Diabetes365 day 11 Thursday, October 18, 2007 - Fog

If you have Type 1 diabetes, you already know just how hard it is to control it. Every morning for breakfast you have the same things and you eat them at about the same time. When you test your blood sugar two hours later (a postprandial test) you get wildly different results.



And why is this? Well maybe you were stressed on one day and not on the other. Or you're coming down with a cold and that drives your blood sugar up. Or you ran for the bus and that made your blood sugar go down.

Managing diabetes is not a rigid, well-defined, set of instructions like a baking recipe. There are guidelines and lots of numbers and ratios. But a big dose of judgment is also needed.

When I see my endocrinologist (diabetes doctor) and they fill out that form with all the checkboxes afterwards, one of the boxes has the code 250.93 beside it. That's the one is normally marked for me.

It means "Type 1 diabetes - uncontrolled".

Well it's not that my diabetes is uncontrolled or out of control. It's just extremely hard to control it. The control is defined based on my blood sugar readings.

And what affects those readings? Food, exercise, sleep, illness, stress, menses. You know, the things of everyday life.

So I wander through a light fog trying to follow the markers and pretty much sticking to the path. And most days it's actually pretty good. As long as I don't think about it too much.

There's no cure for diabetes. And I really wish there was.

There's a great collection of photos that reflect life with diabetes at the diabetes365 project site.

You can see my diabetes365 photos here.

Labels: control, diabetes, diabetes365, exercise, expectations

posted by Bernard @ 12:48 PM 6 Comments Links to this post  

Competing against myself

On the spur of the moment, I bought myself a pedometer over the Christmas break.

Partly this was because of Amy Tenderich's book Know Your Numbers, Outlive Your Diabetes. I'm about half way through the book, and it really does a good job at emphasizing the importance of exercise.

We finally have a treadmill in the house, so that helps me for the 25 minutes or so when I'm on it. But for the rest of the day, or the days when I'm not on it, I really don't pay any attention to how much walking exercise I'm doing.

So now I put the pedometer on first thing in the morning and take it off last thing at night. Then I'm using dHealth.net (which I found out about courtesy of Dave Mendosa's posting) to track the steps I take each day.

Guess what I found out?

For me, it's very challenging to wear this thing. Each day I have it on, I'm really focused on trying to break 7,000 steps. So far (one week and counting) I've got about a 50% success rate, but it's really motivating me to try and walk more and walk faster.

Can't be bad.

If you're interested, the pedometer I purchased is something like this one on Amazon (and yes I'll get a little something if you purchase this one from Amazon).

I actually got mine at an Olympia sports for about $16 (battery included), the model is an Accusplit Alliance 1590 and it's working just fine so far.

I'm hoping to work up to an average of 8,500 steps per day. I'll let you know how it goes.

Labels: exercise, health, walking

posted by Bernard @ 9:49 PM 4 Comments Links to this post