How Type 2 Diabetes Renewed My Love for Cooking and Baking

At first, my diagnosis made cooking a chore. Once I learned to approach cooking and baking as a playful experiment, it became fun again.

When I was a kid, I loved to bake. I attempted cooking family dinners, but I was never much for cooking, as I was more likely to burn dinner than produce something tasty.

But cookies, cakes, and brownies were my playground. I still remember tossing aside the premade mixes that came with my Easy Bake oven in favor of my own from-scratch concoctions.

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How I stopped loving baking

Even though I grew up amid diet culture, food was a form of love in our house. I loved on my family with chocolate layer cakes and blueberry muffins. But the older I got, the more entrenched in diet culture I became, and food was no longer fun. 

When I moved out on my own in my 20s, cooking remained a minefield of diet culture restriction. It also became a chore.

With no one to cook for, there was no one to care for through food. (Self-care hadn’t occurred to me back then.)

So I gravitated toward frozen “diet” meals, or I’d cook once, portion it into individual servings, and eat the same meal every day for a week. Food, especially cooking it, was boring, and I lost my interest.

Getting diagnosed

Being diagnosed with type 2 diabetes only exacerbated my feelings about cooking and baking. At that point, I’d endured decades of dieting in an effort to manage my naturally plump body type — something that was supposed to have prevented this genetic condition from manifesting.

So, I was already wired to view food as the enemy.

My type 2 diabetes diagnosis heightened that. Staring in the face of type 2 diabetes, food, for me, was elevated from enemy to supervillain. I now perceived staying “on track” as life or death. 

After all, diet is so often at the top of the list of ways to manage type 2 diabetes. So, at the beginning of my diagnosis, all I could see was a door slammed shut on what I could never have again.

Several years later, I got married. Now that I had someone to cook for, I relied less on prepackaged options. Occasionally, I showed my husband love with a stack of pancakes or an apple pie. But these were still foods I wasn’t “supposed” to be eating.

So the rigors of figuring out what to cook daily remained a chore, like laundry or doing the dishes.

What changed

Then, around 2019, I discovered the keto diet, and based on its promise to “cure” type 2 diabetes, I decided to give it a try. Although it ultimately didn’t work for me — and this kind of extreme dieting helped me eventually break free of diet culture altogether — there was an unexpected bonus.

I started browsing the web for recipes to overcome my boredom and lack of imagination when figuring out what to eat. Some were utter fails, but others were surprising hits. 

Even better, that simple experimentation with recipes returned a feeling of play to cooking. I found myself keeping recipe notebooks where I’d adjust others’ creations to suit my taste preferences and even started developing some of my own.

At the same time, thanks to the popularity of low-carb diets, new products to serve the demand started hitting grocery store shelves. One of these was ice cream. 

I am a lifelong ice cream lover, but I’d cut way back on my consumption after being diagnosed with type 2 diabetes. It was one of many things I’d relegated to the category of “occasional treat” — even so-called “light” ice creams, which had been acceptable during my dieting days but too high in sugar for managing my type 2 diabetes.

So I was ecstatic, at first, when keto ice cream hit the market. It was low sugar and high fat, the perfect combo for keeping my blood sugar in range. But then I tasted it.

While the flavors were acceptable, the texture was awful. They were all either too crumbly or frozen into solid bricks. Despite the high-fat content in keto ice cream, they were anything but creamy.

At that point, I’d already been experimenting with many recipes, so I decided to try my hand at ice cream. As with any experiment, my first attempts didn’t yield great results. So, I scoured the web for ice cream recipes to figure out what I might be doing wrong.

In my research, I came across a recipe book from one of my favorite sources for the “real” stuff. Jeni Britton Bauer included an entire chapter on the science of ice cream. Until then, I’d never thought about cooking or baking involving science.

I’d already considered it an art of combining the right flavors to get tasty results. But I’d never before considered that molecules are involved that directly affect how things hold together and the resulting textures.

Understanding the science of ice cream helped me develop an ice cream recipe that not only tasted like the real thing but also kept the texture of the sugar-laden kind, even after being in the freezer for weeks — no icy, crumbly bricks.

My renewed love for cooking and baking

I was hooked once I learned there’s a science behind many recipes and realized cooking and baking were often about more than simple ingredient swaps. Cooking no longer felt like a routine chore but an expression of my creativity, with a drop of kitchen scientist.

For example, I recently tried making sugar-free caramel popcorn for family movie nights. At first, I thought I could just swap the sugar for my favorite alternative, allulose. But my popcorn ended up sticky and chewy rather than crisp. 

My first reaction was to resign myself to the impossibility of subbing sugar in some recipes. But then I decided to see if there was a science behind caramel popcorn. Naturally, there is!

Once I understood why certain ingredients and steps are involved in making crisp caramel popcorn, I could make a sugar-free alternative, still using my favorite allulose.

This kind of science-experiment approach to cooking helped me feel like a kid again in the kitchen, playing with her Easy Bake oven. In this way, rather than making me hate it, my type 2 diabetes ultimately led me back around to the fun of it all.

The takeaway

Now that cooking and baking have become a playful experiment of science and creativity, I feel new joy in it.

So much of type 2 diabetes management often feels like a “have to.” And those “have tos” often come with hefty doses of restriction. But I’ve discovered that when I approach anything with the spirit of play, whether it’s cooking and baking, exercise, or something else, it can actually feel fun and much more like a “get to.”