My Day In Food

For Diabetes Blog Week, we were asked to talk about our relationship with food. My relationship always venters around what I plan on doing with food, and what the reality is. Below you can find my typical day in food.

Why Is It Always Adventure???

WHAT DOESN’T WORK

On the morning of October 23rd, 2009, I was already crying before I even opened my eyes. I rolled over and grabbed my meter from my nightstand and tested. I was 458. And I was probably 458 all night.

I could taste the ketones running through my veins and I swear I could feel my blood, as thick as syrup, oozing its way around my body.

I got up and dragged myself to the kitchen to eat, but of course just the thought of food made me want to throw up. I didn’t know what else to do, so I slid down the cupboard into a pile of tears right there on the kitchen floor.

I wish I could say that at that point in my life that was just one crappy day. We all have those. Those days when everything goes wrong and our sugars are just freakishly high.

But it wasn’t. This is how every day of my life had become.

I had no more strength to test. I was so down about my numbers that I hated testing because it would be just one more bad number to look at. I hated having to deny myself my favorite foods every day. I found every excuse in the book to avoid my workout for the day.

I had spent the last twelve years fighting my hardest, giving everything I had to be the perfect diabetic and now I was on empty. And I still had 76 more years to fight.

Something had to change.

I needed something more to bring me out of this slump. I needed an adventure and that winter I found it.

When I was diagnosed with diabetes, my doctors laid out a list of things that I could no longer do. I couldn’t drive a big-rig, fly an airplane, or sail alone. I can remember sitting in the doctor’s sterile office during my visit and swearing to myself that I would do just that. There was no way he was going to set limits on my life.

The time had come to make good on that promise.

At the very tip of Florida there is this string of 1724 tiny islands that extend 100 miles into the ocean like a giant fingernail at the end of the Florida finger. I decided I would sail from mainland Florida to the very end of that strip, to a place called Key West. And I would do it alone.

And you know what happened?

As soon as I decided to go, I noticed something in me had changed. My motivation started flooding back. I started to test again because I knew I had to be in good control if I was going to be on a boat in the middle of the ocean by myself.

And I started to exercise every day because I had to be prepared. When you sail alone, there’s really no one to save you if you fall off the side of the boat. There was one point in my trip where I would be about two and a half miles from the nearest piece of land so I wanted to be able to swim 3 miles in case the boat sank and I was left out in the ocean.

And all that exercise made my blood sugars even better.

Diabetes wasn’t about some complication the doctor threatened would happen to me in forty years anymore. It was about my adventure and being prepared so I would enjoy it.

I started testing again ten times a day (that was before I got a Dexcom) not to please someone else, but so I would know exactly how my body would respond to a new sport.

And I choose foods that were going to make me stronger during my trip instead of foods that would taste good for the minute I was eating them.

In 2011, when I finally got on board the 25’ Catalina sailboat that would be my home for the next four days, I was so completely proud of myself. I had spent the prior year doing diabetes really well. And to celebrate, I had a four-day adventure waiting for me.

About a year after that trip, I realized my diabetes care was slipping again. I had lost my motivation, again. Adventure worked the first time around to resuscitate my motivation, I wondered if it would work again.

This time I decided to do the 12.5-mile Swim Around Key West, but I didn’t want to go alone. So I grabbed two of my type 1 friends and started training. In 2014, we became the first ever all type 1 team to finish the Swim around Key West. And as soon as I decided to go I was motivated again.

After the swim, I knew I couldn’t let a day go by where I didn’t have an adventure to train for. I had to plan at least one adventure a year.

After spending countless hours staring at the black line at the bottom of the pool while I swam hundreds of thousands of yards in training, I wanted to be able to look at something on my next adventure, so I chose Stand Up Paddling.

Last June I took a team of 3 type 1’s and a type 1 researcher 100 miles up the Intracoastal Waterway from Myrtle Beach, South Carolina to Wilmington, North Carolina.

THE LONG ROAD

Diabetes is, for now, a life-long disease. It is a monster that sits forever on our backs, constantly distracting and complicating our life.

He demands blood and pain and tears. He craves restraint and self-control and moderation. And he is never satisfied.

Never.

It would be easy to take care of diabetes, if it were a month long affliction. Even if it were just for a year. But an eighty- or ninety-year-long run is just too much.

