Why quit something your body does for a living?

I’ve recently learned Americans call what Australians call a seesaw, a teeter-totter! But that’s a pretty good picture to use to see how we should think about our health: we’re teetering back and forth in a delicate balancing act, with our blood sugar regulation, with our food choices, even with our immunity.

Sure, genetically we have that balance point in different places, some of us (like me) seem to do a pretty good job with health but all of a sudden are struck down with the brain tumour, others can eat the worst stuff there is and seem to do just fine. In both cases the teeter-totter is weighed down on one side and way in the air on the other. But the idea for all of us should be to keep it balanced, weighted to health. A certain amount of stress is good, too much overcomes our body. The teeter-totter must stay in a delicate balance.

This teeter-totter applies to sugar stress too. Did you know that never before in history have we had an emergency need to lower insulin, which comes to the rescue in high blood sugar, in the body? And never before have we eaten as much sugar as we do, per person per year. Add to that that for this two weeks, we’re all eating less, so the averages are still being kept up by someone else! Sure we’ve always had the ability to raise it for fight and flight, when we needed to run from something, but that was over and done with and our system would lower it and we could sit and relax. But today we live in a ready, set world in which we never go: our blood sugar teeter-totter is way out of whack just from what we (think we should) do, let alone what we eat. It too must stay in a delicate balance.

So to keep the peace and the balance, let’s not live in that emergency world where we’re asking our bodies to lower our insulin all the time. Instead it can work on other cooler stuff - thriving instead of just surviving anyone?!