Rain, Greathearted Writers, Blood Sugar

Happy Wednesday, everyone! I'm working at the bookshop pictured right at the end of this post today - it's a good day to be indoors: rain all day. I biked down here and was pretty soaked on arrival. So far, it certainly has not been a great summer to start bees - or to be outside in relaxed manner.

We've been very busy with the cabin insulation project, and everything is out of place, to the point that when we did our laundry yesterday, rain or not, we had to hang it to dry outside:

Yes, that is a ladder on our kitchen counter/workspace! We still have to hang muslin on the ceiling - I was up early this morning sewing it together.  It's cluttering up rapidly despite having cleared everything off - you can see our thriftstore-bought football-shaped crockpot with Phil's lunch in it there too. That left-hand corner is normally my workdesk-space, normally piled with books and papers (I try to keep it in some sort of order!) Said books, papers, journals, etc are currently sitting on our couch, together with our dishes and dishdrainer. It's not the comfiest... Don't our clothes look pretty wet out there!

Phil and I spent a very cordial and pleasant couple of hours with Nancy Lord yesterday morning. Besides holding the imposing title of Alaska Writer-Laureate, she has published collections of fiction and nonfiction to inspire awe and emulation, and has most recently turned her attention to the effects of climate change on parts of Alaska. But there we were together, finding so much in common: she is so unassuming, sincere and friendly. We resonated on our tendencies to overcommit on a volunteer basis, she gave me some very generous advice about continuing to connect with a broader literary community, we reminisced about the Writers' Conference, at which she had been a presenter and had also attended some of the same workshops that I had been to. Magnanimity in established members of a profession or art is such a wonderful thing - also a boon of living in a small community. And all communities are small, really, once you start to find your tribe.

Blood Sugar Issues

I mentioned in my Sunday post having had a problem with extreme low blood sugar because of getting up a little later than normal and eating a later breakfast. I'm continuing to have problems with this lack of leeway, and am quite puzzled. Anywhere you look, people talk about avoiding sugar and avoiding high-glycemic foods in order to balance blood sugar. Sugar, and high-glycemic foods, release glucose into the blood rapidly, so that overall blood sugar levels rise too fast. Too much insulin is often released in response, which can lead to increased fat storage, as well as a correspondingly rapid crash in blood sugar. Having regularly high insulin levels, for whatever reason they that way, is correlated with pretty much every malady that threatens longevity.

So far, so good: it all makes sense. So, people who tend to suffer from low blood sugar are generally advised to eat regularly and to eat low-glycemic. But I do all this - the highest-glycemic thing I eat is carrots! And yet, not infrequently, I get into this state of crazed-anxiety-white-knuckle feeling. Sometimes, by the time I actually eat something, it doesn't even help - it's as if my body's in panic mode and can't be dissuaded.

You hear so many stories of how people find relief after quitting sugar - how anxiety and general ups-and-downs even out. So why haven't I gotten that? The Naturopath pointed out to me that because I eat so low-glycemically, there's very little sugar available to be circulating in my blood (but I thought my body could then make it from protein - gluceoneogenesis). His point being that if I'm eating small amounts, it could be easy to end up with low blood sugar.

It's certainly true that I've been feeling tons better since adding a mid-morning snack rather than trying to eke through till lunchtime on my meager smoothie (and making said smoothie a little less meager too, adding some protein powder). But I'm feeling a bit of catch-22 here. I know that eating sugar is the worst thing I can do. But eating no-sugar, I'm still 'crashing.' How much of this could be a bodily 'habit?' I used to go without food for long, long stretches of time and just push through. Now, my body seems to rebel/panic at the slightest hint of such behavior.

I'd very much appreciate anyone else's insights or experiences.I've been trawling around on Pub Med and haven't yet found anything helpful.