We could try harder, push more, focus all of our attention on diabetes. We could forget about everything else going on in our lives to make our numbers perfect. We could spend every ounce of our energy on it.

But in the end we would end up in the same place, burnt out and not doing as well as we would like.

Or we could do it differently. We could instead focus on something we love. Something that will make our hearts take flight. Something that will, as a by-product, better our diabetes care.

We could find an adventure. Adventure works. And it works for so many reasons.

WHAT IS ADVENTURE?

Webster’s dictionary defines adventure as an exciting or very unusual experience, a bold, usually risky undertaking, a hazardous action of uncertain outcome.

When I think of adventure, it has three parts; travel, exercise, and enormity.

An adventure is something that brings me to a new place. This world is huge with so many amazing places to see. And I want to see them all.

When we go to a new fresh place, our senses are heightened. We notice the small details. We pay attention to a new smell of trees that we have not experienced before. The ocean smells a bit saltier. The sun rises above the water instead of setting over it. All of these new sensations refresh us and bring us renewal.

Because we are using adventure to refresh our motivation to take care of our diabetes, exercise is an integral part of adventure. It reduces stress, challenges us in new ways, and makes our bodies more sensitive to the insulin we have.

It also combats some of the complications of diabetes by strengthening our cardiovascular systems and fighting heart disease. It gives us something to focus on as we train to be able to take on such a big physical challenge.

Adventure needs to be big enough to force us to take it seriously. If we are using adventure to change our lives and our relationships with diabetes, it has to be big enough to produce those changes.

But my big is not your big.

You don’t need to swim around an island or sail 100 miles or run an ultra-marathon (which scares the crap out of me, by the way). It only needs to be big enough to challenge you, to cause you to re-evaluate how you do things, and to inspire you to do more.

Adventure will delight you with newfound motivation. It will challenge you physically as you train for it. It will counter complications with a stronger cardiovascular system. It will make far off consequences more real.

And it will provide you with amazing tales to share.

So let’s begin dreaming. And then let’s plan, train, and execute our adventures.

We can share our tales along the way so we can be inspired by each other. I am excited to see what you come up with.

Why Big Resolutions Fail

It has been 87 days since the New Year.

How many of the resolutions that you made on January 1st are you still following?

And how long did it take for you to break them? One month? One week? An hour?

Now, tell me. How much of a failure do you feel like?

One of the problems with New Year’s Resolutions, and there are many, is that they are simply too big. After a lifetime of being a slob, you think that you will wake up the next day and, because it is January 1st, you will be entirely organized. A lifetime of bad habits wiped clean by eight hours of sleep.

Or after fifteen years of eating certain foods, you are going to wake up the next day and eat an entirely new group of healthier foods, which you probably don’t know how to cook and don’t even have in the house.

To become organized is a huge undertaking. On top of learning how to become organized, it will take an incredible amount of will-power to follow through on all of those new ways of doing things.

Changing a diet is just as big of a challenge.

So is, all of a sudden, having perfect blood sugars.

So what happens when you make these well-intentioned, big resolutions?

You fail.

You fail big.

And you fail fast.

And then the guilt of being a failure sits on you and discourages you from ever trying to change that area of your life again. You assume that you are just a slob or that you are addicted to bad foods or just a bad diabetic. That there is no way of changing.

The thing is, you aren’t the failure. It’s the system of these huge resolutions that require massive amounts of will power that set you up for failure.

The thing about will power is, that it is a limited brain resource. You only get so much every day. According to Columbia University, in a research study published in the National Academy of Sciences, every time your brain has to make a decision, (do I eat the donut or apple?), it uses energy.

And just like a muscle gets tired after several exercises, your brain will reach a point of decision fatigue. When it reaches this point, it goes into default mode. It won’t make a decision, it relies on a different part of the brain that controls habits and chooses to do what it has always done.

So, if we try to overhaul our entire lives in one fell swoop we are asking our brain to make an enormous amount of new decisions every day. By the end of the day, it simply does not have the energy to make another good one. So we go back to the old, bad habits we want to do away with.

It would be like going out and running a marathon and then expecting to do anything of physical value later that day. After my last half-marathon, I couldn’t manage the four-inch step out my back door without stumbling. There is no way I could balance on my stand up paddleboard. And I wouldn’t ask my body to do that.

