Learning to eat less Sugar the Hard Way
I’ve always had a sweet tooth and now it’s come back to bite me. I am suffering for something that (despite my other half’s loving assurance to the contrary) is pretty much all my own fault – a deep filling in one of my incisors is now grating on the nerve of the tooth. If I hadn’t eaten so many sugary delights in the past twenty or so years, I wouldn’t have such a deep cavity that needed the filling in the first place.
I don’t often have to grapple with pain in my current life and times, so when this flared up it was intense – a searing aching burning sensation that spread like tendrils around the whole area of my bottom jaw. It made me think that my pain tolerance is probably quite low these days. I no longer rock climb or practice Muay Thai so staying tough is not really a priority, but a higher pain threshold would be useful now that sugar is taking its toll.
Some sugar in the diet is necessary and in fact healthy but there’s generally a lot of confusion about sugar; the evils of sugar and the lies about sugar. However, I have come to my own conclusion that the amount of sugar I personally consume is not doing my system, or my oral hygiene any good. On attending an emergency appointment at the dentist yesterday I was presented with two options;
- Have the painful tooth extracted thus removing all problems and losing a tooth in the process
- Have root canal treatment for the tooth which takes two appointments and costs hundreds of pounds
Decisions Decisions
At first, I thought that option one would be preferable as it costs a fraction of the money and solves all future issues with the tooth. However, once I got home and had time to reflect, that seemed like a knee jerk reaction. Not that I’m a die-hard adherent to these, but there is something pertinent in Jordan Peterson’s second rule for life which I seemed to be violating. The rule is;
Treat yourself like someone you are responsible for helping
‘Future Cam’ is going to be in a world of trouble if I leave him a legacy of tooth decay and gum disease by continuing to indulge in sweets and chocolates. But more than that, I am going to be less able to usefully contribute to my family life and the wider community if I am constantly battling ill health in the future.
People take on all sorts of responsibility during the course of their life but often forget the imperative responsibility to take good care of themselves. If we don’t look after ourselves now, how then can we be best placed to look after others in the future when circumstances demand it? It seems to me that young adults should be living in the present moment whilst being aware of the ever-growing calling to increased responsibility.
Something else Jordan Peterson mentions somewhere in his corpus of socio-psychological ideas is the notion that we are not just our present self, but a community of individuals spread across time. In this interpretation of being, we owe it to the future iterations of our self to make informed and careful decisions about our health.
A Painful Reminder
It isn’t a New Year any more and I’ve just missed the ‘giving up for Lent’ boat, but I will be paying more attention to my diet and the amount of sugar I consume in the coming weeks and months. It has been a painful reminder that I desperately need to cut back on my sugar intake.