Good Body Buddies

I don't want to have diabetes. Type II diabetes comes with a stigma. If I have Type II then it means I deserve it because I ate and lazified my way to a deadly disease. Everywhere I turn I see messages that obesity causes Type II diabetes and the only way to manage it is through dieting and exercise.

I chose to get past the stigma and investigate whether or not I had diabetes because I had run out of options. I have tried dieting and exercise, acupuncture, thyroid treatment, hormone treatment, sugar-free and wheat-free diets. Nothing I do seems to make the scale budge. I can't even remember how I arrived at the decision to investigate diabetes or how I found the site www.bloodsugar101.com. I ended up reading the book by the same name as the site and was shocked by what I read. The author, Jenny Ruhl turns everything I previously thought about diabetes on it's head. She says "While people with diabetes often are seriously overweight, there is accumulating evidence that their overweight is a symptom, not the cause of the process that leads to Type 2 Diabetes". What? Diabetes causes weight gain instead of the other way around? To top it all off, she goes on to list increasing evidence that diabetes may have many causes including environmental pollution, autoimmune or viral attacks, and genes. The fact that diabetes and obesity are spreading at a faster rate than food consumption and lack of exercise patterns to me seems to suggest something "bigger" is going on here. Perhaps we are literally "catching" obesity.

Please read the article You Did Not Eat Your Way to Diabetes because she explains this so much better than I can. I have read it multiple times in order to help myself feel better about diabetes. I have been testing my blood sugar for a few months now and it appears that I probably have diabetes. But thanks to Jenny Ruhl's book, I am okay with this and believe that treating it might turn out to be my path to weight loss. Much more to come on this topic.