At the end of my five-week vacation on the South Island of New Zealand I am returning to the reality of my everyday life with diabetes. For me, reality means controlling my blood glucose level with diet and exercise. Since 2007 I haven’t had to use any diabetes medications to keep good control.

But, like all of us, I do have to watch my diet and exercise. And like most people on vacation my attention sometimes wandered.

While I have diligently following a very low-carb diet since 2007, I readily admit that I enjoyed a few servings of potatoes in New Zealand. Worse, I ate two slices of toast. While I have broken my addiction to all types and forms of grain, the toast in eggs benedict was sometimes impossible for me to ignore.

On the other hand, I ate more seafood than ever before in my life. Seafood is our best source of heart-healthy omega-3 fats. I ate everything from the well-known salmon, prawns, shrimp, oysters, and calamari to butterfish, groper, smooth dory, gurnard, ling, monkfish, and blue cod and on to fish I never heard of before — warehou, tarakihi, whitebait, bluenose, trumpeter, and green shell mussels. They all tasted wonderful to me while at the same time helping to balance out my dietary lapses.

Wild game also has a better ratio of omega 3 to omega 6 fats. That helped me to feel virtuous while enjoying a venison cassarole that a ranger on the Milford Track prepared for my lunch. I wrote about this and my other New Zealand adventures on my “Fitness and Photography for Fun ” blog.

Normally, I minimize the amount of fructose that I eat, since it’s so hard on the liver. I do eat some berries when I am at home. The berries that I especially enjoyed in New Zealand are called kiwiberries, miniature (grape-sized) versions of the kiwi fruit we have in America. But kiwiberries are especially sweet and juicy.

New Zealand is rightfully famous for its dairy products. I don’t think that the country has any of the infamous concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs), where we tightly pen our lifestock and chickens and feed them a grain diet, which in turn worsens our omega-3 to omega-6 ratio.

New Zealand dairy products are therefore not only healthier than most of ours but also taste better. I particularly enjoyed their cheese and their “Fresh’n Fruity” brand of natural (no fruit) Greek style yoghurt (as they spell it).

The other major deviation from my diet besides some additional carbohydrates was going back on coffee after almost a year without. I stopped drinking coffee because it was giving me awful headaches. But I can handle one cup a day now. I make sure that it’s a good cup, which the Kiwis do know how to make. In all the better restaurants I can find excellent coffee that is somewhat diluted espresso that for some reason the Kiwis call a “long black.”

In contrast to my somewhat slacker dietary habits on vacation I have been walking and hiking more than usual. I convinced myself that I need the extra calories to give me strength on the trail. I’m hoping that it has been a wash.

This is a mirror of one of my articles that Health Central published. You can navigate to that site to find my most recent articles.

Eating fast probably comes naturally to all of us. Hiking a long trail on my vacation in New Zealand a few days ago, I ate as quickly as I could when I stopped, because I wanted to get to the hut before dark.

I ate for the energy that I needed to finish the hike, not for pleasure. For once, I wasn’t concerned about the taste of the food or eating too much of it too fast.

This must have been the way my ancestors and yours ate back in the days when they went out on the hunt or to gather roots and berries. This comes naturally to human beings.

But nowadays we have much more food much more readily available. Normally we don’t have to be concerned about getting enough energy to get to our destination. We have the pick of the most tasty food from around the world. We eat for pleasure much more than for sheer energy.

With a different goal we need a different eating strategy. Specifically, we need to slow down so we won’t overeat. As a bonus, slowing the speed with which we consume our meals giaves us more time to savor them.

Eating slowly has been one of the hardest eating lessons that I have had to learn.  Not until I admitted to a friend that I always eat too fast have I been able to control my eating speed. My acknowledgement to another person was the key to controlling my behavior.

We have to fully accept the truth of our existing state before we can expect to progress or to heal.  Recognizing and admitting our own problem is the necessary first step towards change. This is perhaps because the light of awareness or acceptance or humility is in itself a healing.  If we are forever in denial about where we are stuck, we will continue to overlook the keys that are out there that can set us free.

Once I fully accepted that I ate too fast, I adopted some specific strategies. I had always told myself that I ate fast just because I didn’t want my hot food to get cold. So I started with food that we normally eat at room temperature, like a salad.

Then I consciously told myself to put down the fork or spoon between bites. Now I completely chew what was in my mouth before picking it up again.

While chewing, I don’t do anything else except concentrate on the wonderful food that I am eating. Now, I really taste my food.

Eating more slowly means for me that I don’t eat as much as I did before. This is because of the fact that was long well known to me that our bodies and brains need some time, like about a quarter of an hour, to register that we are full.

The great food that we get now can be so much better and so much easier to obtain then what our hunter-gatherer ancestors were able to eat. We owe it to ourselves to savor it.

This is a mirror of one of my articles that Health Central published. You can navigate to that site to find my most recent articles.

