Sport and Sugar

As a kid I was quite active. I would play around a lot. I was a fast kid so I enjoyed running fast, I did track later on, I tried rollerblading, I would bike through forests and go off of dirt jumps. I really enjoyed a lot of sport and activities with my body. I joined soccer when I was in grade 3, which I enjoyed a lot because I could run a lot and use my speed to my advantage, and attempt to win. From the age of 4 or 5 until I was 10-11 I was very active, most days doing something. I was also heavily, not addicted per say, but participated in video games and television…actually yes I would say I was addicted. When I was younger I remember on the weekends always renting a video game, wanting to beat it quickly I would wake up really early, and basically play it the entire day, with periods of activity in between, that was the majority of my time. I would also come home and sit down for hours watching television and being influenced by that. Luckily the activity that I did was a balance with my sedentary lifestyle.

My diet consisted of candy, and carbohydrates. Fruit and vegetables was rarely in any of my meals, I was brought up on grilled cheese, peanut butter and jam sandwiches, macaroni and cheese, cereals, and whenever I could get my hands on candy I would consume it until I was ill. I remember being given the opportunity to go down to the store and buy myself my own cereal. Previously to this I had wanted the most sugar infused cereal possible, always being denied getting it as many parents do in the grocery store. Now I was free from parental supervision, and I was able to get what I wanted. So I got cereal that I saw as loaded with sugar, looking for the words chocolate and a picture of a cereal that had candies embedded in the cereal as well. All of this food was not balanced through the intake of fruits and vegetables which would give me fibre to assist in breaking down the extensive amount of carbohydrates that I was eating. The fiber would have created somewhat of a balance to the food that I was eating and stop the excessive carbohydrates that I was eating. My addiction to sugar was extensive as well. My relationship with sugar has always been a reward system and I associated sugar with happiness, so if I was feeling down I would turn to sugar to keep myself happy, I allowed my world to revolve around sugar, and through the influence of media with kid shows demonizing vegetables…"Ew, Broccoli" I decided in that moment that I as well didn't like broccoli, then with the constant commercials supporting high sugar food and candies I started to want those too. Understand that my mother was a single mother, and living in a suburban neighbourhood I was easily susceptible to these things. She had to have time to herself to, she could not easily manage 2 kids, a full time job, and then her other responsibilities on the side, so I was left to find my own way basically. Then with the media's influence on children I became a violent, sugar abusing, little shit that wanted what I wanted without compromise.

In sports as well they would give out the majority of the time popsicles, candy, other various frozen treats, and when they did give fruit I did not like it so much because it wasn't candy. So eventually I ended up quitting soccer because I was not winning as much, in that looking for another happiness source to maintain the influx of happiness, in which I turned to more sugar, and more of a sedentary lifestyle wherein it was easy for me to win at videogames so I started to play them more and it was easy for me to generate emotions and feelings when watching a television show so I started to do that more, still playing with friends from time to time, but we would then mostly play video games together. My diet stayed the same, mainly carbohydrates and candy, rarely eating fruits and vegetables, not getting the necessary fiber that I needed.

All of the carbohydrates that I was taking in had a massive effect on my body and it took 2 years for it to manifest into diabetes. Too many carbohydrates meant that my pancreas was producing an extensive of insulin in order to maintain my blood sugar at the levels that they are supposed to be. Over time breath by breath the amount of carbohydrates became too much and the body started to react to the insulin that I was producing because with all the food that I was consuming with less and less activity the cells has an enormous amount of energy that they could use but weren't so the body saw that the insulin was damaging the cells through being a transmitter of the glucose in the blood stream to the cells and since there was no activity to use up the glucose in the blood stream the body said, what the fuck is going on?, and decided to attack the insulin producing cells in the pancreas to stop the harm that I was doing to the body, causing the sugar in the blood stream to build up causing a physical consequence that I could see with me being thirsty and having to pee at an alarming rate.

So here are the factors that was involved in me being diagnosed with type 1 diabetes. Take into consideration what children are doing to their bodies with the sugar intake and consider what influences them in their food intake. The media is a terrible fucking perpetrator in the push for more sugar consumption, and look at all the foods that are designed for children, they have outrageous quantities of sugar in them. Diabetes will become more of an epidemic than it is now if things are not changed, because we are getting more sedentary than ever before.