More Health: Lessons Learned and Much More to Life

So where do you start when you have diabetes, need to lose weight and start exercising regularly? I am no expert but for me, sadly, it had to be an incentive. My incentive was I didn't want to have diabetes! I didn't want to "shudder" inject myself with insulin every day. This was incentive enough for me!

As I already said in my prior entry, I started using MyFitnessPal (MFP) to track what I ate, calories and all that good stuff. It was a learning process the first week. You can easily put in your starting weight and the weight you hope to be at some point, and it will tell you how many calories you can eat each day. My challenge was I also had diabetes and high blood pressure. Not only did I need to watch my sodium intake but I also need to consider how much carbohydrates and sugar I was consuming.

When you use the free portion of the MFP App, you can only indicate what percentage of your diet should be carbohydrates, fat and protein as well as limit the amount of sodium you intake a day. I'm sure but not entirely positive with the paid portion, you can manipulate other details. So far using the free portion of the app has worked out for me. I decided I wanted to lose weight in increments because it seemed much more doable than trying to lose a whole bunch at one time. This is what worked for me and the amount of calories I thought I could work with on a daily basis.

The first week is always the hardest when making a change. My overarching lesson for making a change is changing my attitude. I knew I could not adequately make a change unless I changed my approach to food. For me, eating was no longer something I lived for but rather I would be eating to live! Imagine that crazy concept which all of us should have learned from a young age. Yes, my new motto would be:

Eat to live! Not live to eat.

Even that little realization really helped me to curb my eating. I had to remember I was fueling my body for the day which was way less than what I used to eat before. This was also a big change from eating basically without thinking to thinking about what I ate. This is where the MFP app came in handy. It was easy to input what food I planned on eating for a meal and see how many calories, fat, carbs and sodium and sugars I was having.

I won't lie but it was super hard the first week. I had never lived within a caloric guideline but I learned a lot about myself. I learned I probably ate at least 2-3 times that amount sometimes before I started and I was amazed at how much sodium many of the foods, especially fast foods and restaurant foods had in their so-called healthy meals. This was definitely an eyeopener for me. Now I knew what everyone who was anyone who ever touted healthy lifestyle and healthy eating meant:  moderation. Yes, I could eat it but I just couldn't eat it all or all the time!

See the thing with having diabetes is that you can eat whatever you want but you just can't have excessive amounts because your body is apt not to process the glucose/sugars properly. The greatest lesson I learned is that having diabetes meant that I couldn't just lose weight and be cured. No, it meant I would need to change for the rest of my life. I also learned things would take time because it certainly didn't take overnight to gained all this weight or have diabetes, so it would be an ongoing process. I have to keep going and not stop!

* Any products or links in this post are not sponsored. I have not received any compensation for mentioning them, and all opinions are my own.