This whole thing started when my spouse learned he was pre-diabetic.

Actually, that’s a lie. It started when I learned my spouse was pre-diabetic. He had known this for 3 years, maybe 5, but who’s counting?

The good news was that he was still “pre.” The bad news was that his A1C was inching forever closer to plain old, type-2 diabetes.

I’d spent a few years, since fall 2020 (because who can forget anything from 2020?!), watching his movement become visibly slower and more painful from gout, which crept out of his foot to attack other joints in his legs and back. I’d watched him switch crackers and test an endless array of wheatless tortillas when he learned he was gluten-intolerant in August 2021. I’d perfected dozens of recipe modifications to switch baked goods and other foods to gluten-free without the addition of gums or anything else, since I personally wasn’t willing to eat cellulose or xanthan (they both cause me immense stomach pain) but I also wasn’t willing to give up my baking habit or our grab-and-go breakfasts. And I’d seen …

NONE OF IT WORK!

But in April 2023, which, BTW, was smack in the middle of what seemed like an endlessly snowy, endlessly grey winter, when both of us found ourselves at home for a week — he was on spring break from teaching and I was one of the many proudly terminated employees of yet again another failing Utah tech company —I looked at him and said:

“Why the fuck are you drinking?”

That was one of the hardest things I’d ever said. Because I love booze. Beer, OMG, so delicious. Wine. OMG!! So incredibly delicious. Grappa!!! OMG, I ADORE THAT SHIT. Let’s not even discuss Scotch whiskey or a shot of Bushmills after a really shitty day at work or a snowy drive home or a trip to the grocery store or putting the trash cans out at the curb or …

You get the idea.

But it had to stop. Booze is the freaking worst thing ever for gout.

I have absolutely no idea what precipitated the conversation, BTW. Maybe he had gotten new test results from his doctor. Or maybe I wanted to hike or go for a walk and he was in too much foot pain to go with me. He’s only in his 40s BTW. Or maybe he was on the shitter again because the gout meds he was prescribed to ease the flareups that came more and more frequently gave him stomach cramps or explosive diarrhea or both. Or maybe I was just in a mood because I was empowered by my newfound unemployed freedom (seriously, I despised my employer and was ecstatic to be one of the ~80% of the marketing team of a terribly mismanaged and probably dying fintech who would leave in a 12 month period) and needed to shake some shit up at home while I pretended to look for a job while actually focusing on unstable freelance gigs instead.

Whatever it was, it worked.

Because he looked at me and said, “I … I don’t know.”

And that’s where this whole thing started. But it wasn’t alcohol he gave up.

It was free-eating. He mentioned the pre-diabetes thing, which truthfully may he had told me about repeatedly but I chose not to process. And that suddenly seemed like a much bigger issue to address.

Family history. We’ll get into that later. But it was there. Shit like that doesn’t end well.

We agreed to take on the pre-D first and he committed to giving up the freedom to imbibe in anything and everything he wanted without documenting every ingredient and morsel and calculating the carb-o-load. He would, hopefully. give up the sugar spikes and the stupidity he’d held onto for at least 3 years (neither of us is certain if it was more because he didn’t have test records more than 3 years old) when he did abso-fucking-lutely nothing about being pre-diabetic.

We’d address alcohol again a week or so later. Shhhh…

But that was him.

As for me? I’m a team player, at least sometimes. And on this occasion, it felt like I should give up something too. So I gave up added sugar. Or at least I committed to cutting back to less than the 25-30g/day of added sugar that the CDC or FDA or AMA or FCC or whoever it was said women should have.

I was positive that I didn’t come anywhere close to eating that much sugar daily anyway. I was better than 25g per day. I would go to 20g per day. It would be easy and I would prove that everyone else on the planet was weak.

I didn’t need sugar. I hardly ate ANY anyway. I was probably already under that 20g per day anyway.

Deer fucking jeezus, was I wrong.