The Mayo Clinic diabetes educators have a blog I read when they post every week or two.  I think they are well-intentioned despite the fact I still sense a condescension vibe from it sometimes.  I don’t know why! 

Their blog yesterday highlighted how important it is to recognize that taking a “break” from your diabetes care can be important.

I agree.

For me, taking a break from my diabetes care primarily means taking a break from making myself feel badly about not doing enough. 

Diabetes is with me for the long haul, and I can’t do it right every day or every week or even every year.  It’s going to have its ups and downs, just like the rest of my life.

I just don’t have quite as clear a target range with the rest of my life as I do with my diabetes.

As an example, I was talking to my bootcampers this morning about the clothes we wear.  I mentioned that the more I transition away from practicing law and into physical fitness, the more elastic waist pants I wear, and that makes me somewhat nervous.   I need to watch my weight because a clue of weight gain for me in the past was how my pants fit!

But whether or not I am comfortable in my jeans depends on my weight and when I washed the jeans.  Whether I hit my BG target is right there on that little screen every time I check.  It doesn’t take days or weeks to notice: notification I am not in range is right there in front of me several times every day.

And that is indeed hard to live with.

2010 has been a rough year in my personal life this year, and I know my care has suffered along with that.  But I can’t feel badly about that: I need to recognize that in the course of my life there will be different patches and my diabetes will have its own corresponding ups and downs too.

Diabetes is always going to be a process more than a project; you know that if you’ve ever done the same thing at the same time and gotten different results.  It’s the nature of the disease and the nature of our lives.

So yes, take breaks from what you can take breaks from when it comes to your diabetes.  Take smart short breaks from eating the best you can, take smart breaks from a midnight check now and then.  Take a break from making yourself feel badly about your best not being someone else’s “good enough.”

Take breaks, forgive yourself, but don’t ever stop.  You’re worth much more than that!

Professor Brian Wansink is a smart guy.  He has written a number of books and more than 100 academic articles on eating and why we eat more than we think we eat.  Fascinating.  He’s one of the smarties behind the 100 calorie snack packs.

I told you he’s a smart guy!

I know for me that I realized when I was trying to lose weight that it was better for me to accept that I could not (and still can’t) stop eating halfway through a bag than it was to try and change that about myself and my eating habits.

But what I could change, and did change, was the size of the bag.

I’m sure we’ve all hit blood sugar numbers way higher than we expected because we weren’t paying attention to how much we were eating.  I’ve been known to frequently double-bolus (prior to eating for what I think I’m going to eat, and then after eating when I try to compensate with extra insulin for the additional food I did eat). 

So how do we change our eating habits if we don’t even know what those habits are??

No easy answer, of course, but Wansink has some suggestions to change some habits that won’t be so threatening:

• Sit next to the person you think will be the slowest eater when you go to a restaurant. 
• In a group, be the last one to start eating when a plate is put in front of you.
• At home, put high-calorie foods on the plate before you sit down at the table.  Conversely, bring the veggies with you to the table.
• At a buffet, put only two items on your plate at a time.
• Never eat directly from a package.
• Wrap tempting food in foil so that you don’t see it.

I’ve got a few additions to this brief list. 

• For me, it works to keep the more dangerous foods out of the kitchen and put them in another space altogether, like in our garage.
• If I don’t want to eat it, I don’t buy it.
• If my husband buys it, and I don’t want to eat it, I ask him to keep it on top of the fridge.  (He’s a foot taller than I am.)
• I drink a lot of water.  If I want to slow down my eating at any certain meal, I’ll make myself drink twice the water than I otherwise would.

None of these strategies are going to melt off any weight on their own… but they won’t sabotage your efforts, either, and they are pretty subtle changes that make it easier for you to take off the pounds one at a time.  It’s worth considering.

Have you come up with strategies that have helped you?  Please share them!

I was listening to John Madden on the radio this morning (love him) and he mentioned, probably without realizing it, a play someone ran in a game last year. 

It made me think.

I know a lot of things, and I pay attention to a lot of things, and I go a lot of places and I perform a lot of tasks and play a lot of different roles every day of my life.  But a play from a year ago and most of the 13,007 cases I had to read in law school and I think who actually done it in nearly every mystery I’ve ever read no longer exists in my brain.

I don’t think there is any room inside there; I don’t even know if there ever was!

I really don’t think it’s age related.  I think I have less room in my brain than the Average Jane has for storing information on TV shows, cartoon plot lines, or what have you. 

I think I have a considerable chunk up there reserved for my diabetes information. 

If you don’t have diabetes, have you ever thought about how much goes into trying to function for one organ?!  I am constantly amazed, and I have been doing it for more than 20 years! 

what I had for breakfast and what that’s going to do to my blood sugar by lunch and what my number was and what day of the month it is and what basal rate am I at and did I go on a temporary basal this morning and did I do extra exercise with the bootcampers and why didn’t I eat a snack and did I bring candy with me and what am I planning to do after work and how many miles is that and is it unusually hot or cold outside and how long will the aftereffects of the marathon impact my metabolism and my basal rate and how is my basal rate do I need to run tests on that again I hate those and am I going to go do a heavy weight workout after work or am I going to run and if I run how long am I running for and how fast and will it be fast enough to change the insulin/food I need and what am I going to do to prevent a swing if I run and if I am going to do heavy weight work how heavy and when was the last time I did that and the time before when I hadn’t done heavy weight work and then I did it what happened to my blood sugar and how likely is that to happen again and am I going low right now in fact what is my blood sugar right now I should check and when was the last time I checked and did I bolus and where is my meter and when is the next meal and what am I going to eat and how much insulin is that going to take and how much insulin is left in my pump do I need to change my site when was the last time I changed my site and

So, yes: I’ll say it:  My brain is not like the brain of a person without diabetes.  My brain does all the same things their brains do, and it does that diabetes monologue.  And I have to store a lot of that information for future reference, too.

It’s kind of a shame, really.  I could use some of that extra space. 

There are a lot of football games and cartoons and mysteries out there.