Off to the races

Welcome to this week’s Reno News & Review.

Next week is going to be a great week. I only say that in comparison to this week, which really kind of sucked. Nothing big, nothing I couldn’t handle, but man, on weeks when I’m under a lot of stress, those blood glucose numbers go through the roof.

Funny, I had a completely different direction in my head for this column this morning. I wanted to talk about this weird form of acquisitiveness I have on trash day, but let’s talk about stress for a second. I’m what they call insulin resistant, which means my body doesn’t use insulin well, so my pancreas makes more than it should. The “disease” is also called metabolic syndrome and pre-diabetes.

OK, now here’s the funny part. I’m not sure that metabolic syndrome is wholly bad. It feels like there may be some evolutionary benefit to it. I’m making one assumption—that human beings were not intended to live as long as they do.

So, here are my thoughts; they’re irrelevant to anything but an editor’s note. This syndrome is basically too much sugar in the blood. It feels similar to an adrenaline rush. And I’m guessing it’s why kids get out of control when they eat too much sugar. Your body feels like it’s on a hair-trigger—fight or flight. But metabolic syndrome comes on at the same time as testosterone is waning in the adult male. The sugar eventually burns out the pancreas, but when I wake up in the morning, I’m ready to go. I’m excited. I feel great. But it’s not like I’m dangerous, like back in the day when testosterone was calling the shots.

At 48, I’m pretty relentless. And back in caveman days, the kind of guy with boundless energy might come in handy in the mix with the testosterone types who wanted to fight the mastadon head on and propogate the species.

I guess one of the ancillary effects of an abundance of energy is that I’m still thinking about going back and grabbing that uncracked full-length mirror that was sitting next to that garbage can.