The best way for us to boost the amount of omega-3 fats in our diet might be to come to New Zealand. This country must have the largest offering of fish in the world.

This month I am vacationing on the country’s South Island and have been feasting on all sorts of fish. I know that many people don’t love fish as much as I do. But even those who aren’t particularly found of them will certainly find some varieties and different preparations to suit their taste buds.

Those of us who have diabetes really need the benefits to our heart health that regularly eating fish provide. Everyone’s hearts are healthier when we consume high levels of the long-chain omega-3 fats that cold-water fish in particuar have.

Of course, coming to New Zealand isn’t the only way to increase our omega-3 consumption. In fact, eating fish isn’t the only way either. For starters, we don’t actually have to limit ourself to cold-water fish, even though these fish have the most omega-3.

Take a quick look through the KIM-2 database, which I have written about earlier in this series of articles on achieving a good balance of omega-3 and omega-6 fats. These two types of polyunsaturated fats compete in our bodies. High levels of omega-3 fats are anti-inflammatory, while high levels of omega-6 fats are pro-inflammatory.

The KIM-2 database does show that the cold-water fish like salmon and sardines have extraordinarily good ratios of omega-3 to omega-6 fats. But it also doesn’t show ANY fish with more omega-6 than omega-3. That’s one reason why I am eating fish with Maori names that I have never heard of and which don’t appear in the KIM-2 database.

And it’s not just fish where we can get our long-chain omega-3s. The world also has a great variety of seafood that is high in omega-3.

Beyond fish and seafood we have fish oil or krill oil to supplement our omega-3 level. These supplements come in either liquid or capsule form. Some people who don’t like the taste of the liquid do very well with capsules.

But what about the dilemma that vegetarians and vegans face? Even this is not a problem. Think for a moment where fish and seafood find the ultimate source of their omega-3 fats. That source is the lowest on the food chain, a plant called algae.

We can skip the intermediate links in the chain and go ourselves directly to the source. Several companies now offer long-chain omega-3 fats in vegan algae.

Those capsules aren’t cheap. On the other hand coming to New Zealand to eat fish isn’t either.

P.S: I originally wrote this article for HealthCentral.com on March 11, 2010. I am now back in the U.S. after vacationing in New Zealand. You can read about the trip here: http://www.mendosa.com/fitnessblog/?cat=17

This is a mirror of one of my articles that Health Central published. You can navigate to that site to find my most recent articles.

Ever since coming to New Zealand on vacation for five weeks on February 23, I have been eating a lot of the country’s wonderful fish and seafood. Everything from the well-known salmon, prawns, shrimp, oysters, and calamari to butterfish, groper, smooth dory, gurnard, ling, monkfish, and blue cod and on to fish I never heard of before — hoki, moki, warehou, tarakihi, whitebait, bluenose, trumpeter, and green shell mussels. We have a greater variety of fish and any other source of omega-3 fats, and they all taste wonderful to me.

Because of my steady diet of New Zealand fish this month, my omega-3 level is certainly improving, something important to everyone and crucial to those of us who have diabetes. But according to the results of the LipidLab test that CEO Doug Bibus just sent me, my results were already good enough.

“Wow!” he emailed me. “What a pleasure it was to interpret your chromatogram and data. You truly are the omega 3 man!!!  You are close to Dr. Ralph Holman’s omega 3 levels.  He has a 25% total omega 3 and a 1:1 omega 6 to omega 3 ratio.  He just celebrated his 92 birthday!”

And I am only 74.

Doug went on: “Would you mind if we used your profile as an example on our website as a true success story? Are you taking any fish oil supplements or getting most of your omega 3 from your diet (fish).  You have a big level of ALA which comments on your intake of flax and greens.”

I replied to Doug, “You are certainly welcomed to use my profile on your site. I don’t take any fish oil — but I do take three capsules of Neptune Krill Oil (the NOW brand), 500 mg each, daily. I eat a lot of cold-water fish, mainly salmon (fresh, frozen, and canned) and also a very high quality sardine (from vitalchoice.com ). Sometimes other fish, including the best tasting one, Chilean sea bass (formerly Patagonian toothfish, and I don’t wonder why they changed the name).

“I use flaxseed oil on my salad, which is my usual lunch (when I am at home). My breakfast, both at home and here in New Zealand is Greens First , which I have written about at Health Central. Interesting that you have my ALA results. But it’s not just omega-3. I think the key at least at the start is to reduce the omega-6.”

My LipidLab report is comprehensive and too long to include here. But I just uploaded it to my website at http://www.mendosa.com/test.pdf

Now, I am hard at work to equal Dr. Holman’s omega-3 level and eventually to match his age.

P.S: I originally wrote this article for HealthCentral.com on March 05, 2010. I am now back in the U.S. after vacationing in New Zealand. You can read about the trip here: http://www.mendosa.com/fitnessblog/?cat=17

This is a mirror of one of my articles that Health Central published. You can navigate to that site to find my most recent articles.