It will probably come as no surprise to discover that I spend a lot of time thinking about food. Not just as in "oh God, how many carbs are in this handful of raspberries," but also "I wonder if the proteins in this would absorb better if I heated it more".
Megan Whelan. Photo: RNZ / Rebekah Parsons-King
I love food and not just to eat. I am fascinated by recipes, science, the culture of food. I like words like maillard, mirepoix, emulsion. I am fascinated that it's so fundamental to our lives, and yet we're so willing to sacrifice the joy of it for an arbitrary definition of "health," or worse, a magazine's definition of beauty.
One of my favourite things to make is choux pastry (think eclairs, profiteroles, beignets). Not just because I can be super pretentious and call it pâte à choux, but because it's a complicated thing to make. To get it right takes timing, understanding what's going on with the flour and liquid, getting the heat right, adding the eggs bit by bit and mixing hard - I like to make it by hand so I can be even more smug when I get it right. It's part skill, part science, part luck. And when it's right, it's so good: light and crisp and delicious.
The lopsided, not very high tower of eclairs was a "hilarious, delicious, ridiculous failure", writes Megan Whelan. Photo: Supplied
Once, for my birthday, a friend and I tried to make a croquembouche (a tower of cream-filled profiteroles covered in caramel). In a bach kitchen with an unfamiliar oven and not many utensils. It was a hilarious, delicious, ridiculous failure. I have never laughed so hard in a kitchen.
For a while, my type 2 diabetes took away that love, that curiosity, that willingness to experiment and fail. I can't eat pastry, or sourdough, or pasta, or all the things I loved to try to see if I could create in my kitchen. So why bother, I figured?
And you know what? It sucked. It took away one of the ways I feel most creative and clever. That I can turn flour and water and olive oil into bread in a few hours, with just a bowl and a spoon and an oven makes me feel capable in ways few other things do.
For the first three months after my diagnosis, I cooked as low-carb as possible. I bought cookbooks and scoured the internet. I replaced white rice with brown, potatoes with kūmara, ramen with edamame noodles.
Tracking and weighing everything I ate was doing bad things to my brain - more on that in a couple of weeks. But the harder part was feeling like I was just cooking to manage my condition; that diabetes was ruling my culinary life. I missed planning a menu to cook for people I loved, even if I had to figure out how to manage what I could personally eat from it.
Enter choux pastry again. One day, I was searching for lunch, and I was at a local French cafe. Armed with new knowledge from the dietician that protein would help my body manage carbohydrates, it occurred to me that a gougere (choux with added cheese) filled with smoked salmon and salad wasn't a terrible option. Pastry made with eggs has to be higher in protein than a baguette, right? (Yes, but also quite a lot higher in fat. And still quite a few carbs.)
That realisation led to a much better place. I can still be creative with my food. I just had to change the way I think about it.
A couple of things have worked for me. This isn't a TikTok style "what I eat in a day." (Mostly because I feel like those are almost always doctored, and because what looks like a reasonable diet for one person might be terrible for another). I am not qualified to give diet advice.
The first is planning.
Not meal prep, particularly, but thinking about what I might want to eat in a week. I sit down on a weekend and go through my recipe books and favourite sites and choose five meals I might like to cook. Then I do a big shop with all the ingredients I need, plus snacks, protein bars, and all the other things that my life now requires. I try to find things that have interesting techniques, cuisines I don't know, or ingredients that are unfamiliar.
What that means is, when I come home, I know what I can cook, and I can choose between several things. I'm much more likely to cook when I don't come home and look at a pile of ingredients and have to work out what to do with them. That feels, for some reason, like more mental load than I can handle.
I often think what my grandmothers would make of that, and it causes shame. With all the resources I have at my fingertips, deciding what to eat feels too hard. Boohoo, I think to myself, you have all this food, but no motivation.
But the other thing that has helped is chilling the hell out about it all. Overthinking my diet was causing way more damage to my mental health than the positives for my physical health.
It's OK that cooking dinner every night is a thing I find hard. I know I am not alone in this. There are enough hard things going on in the world at the moment that I am going to cut myself - and you if you'd like it - some slack.
I motivate myself to go to the gym, to take my medication, to drink my water and manage my stress. My diet is only one, albeit important, utensil in my diabetes kitchen. It can, occasionally, be on the back burner. Getting it right some of the time is way better than not trying at all.