This extra chapter was cut from The Journey Back to keep the book focused. The physical paperback is $12.95 with free U.S. shipping. Any $17 PDF-and-audiobook bundle is a separate optional digital add-on, not the price of the paperback.
The support started almost as soon as Brandy learned I had diabetes.
I think her first reaction was shock.
Then she began researching.
I was trying to learn how to eat as a person with diabetes, and she was trying to learn right alongside me.
Neither of us had received a map for what happened next. We knew the diagnosis. We knew the numbers that had frightened us. We knew something had to change.
Then we came home to a kitchen filled with the food we had been eating before any of this happened.
I looked at the sugar, the processed food, and the things that had once seemed ordinary, and I wanted them gone.
My reaction was absolute.
I thought, ‘I am going to eat nothing but unprocessed food.’
I did not want to negotiate with the pantry. I did not want to create a complicated system of foods I might eat occasionally, foods I could eat in moderation, and foods I needed to avoid. At that moment, the simplest rule felt safest.
Get rid of the old food.
Start over.
Eat food I could recognize.
I began cooking for myself.
Salmon became one of my standards. I could put it in the air fryer and know exactly what I was eating. I ate eggs constantly. I ate broccoli and okra in quantities that would surprise most people.
A typical serving might be around twelve ounces of broccoli or twelve ounces of okra. Across a day, I might eat approximately two and a quarter pounds of vegetables, and I considered that the lower end for me. I often ate around eight ounces of meat or fish as part of a meal.
I eat an enormous volume of vegetables.
For many people, a plate like that might feel repetitive or punitive. For me, it did not create the struggle someone might imagine.
I have often said that food and Styrofoam were basically the same to me.
That is an exaggeration, but it describes the utilitarian way I approached eating. I did not need every meal to be beautifully presented or emotionally exciting. I could enjoy good food, but I often ate because eating was a task that allowed me to return to something else.
Once I decided the task had changed, I could repeat the new version with almost monastic discipline.
Cook the salmon.
Cook the vegetables.
Eat the eggs.
Do it again tomorrow.
That structure worked for me.
It did not mean everybody else in the house suddenly wanted to eat exactly the way I did.
Brandy and Jill might eat something different. At times, separate food had to be prepared. But I never experienced that difference as my family pushing me away from the table.
I did not feel ostracized.
I felt supported.
The first time Brandy cooked something specifically for me, she was scared.
She kept asking, ‘Is this okay? Is this okay? Is this okay?’
She was not asking because cooking for me annoyed her.
She was asking because she wanted to get it right.
She knew the food now carried meaning it had not carried before. A meal was no longer only a meal. In her mind, the wrong ingredient might work against everything I was trying to do.
She was trying to take care of me, but she was also afraid that care might accidentally become harm.
I told her, ‘Baby, I love you. It is okay.’
She tries, and I know it.
She truly tries.
That mattered more to me than whether every meal perfectly matched every rule I had created.
She was learning. I was learning. Neither of us was going to get every decision right immediately.
What I needed was not a private chef with a perfect understanding of nutrition.
I needed to know that the person beside me believed the change mattered.
Brandy showed me that it mattered to her because I mattered to her.
She researched. She asked questions. She checked the ingredients. She tried to prepare a meal that fit the way I was now eating.
The nervous repetition of ‘Is this okay?’ was not uncertainty about whether she wanted to help.
It was evidence of how badly she wanted to help correctly.
We still face challenges around family food.
Today, Brandy and I are trying to help Jill eat healthier. That is not easy. People become attached to what they eat, how they eat, and what food means inside a family routine.
You cannot simply announce that everyone will change and expect their preferences to disappear.
Brandy tries to eat healthier too, but I recognize that the level of discipline I can bring to food is unusual.
Once I make a decision, I can become almost monk-like about it.
I can eat the same basic foods again and again without needing the constant novelty that many people want from meals. That may make my routine easier for me to follow than it would be for someone else.
It also means I have to be careful not to confuse my discipline with the only acceptable way to change.
My family can support me without becoming me.
They do not have to eat two pounds of vegetables because I do. They do not have to treat food with the same utilitarian mindset. They do not have to experience the fear that entered my relationship with food after the hospital.
Support does not require identical plates.
Sometimes it means preparing separate food without making the person eating it feel separate.
Alex may be the clearest example of how deeply my family took my safety into their own thinking.
He became afraid to bring certain foods into the house if the label said they had been processed in a facility or on equipment associated with peanuts.
We were at Costco recently, and he picked up something he wanted. Then he saw the peanut warning.
I told him he could get it.
He said, ‘No, Dad. It was processed on something that has peanuts.’
He was not only thinking about whether I would eat the product directly.
He was imagining the chain of small accidents that could follow.
He might eat it and be fine. Then I might pick up one of his plates, touch something he had touched, or drink after him. In his mind, even that indirect possibility was enough to make the food no longer worth buying.
That was not a dietary rule I had imposed on him in the middle of Costco.
That was my son deciding that my safety mattered more to him than the snack in his hand.
I did not want him to live in fear of accidentally hurting me. At the same time, I could not miss what his decision revealed.
My family truly loves me.
They do not merely say they support me. They allow my needs to enter their decisions, even decisions about food they might eat when I am not the intended consumer.
I know not everybody receives that kind of support.
I have heard stories from people who must cook every meal separately while the rest of the family continues eating exactly as before. Some are teased for their choices. Some are pressured to make exceptions. Some are made to feel dramatic or difficult. Some sit at the same table and still feel completely alone.
That was not my experience.
My plate may have looked different, but my family never used the difference to push me outside the circle.
Brandy did not say, ‘This is your problem. Cook your food and leave us alone.’
She asked, ‘Is this okay?’
Alex did not say, ‘You are the one with the allergy. This is what I want.’
He put the product back.
Those moments showed me that family support is not always everybody eating the same meal.
Sometimes support is a spouse standing in the kitchen, afraid she might get the recipe wrong because she wants so badly to help.
Sometimes it is a son reading an allergen warning on something meant for himself and picturing how it might somehow reach his father.
Sometimes it is a daughter learning, slowly and imperfectly, that the family’s relationship with food is changing.
Sometimes it is everybody accepting that one person’s plate will look different without treating that person as if he no longer belongs.
The diagnosis changed the food in our house.
It did not change whether I was loved there.
If anything, the food made that love visible.
I saw it in the research Brandy began doing while I was doing my own.
I heard it every time she asked whether something was okay.
I saw it in the product Alex returned to the Costco shelf.
I felt it in the fact that separate meals never became separate lives.
I brought a frightening diagnosis home.
My family did not hand it back to me and say, ‘This belongs to you.’
They picked it up with me.
They worried with me.
They learned with me.
They changed with me, even when their changes did not look exactly like mine.
I may have had the monk-like discipline to eat salmon, eggs, broccoli, and okra day after day.
But discipline was not the only thing sustaining me.
There was a wife in the kitchen asking, ‘Is this okay?’
There was a son in Costco deciding my safety mattered more than something he wanted.
There was a family that allowed my food to be different without making me feel different.
I changed what I ate.
They made sure I never had to make that change alone.
Want to see how I connected the dots?
I wrote The Journey Back to share my experience and explain the Four Metabolic Loads framework. The physical paperback is $12.95 with free U.S. shipping.
→ See The Journey Back Paperback ($12.95)
Educational only, not medical advice. Charles’s experience was alongside physician-supervised care and prescribed medication. Individual results vary. Talk to your doctor.
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