When I was diagnosed with diabetes, sugar was suddenly taken off the menu. The only insulin on offer was a slow, background kind that was just designed to keep your blood sugar stable, so long as you ate the right food. It couldn’t cope with sugars, so I couldn’t eat them.
It was a weird time, looking back at it. I could eat as many carbs as I liked, just as long as the ‘of which sugars’ section fell below 15%. I’ve no idea how that made sense, but it was the way I lived for the next six years.
From 17 through to 23, my diet was sugar-free.
Every birthday my mum would bake me a sugar-free cake. For Easter I’d get diabetic chocolate. For Christmas I’d sit and watch as everyone else ate Quality Street.
If you’ve ever eaten diabetic chocolate, you’ll know what it does to you. If you haven’t, well, let’s just say your insides quickly escape.
It was a diet I got really used to after a while. Once the initial teenage angst was over, my more mature self accepted my fate and cracked on with it. Not eating sugar was normal.
Then, everything changed.
After one particularly bad hypo, my nurse looked at my insulin with alarm. “Why are you still on that?” she asked, and prescribed me some new, fancy insulin with the immortal words - you can eat sugar now.
MENTAL.
MY MIND WAS BLOWN WIDE OPEN.
I left the doctors feeling terrified. I’d just been told that a) the last few years of eating no sugar had been a waste of time, and b) life now would be totally different.
I’d also been offered no advice. Carb counting? What the fuck was that? How much of this insulin did I need to eat the forbidden fruit? No-one had told me anything. I’d been released into the wild with a loaded pistol and no idea how to use it.
A few weeks later I was offered my first bit of sugar since I was 17. It felt so very, very wrong.
After much persuasion, I took the tiniest bite, before frantically rushing to take a tonne of insulin. Honestly, I think I took about 6 units for that nibble. I know now that I could have eaten the entire thing for much less.
That lack of advice cost me over the next few years as I bumbled my way through eating new things and falling over in new places.
After six years of a sugar-free diet, some carb counting advice would have come in quite handy.