were my choice, they were actually just given to me at birth.

  • Water. Lots of it. I don’t take in any liquid sugar during the daytime. Ever. No juice, no iced tea, no soft drinks, no wine. Only water. The good stuff only comes out at night as a reward for being healthy all day.

  • Exercise. I work out at the gym doing weightlifting 4 times a week and do 4 different types of martial arts 2-3 evenings a week. The ones I am currently doing are boxing, Judo, Parkour/free running and Pencat Silat.

  • Very healthy eating. Though I may mock on this board the salads and proteins others bring to get-togethers I attend, in truth they make up the majority of my diet. I cook the majority of my food myself and choose very wisely when I go out. You will never see a hot dog or a poutine (an ungodly mix of fries, gravy and cheese curds famous here in Canada) in my hand when I go out to dinner.

  • Removal of as much white flour and white rice from my diet as possible.

  • I keep my actual dessert portions quite reasonable. Compare the size of the pie in my Brownie Cheesecake Pecan Pie post to the actual square I cut for myself to eat.

  • I eat and drink for fuel and pleasure, not because I feel bad about or sorry for myself. I always freak when somebody tells me they ate a whole container of ice cream because they were feeling down.

  • I drink wine. Wine contains a special ingredient called alcohol that, when consumed in moderate amounts, I strongly believe will actually act as a preservative that benefits our bodies. As humans, we tend to not to want to think about this because it reminds us of death which is when we are most likely to be preserved. Pfft. What a waste. I prefer to be preserved while I’m still alive.

P.S. The idea that “reservatrol” is what’s actually healthy about wine is complete and total BS and is a codeword that actually means “alcohol” for those really in the know.

  • Drug-free lifestyle. No weed. No pharmaceuticals. No recreationals. I especially do not self-medicate with alcohol and drugs. They have the bad effect of speeding up your metabolism when you’re younger and making you lose weight… and then crashing it and causing you to become a blimp later on in life as the body can no longer keep up the insane lifestyle.

  • I see a chiropractor twice monthly.

  • Anytime I get a sports injury of any kind, I am at the doctor’s immediately. Injuries lead to inactivity which leads to health problems, and not seeing a doctor for proper diagnosing after one results in a longer period of inactivity… sometimes even a permanent one.

So with the exception of racial genetics – which you can’t really do anything about especially if you have crappy Caucasian ones that seem to be prone to every horrible hereditary disease imaginable (sorry all you whiteys and Gwei Los out there) – there is not one thing I have listed above that any other person could not accomplish.

BTW, my father is Caucasian, has a back injury from when he was younger that prevented him from doing exercise as an adult and ate on the road most of his life as a traveling salesman. Guess what he has now that I don’t? Sucks but fortunately he is managing it with mostly diet change and some small amounts of insulin.

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Gee, I was wondering how it is you can consume sweets without issue, and now I know! Consider me enlightened.

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Good post Tran

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I think all of what you say has a bit of truth to it, but the biggest, most significant issue, by far, is your genetics. Everything else mentioned is tricking genetics, or getting the most out of them. Also…age, which will change your genetics, affect testosterone levels, and you’ll find 10-20 years from now, or more, you’ll not be able to maintain the same diet even if you maintain the same lifestyle otherwise.

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Be prepared for when those Caucasian genes kick in.

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@Michael: Sorry, I’m adopted, not racially mixed. No Caucasian genes kicking in here. On the one hand, that’s good health-wise because I don’t have the Alzheimer’s, heart disease, diabetes and cancer genes on both sides of my family.

On the other, I really would’ve liked to be, you know, taller. [swearing.gif]

Ah well, can’t have it all.

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Aha!
So you’re not a purebred Asian!
Pshhht!

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@Dan: Well, I’m not sure about not being “purebred.” I presume that two Asians strictly produced me. I just wasn’t raised by them. I was raised in a multiracial family headed by two Caucasian Jewish parents emigrated to Canada from Romania on my dad’s side and New York on my mother’s side.

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What’s your Asian ethnicity background? My dad’s side of the family has diabetes issues. (Chinese)

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IIRC, Diabetes is more common in China than the US.

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that’s what i’m saying, I didn’t know that being whatever nationality asian was beneficial to avoiding diabetes :smiley:

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Gotta be the soy! [snort.gif]

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I know this is a completely perpendicular response and not on topic – I think I do this a lot.

BUT one thing I learned on 23andMe is that I have a higher than average proportion of Neanderthal genes. I decided that that had to do with my very European background, since Neanderthals lived in Europe. And I assumed that Asians would have much lower levels. Oddly enough, this is not correct. Some Asians have even higher Neanderthal levels than I do.

There appear to be 2 reasons for that. 1) we all came out of Africa, and there were early Neanderthals in what is now Israel, and there was apparently some mixing as people migrated out. 2) there were also some eastern cousins of the Neanderthals, the Denisovans, and they appear to have contributed to Asian genes as well.

Obviously the lowest levels of Neanderthal genes are found in populations that never left Africa, because there were never any Neanderthals there.

Before Thanksgiving of last year, you could have done 23andMe and found out your risk of diabetes etc. But then they were forced to stop giving out health information, so you’ll only get the ethnic mix, and a list of probably about 1000 relatives who share some of your identical DNA. Which can be interesting. If you want health info you would need to download your genomic information and upload to certain other sites.

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Yeah, my husband’s family is originally from China, and they’ve got diabetes, gout, you name it… Torsos like a barrel.

But I do understand the OP’s point of what you see on the interwebs isn’t a full representation of someone’s life and the choices they make. Over the last 1.5 years I’ve lost and kept off about 25 lbs. I saw a friend from overseas recently who was shocked that I had managed to lose weight given the pictures I post of food on Facebook. Well I’m sorry hon, but you don’t really want me posting pictures of my salads and protein shakes and gym selfies, do you? Of course I only post the sexy stuff! (and having said that, this morning I posted my breakfast of fruit and nonfat Greek yogurt, but it was really pretty…)

And now I’ll have to go hunt down the OP’s posts on sweet wine, as a fellow fan.

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@ CFu aka Coke and Red Wine Sifu: I was adopted from Vietnam, found in an orphanage in Denang as a baby. So there are no apparently as bad as Caucasian Chinese genes in me at all. Sorry if I was discriminatory against Caucasians in my original post, apparently everyone other than me will die horribly regardless of their genetic background. neener

@Rachel: Ah, a fellow sweet wine fanatic. Fist bump, hugs and props to you. grouphug Like you, I also believe in posting only the sexy stuff (though I would argue my gym selfies count as sexy too). We have threads here for food porn, steak porn, pizza porn, dessert porn, expresso machine porn, wine bottle porn, pickle porn, cheese porn, fruit porn, bourbon porn, whisky porn, etc.

The only porn we seem to be missing around here is actual, um, porn. And honestly I’d rather be viewing and drooling over all of the porn that is posted on the board than the kind involving humans. Care to share some pics of your own? I even want to see that yogurt and fruit pic! [worship.gif]

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Oh dear, I’ve just found the bread porn thread… time to go drool…