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.

I just have to share a fitness blog that I am starting to read daily. It is called The Great Fitness Experiment. It's written by Charlotte Hinton and it's absolutely pee-your-pants hilarious and interesting. She writes about things that I think in my head but never think to write about. For example, she has a post titled A Hoochie Trapped in a Feminist's Body about the internal struggle she experiences from the guilty pleasure of listening to rap music with questionable (to put it mildly) lyrics when she works out. I too am a raunchy hip-hop workout playlist addict and I struggle with it sometimes but never thought that anyone could relate. I would also never be able to write about it in such an entertaining way so I won't even try.

"Learn how to suffer"

This was the advice a caller received on NPR's Talk of the Nation radio show yesterday on What Really Works for Weight Loss. The caller stated that he used to be 400 lbs but is now a competitive bicyclist. He said those words from a friend and bike store owner changed his life. His statement seemed to ruffle the feathers of one of the show's experts but this quote resonated with me.

It reminded me of the main point of the book The Road Less Traveled, “Life is difficult". The author, Scott Peck gleaned this idea from the Buddhist principle, “Life is suffering." Peck said that spiritual growth must include self-discipline, delayed gratification, and understanding the consequences of our actions. This seems like a perfect recipe to me for lifelong weight managment. We want life and weight loss to be easy and pain-free but is that realistic?

The three main times that I have lost weight have been relatively easy. The first two times I was nursing and even though I did exercise and watch my portions somewhat consistently, I didn't ever push myself too hard, especially when it came to fitness. The third time I was on Adderall for ADHD and it was a powerful appetite suppressant. I rarely exercised that time and still dropped 55 lbs in 6 months! When it comes to exercise and healthy eating, I have an extremely low tolerance for pain or sacrafice, a.k.a, lazy. My modest weight loss efforts are not weilding any visible results so far so I think it is my time to learn how to suffer.

While compiling the links for this post, I ran across a NPR slideshow of unpublished photos of Marilyn Monroe from Life. Neat!