You Can't See the Pies in Your Eyes When You Have Pies in Your Eyes

You know what's great after five weekdays of dieting? Getting up and breakfasting on a bowl of Pringle's and a Coke.

I assume this isn't good for my gall bladder, which has been worrying me. But dieting seven days a week is madness.

I learned something interesting this week, while Googling my medical problems. It look like insulin resistance--the notion Dr. Atkins was ridiculed for promoting years ago--is now accepted by mainstream medicine as a bona fide illness. Funny how stuff like that keeps happening to the late doctor. I believe it's also called, or perhaps considered a part of, "metabolic syndrome." The idea is that you torture your body with refined carbs all your life, and it becomes insensitive to insulin, so you gain weight and have blood sugar problems. And it leads to other bad stuff.

Well, guess what turns out to be a big risk factor for gallstones? Uh...insulin resistance. How about that?

Damn that quack Atkins. There is nothing worse than a fraud who turns out to be right about everything. I think Atkins will end up like George Bush and Ronald Reagan. Reviled by contemporaries but honored in retrospect.

I'm not that fat. I need to drop 20 more pounds. But it's very obvious to me that carbs and body fat are ruining my life. I snore. I have chronic heartburn. I have memory problems. And now my gall bladder is bugging me. I almost certainly have insulin resistance. Most of the time I'm pretty good about avoiding refined carbs, but I remember what life was like when I used to eat cereal for breakfast and lots of potatoes. If I went too long between meals, I started sweating, I shook, and I wanted to eat everything in sight to make it stop. You don't have to be a doctor to know that a person like that needs to lay off the carbs.

The big catch-22 of gallbladder problems is that extra weight brings them on, and dieting can cause acute attacks. I'm like one of those guys who held onto the rope in that famous film of the runaway blimp. The blimp left the ground and took them with it, and at 20 feet or so, they had to choose between a risky jump or certain death later on.

Maybe I AM the runaway blimp.

Another interesting thing: while fiber is turning out to be worthless in some respects, it looks like it does one thing well. It carries bile cholesterol out of the body, and bile cholesterol is what turns into stones.

Also, dietary cholesterol may increase gallstone formation (then again, it may not), so you have to be careful about saturated fat. On the other hand, if you eat very little fat, your gall bladder falls asleep, and guess what you get? GALLSTONES.

It's like a tightrope act.

Pretty clearly, doctors aren't doing nearly enough to educate people about gallstones. They claim they can't be prevented, but that's a load of crap. Thin people usually don't get them. People who eat lots of fiber have a lower risk. Exercise helps. Lecithin supplements probably deter stones from forming. Eating fat regularly is important. You can't skip meals, either. Those things are all true, so how can any medical professional claim, with a straight face, that you can't prevent gallstones? The only explanation I can come up with is that they don't care at all. They see the gall bladder as something they can cut out quickly and profitably, at fairly low risk to the patient. So what if you have diarrhea for a year after they remove it? Not their problem.

The disease has risk factors. The risk factors can be eliminated by behavior. So how can anyone say the disease itself is unpreventable? It can't be true. Maybe it's not a hundred percent preventable, but what if the risk can be reduced by say, sixty percent? Worth a shot, isn't it?

I guess I'll wander in to a doctor's office eventually, once I think I've done everything I can. In the meantime, I'm doing a lot. I quit skipping meals. I try to have a little alcohol every day. I got myself some Rowachol, the medicine doctors in Europe have been prescribing for fifty years. I quit eating four eggs a day. I'm making sure I drink enough water. I take lecithin. I'm back on cinnamon. I ordered some chanca piedra. I'm sticking to my slow weight-loss program. If I have to see a doctor, at least I'll know I've taken every responsible step. And if I go in, I'm not going to let them cut me up until they prove it's the best solution. If I can get these stones cleaned out, so I can have a chance to see if preventative measures can prevent a recurrence, I'll do it. I just can't believe the human body has a completely unnecessary organ hanging off the liver.

I have to stay serious about the changes anyway, because you can get stones without a gall bladder. Isn't that fun? If my lifestyle is causing stones to form, that won't change just because the gall bladder is gone.

In other news, I got a few links to an entry I wrote about political bloggers. I have some commenters who are making a big deal out of it. I assume they're being sarcastic. It means absolutely nothing, and it's probably useless traffic. If you attract readers with one product and then try to serve them something else, it rarely works. That's why it's not smart to wave your tits in a political vlog. People who come here to read a political piece are unlikely to come back to read about food or whatever. So here's my response to the links: whee.

I hope some day I'll look at my Sitemeter and see a few thousand visits with actual value. People who came to read a recipe or something I wrote to make them laugh. But fleeting traffic for a political piece is worthless and possibly counterproductive. So no, I am not grateful or impressed or even slightly encouraged. I'd much rather have a link from Egullet or Foodie Forums or maybe the Comedy Central blog. I wouldn't want the other rats to pull me back onto the sinking ship that is the right-wing Blogosphere.

I'm much happier about my Youtube hits. I get them from both sides of the political spectrum, and they're about humor, not conservatism. And speaking of Youtube, I have to get to work on a new video.