The Dance with Diabetes Continues

TW/CW: This post contains talk of emotional eating/food issues, suicidal ideation and other mental health challenges. I haven’t written in quite a while (months!) – and I’ll tell you why: I really haven’t been doing my program or being careful at all. As a result, my blood sugar has risen and been staying fairly high.

Freaking Out Doesn’t Help

I’m going to keep paying attention to what are the best choices for me in my daily life to stay well – physically, emotionally, mentally, psychologically – even spiritually. To me, it’s all tied together. Freaking out throws me off balance. Strict dietary programs and over-emphasis on activity throw me off balance. I’m riding the waves of recovery from decades of weight loss dieting traumas, negotiating new pathways in my relationship to food and health/well-being. I’m also learning on a deeper level what would have been very helpful for me to know when I was first diagnosed: I don’t have to go to extremes or get this under perfect control immediately – it is okay to take my time and find my way into balance.

Allowing My Blood Sugar Level To Be “Good Enough”

My point of this post is to say that life happens – and that we don’t always have favorable conditions to manage our diabetes perfectly. In that case, we just do the best we can – and allow that to be good enough. I’ve tended in my life to be a perfectionist – but that isn’t sustainable – or practical or even ideal in a human life.

This May Be Helpful To Know

Am I ever glad I kept a journal (pictured above) the first time I went down this path! I recorded everything: my morning sugar reading, my readings after various meals, everything I ate, supplements I took, my amount of exercise, many comments along the way of how I was feeling, both physically and emotionally. Perhaps the most helpful thing for me to be able to review this morning is the string of profanities laced throughout my notebook. See, even when I was staying on point, the journey wasn’t always smooth sailing. My sugar regularly spiked a little (sometimes a lot!) for no discernible reason. But I stayed the course … and over time, it kept trending in the right direction until it stayed in the good range almost all of the time. Until recently, when I had veered off course over many months during the pandemic.

This Time Feels A Little More Challenging

When I was diagnosed with diabetes almost three years ago, I went into complete panic mode. My doctor just said it matter-of-factly, “you have diabetes” – and offered no further information other than I could start on medication to control it. No thank you! I didn’t receive any nutritional counseling (or for that matter, emotional counseling) from him regarding how to handle this diagnosis and my future health potentials. I was left to figure it out on my own.