Joy, Life and More

Most people find the holidays daunting, and why not? It seems like the fall and winter brings the best eating holidays:  Halloween candy, Thanksgiving turkey and pumpkin pie and Christmas dinner, chocolates and desserts plus so much more! Having diabetes during this time of the year is no fun! I have Type 2 diabetes and thankfully I can control my diabetes through diet and exercise. I can only speak from my perspective, so if you take medications or insulin, there may be different restrictions. To be completely honest, I didn't overthink too much about the upcoming holidays. With children in the house, it would be hard to completely avoid candy and other goodies, and I did not want to deprive my family or even myself! I also wanted to enjoy the holidays and not make anyone uncomfortable especially since we were spending Thanksgiving and Christmas with relatives (side note: my relatives knew about my diabetes diagnosis and was very mindful of asking me how they could accommo...

It's been about four months since my journey toward better health and beating diabetes began. So where am I now? At the end of October, three months since I took the A1C test which diagnosed me diabetic, I retook the test. This time it was a simple finger prick and a small amount of blood. I was lucky that the lab in my doctor's office had a machine which didn't require them to send out the sample. The phlebotomist was nice and told me I would get the results in a few minutes. In all honesty, before I took the test, I told myself there was a chance my results might even be higher than 6.4% despite all the things I had been doing to get it down. The problem with diabetes is if someone in your family has the disease, the chances of getting it goes up, and someone in my biological background had diabetes (side note: I was adopted as a baby but my mom told me my biological grandmother had diabetes). Of course, this is not an excuse why I have diabetes. I know my lifestyle...

I wanted to address the cost of being healthy versus the cost of not being healthy. When I was first diagnosed with diabetes, many thoughts went through my head. Would I need to take medication? Have I signed myself up for a lifetime of insulin injections? Do I need to sign up for a gym? Would I need special food? How much is this all going to cost? Let's be real here. Being healthy cost money right? When you visit the doctor, it will cost you money. Then when the doctor prescribes this pill or that pill, it will cost you more money. This is all aside from the money you already pay out for health insurance. Of course not to mention all the tests you need to take to make sure you are healthy (or not healthy). Pretty soon you figure out how much it is going to cost you to stay healthy and maybe it makes you feel ill. But think about it this way. If you don't go to the doctor, get sick and land in the hospital, how much will that cost you in the end? The average cost of one ...

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 amou...

When I started this blog, I didn't want it to stagnant but it's come to that mainly because I haven't posted in awhile. I have two boys, ages 5 and 9, and I am 46 years old. I had my children later in life because I didn't get married until I was 35. My husband and I planned on having children as soon as we got married because we didn't know if there would be problems getting pregnant because of our ages. But we were able to get pregnant after a couple of miscarriages and now have two healthy boys. Speaking of health, I've always been overweight. There I've said it. Ever since I was young, I've always favored being heavier than I should be I think. I'm not sure but it seems that way. I know for sure I've never been skinny and been able to fit into normal clothes. Sure I've tried to lose weight over the years but without much success. To be frank, I haven't really been trying and it's shown. I've gained a significant amount of ...