So why are we asking our brains to do that?

Instead of asking something of our brains that is impossible, let’s ask of it something we know it can do. Let’s make a micro-resolution.

According to Caroline L. Arnold, micro-resolution is a small, targeted behavioral change that is attainable and permanently sustainable. It is so small you might think it is worthless. But small things can make a huge difference.

Let’s say you want to lose weight. You could try to change your entire diet. But as we just learned, that’s way too much for your brain to handle. A better solution would be to do something small.

Tiny even.

Something like eliminating the tablespoon of butter on your morning toast.

You still get the jelly on your toast. You get your coffee and your eggs and your bacon. All of that you still do the same way. Your lunch and dinner and snacks are still the same. You still eat out as much and go out for a drink on the weekend.

You only get rid of the butter.

That’s it. A micro-resolution. I am pretty sure EVERYONE is capable of eliminating a tablespoon of butter in the morning.

It is guaranteed success. After a week of this you will feel like the greatest person around, because you succeeded. After two weeks, you won’t even have to think about the butter that you used to use. After three weeks, you might be ready for another micro-resolution.

And, because you just succeeded with your first micro-resolution, you will be more eager and confident when you start your second micro-resolution.

Now some of you are probably saying, so what? I have pounds to shed, and the rest of my diet is horrible. I gave up some butter, who cares?

Well, that tablespoon of butter is about 100 calories. And since you have permanently given it up, that is 100 calories every day. After a year that’s 36,500 calories.

Or in terms you might want to hear, after a year, if you do everything else the same, you will have lost 10 pounds from giving up a stupid tablespoon of butter on your morning toast.

You see, when small things are repeated every day, they add up.

When I decided to start eating mostly plant-based foods several years ago, I knew it would be a huge change. And I just don’t have that kind of strength.

I also knew that I had other things going on like work and kids and training and diabetes. So I didn’t have much decision energy left at the end of the day. I couldn’t just wake up one day and change everything.

So I didn’t. I mirco-resolutioned my way to the change I wanted to see.

My first task was breakfast. For years I woke to two eggs scrambled with veggies and two pieces of toast. Since my morning blood sugars are a bit finicky, once I found a meal that worked, breakfast had been on autopilot for years.

So I tackled it first. The toast would stay. The veggies would stay. And I switched the eggs for vegan sausage. One simple change. All of the other aspects of my food were the same.

After one month, I tackled lunch, by taking out the cheese of my cheese and veggie sandwich. And then I took on dinner, and snacks, and treats.

Meal by meal, through small changes, I went from eating an omnivores diet to a mostly plant-based. And I didn’t even notice. There was no will-power involved. It was just tiny changes, over and over.

Micro-resolutions make big change easy and permanent because each step in the process is repeated over and over until it is just a part of how you do things before the next step is taken on.

Once one goal is accomplished, the same system is applied to a new area of life.

So, now, I am at a place once again, where I want to see some new changes in my life. I have lost some of my endurance and strength due to a prolonged health issue. I am healthier now and want to get back what I have lost, but I have learned that instead of a huge overhaul and expecting to go from not working out to doing 7 days a week of intense training, I am going to make micro-resolutions.

I also want to tighten up my blood sugar numbers. But instead of promising to drop 2.0 on my A1C, I will make one micro-change that I know I can consistently do forever without needing any extraordinary amounts of will-power.

My micro-resolutions will get me to these goals.

To give you an idea of the scope of these resolutions, they are below.

#1. Each night before bed, do 20 pushups or sit-ups or squats.

#2. Instead of waiting until my sugars rise to 180 to correct, I will micro-bolus and correct when I am 150 (of course taking into consideration the direction I am already heading on my Dexcom and any insulin I may have on board from a prior bolus.)

When I have built these into habits, I will add another layer of change. Slowly, layer by successful layer, I will have accomplished my goals, all without taxing my brain or failing.

And, here’s my pledge, (because accountability is so important in follow through), I will post a pic on Instagram of myself doing my strength micro-resolutions each night for the next 7 nights with the hashtag #diabetesmicroresolutions. Feel free to call me on it if I miss a night.

And if you want to join in, feel free to post your own pics and micro-resolutions.

Let’s check up on each other and encourage one another.

I’ll be looking for your posts and to congratulate you on your successes.