Diet and Exercise and Bears… Oh My…

Damn.

There is no way around it, if you’ve been diagnosed with Type II like I've just been, or even pre-diabetes you are going to have to exercise and diet like your life depends on it… because it does.

Just to keep your attention, here are some of the wonderful things to look forward to if we don’t get our blood sugar under control, and if they sound a lot like Al Qaeda interrogation techniques, well, yes.

• You can lose your kidneys and be forced to sit for hours at a time with needles sticking in your arm until, thankfully, you die.
• You can go blind faster than a sixteen year old boy with a webcam in Pamela Anderson’s shower.
• You can have your feet cut off after a bout with gangrene and blood poisoning.
• Impotence (and forget Viagra; you might as well start peeing sitting down).
• Acute-onset femoral neuropathy will keep your thighs in constant pain for the rest of your life.
• Gastroparesis and Diabetic diarrhea. Now you get to spew what little food you can still manage to eat, out from both ends.
• Abnormal blood lipids. Just a heart attack, stroke, not so bad comparatively.
• Ketoacidosis leading to coma or death.

Terrific; not as bad as being lowered, slowly, feet first through an industrial paper shredder perhaps, but just barely.

It’s not all bad news; one advantage of combining diet and exercise is that they tend to reinforce each other. Think back, when you were a kid exercise wasn’t really the chore it is now, was it. In fact we called it playing back then. Why the change? It’s because when you were younger you had more energy and if you are honest with yourself you’ll admit that it isn’t really a lack of time to exercise but a lack of energy. When you have the time you are too tired and want nothing more than to pass out in front of the T.V. and munch on some cheese doodles, and when you aren’t too tired, it’s time for work or kids or something and now you really are too busy.

The only secret of diet and exercise is that once you do force yourself to start a combined campaign, it gets a lot easier. Maybe not quite like playing when you were a kid, but a lot closer than you’re thinking right now. So our first goal is to get a combined plan together and start a virtuous circle.