You are what you eat

I've finally dsicovered the mere fact that if you take in crap you feel like crap. Doh! I'm not generally this slow on the uptake but in this case I am. Now that I am diabetic, with my sugars still out of control, I am feeling the headaches that come along with eating too many fats and carbs. I am supposed to be carb counting but have been doing a half-ass job of it.

I rarely sleep through the night and often find myself driving to Dunkin Donuts for a bagel with cream cheese at some random time in the morning, say around 3 a.m. Then I also get a big ole chocolate chip cookie, double doh! No wonder my sugars are in the 300s even hours later.

So today I pulled out my meal planning and carb counting book from the diabetes nurse educator and flipped through it. Time to get a little more serious. I have a good month before I have to return to school and I'd really love to see lower numbers. Even when I do eat well my numbers are often very high, rarely under 200 and nowhere near where they actually should be.

I guess there's a learning curve with every illness. It took me a long time to get past being a person with multiple sclerosis to just being a person again. MS consumed me for a long time because I was so symptomatic and needed to take shots daily. Then there were the side effects of the Copaxone shots. I was immersed in the MS online community, searching for people who were like me, who felt like me. That took years.

Now I coexist with the MS and am happily in remission. That brings me to the present time to focus on food, healthy thoughts, exercise, and diabetes.

I am now turning a wary eye to mindful eating even when it includes a bagel and a cookie. I enjoy eating them and eat them slowly. The problem ensues with the diabetes. That just means it's time to refocus the lens again to see the clearer picture.

It's as simple as the old line, you are what you eat.