Halloween Humbug

That I'm not a fan of Halloween is no surprise to anyone who knows me well. It went downhill for me after my mom threw out my favorite Dick Dastardly mask when I was 9. I rarely go to costume parties and I have been known to dim the lights and lay low on the night of in order to avoid even the slightest interaction with a 5-year old pumpkin. I'm the guy that leaves the candy bowl outside and trusts the honor system.

"..this year I'm not buying ANY candy"

Yes I'm a party pooper. But that's not news. The news is that this year I'm not buying ANY candy. Not one bag of “fun size" Snickers or Three Musketeers or Reese's Peanut Butter Cups. Oh I know that nearly $2 Billion will be spent on nearly 600 million pounds of the stuff regardless, but I will contribute nothing to those stats. I typically buy two or three bags of the aforementioned goodies. Truth is I don't think I've had five trick-or-treaters show up over the last five years combined, so guess where that candy went. Yep, right into my Type-2 diabetic mouth. And then I could look forward to gorging at the office the next day where half the staff would bring their leftovers to avoid doing the same.

I grew up in Queens, NY in an area rife with apartment buildings. We'd start on the sixth or top floor of each building, scrounge off all ten or so apartments, descend the stairs to the next floor, then move on to the next building. We'd score hundreds of pieces of candy. No, I was not a fan of Halloween, of dressing up, but I was a big fan of free candy. For most of us, the haul was gone within a few days. This went unchecked by our parents as I grew up in an era when kids could do pretty much anything without chaperones, bodyguards or GPS chips.

That the addiction to sugar sets in at an early age is not new to the current generation of kids. The “Big Sugar" cartels have made sure of it. Some of my revisionist historian peers claim that we were more active as kids and handled it better but I was overweight as a kid and stayed that way through most of my adult life. After being diagnosed at 45 with what I believed to be the inevitable onset of my father's diabetes, I continued to buy and eat the products of the sugar pushers. Despite persistent peripheral neuropathy, Hemoglobin A1C over 9% at my worst, diminished focus and consistently feeling lousy, I didn't change my diet much since my youth and sugar, which is in just about every processed thing I ate, was too much a part of it.

I finally gave up sugar for good on February 25, 2014, cold turkey, after reading Dr. David Perlmutter's best seller Grain Brain: The Surprising Truth about Wheat, Carbs, and Sugar--Your Brain's Silent Killers

The book scared me in a way none of my health issues could. The notion that high glucose equates to early dementia hit me hard. I could not bear the thought of becoming a burden on my loved ones. The fear got me through the first week of carb addiction withdrawal. Shortly thereafter the cravings for carbs and sugars were gone. Over roughly 18 months I have lost nearly 50 pounds and my Hemoglobin A1C was 5.3% in my most recent blood test last month, considered normal. Translation: within 7 months of giving up sugar I was cured of diabetes.

So now I'm that guy, the evangelist, the reformed smoker who tells everyone to quit smoking at every turn. Took me 48 years to get it, but it's never too late. And so no, I will buy no candy this year. I will not “be a pusher" to any little princess that may make her way up to my front door. I will not tempt myself with stashing toxic “drugs" in the house and I will never give another nickel to those Big Sugar cartels who are systematically poisoning America.

The wife is getting flowers on Valentine's Day. But that's another post.