D-DAY: The Journey of Thousand Miles Starts with Ten Thousand Steps

I kind of look at diabetes management as a triangle. Sort of like the fire triangle where you need three sides...heat, oxygen, and fuel.

For diabetes, I see it as food, exercise/weight loss, and monitoring.  I've talked about food and monitoring in the last couple of posts, today it's exercise.

I go to the gym twice a week for weight training. My doctor has told me to ease back on that and replace it with a more aerobic exercise. If you follow me on Facebook, you'll know that my biggest form of aerobic exercise is walking.

My wife's a runner.  She loves it. Me? Not so much but I do like walking.  I've been walking daily for a few years now.

At first my minimum walk was a mile a day, which could be accomplished by doing a creative lap of the office complex where I work. Didn't seem like enough, so I started branching out.

Now, I do the 10,000 step regimen where I try to make sure I do a minimum of 10,000 steps a day, which works out to about 3.5 miles. 

One problem is that I get bored easily with exercise and I need some motivation.  Each day, I like to strike out from my office in a different direction.  For the motivation part, I like to take pictures as I go along and post them to my Facebook.

There's not much more to it, just walking and shooting.  I can tell it's helped. I feel healthier and I've lost 25 pounds in a year.

In the meantime, I've been assembling quite a portfolio of life in downtown Los Angeles, as you can see by some of the examples in this post.

Darryl
Copyright 2016 - Darryl Musick
All Rights Reserved

D-Day: Life After the Diagnosis

God works in mysterious ways. After years of good to very good checkups and starting this food blog, I get the news.

Just before Thanksgiving, my doctor's note comes in the mail. Dianosis: Diabetes Mellitus. In other words, I'm now a Type 2 diabetic.

First order of business is to attend my health plan's "Diabetes 101" class where I receive some basic nutritional information and a blood glucose monitor.  After that, it's another four week advanced class for diabetes management.

Now, I'm officially on the program.

Actually, it's not a bad thing. Probably one of the better things to happen for my health because now I have an almost instant read (2 hours later) on how my last meal affected me.  I'm getting to know what I can eat (a carne asada sope with a chile relleno works real good for my glucose level) and what I can't (white rice is a sugar bomb for my blood but that's ok, I don't really care for it anyway).

What's that mean for the blog? Well, I'll now do occasional D-Day posts spotlighting foods that work, those that don't, and other highs and lows of living with Type 2 Diabetes.

For me, so far, I've been able to keep within the range of 100-150 on the reading of my monitor, which is exactly where my doctor wants me to be. I've had two big spikes...once when I had a beef bowl from a local teriyaki place (B-Man's), where I learned that white rice is not my friend...and when I had a burrito wrapped in a huge, flour tortilla that spiked me up to over 200.

That was a bit harder to take than the rice but smaller flour tortillas don't affect me so badly. Corn are even better and I still need to try the wheat variety to see how that will be.

I'm not much for candy or sweets, though I do occasionally like to have them, so it's been pretty easy to cut back on them.  I am a fan of butter, which doesn't pump up the sugar but does contribute to other things that don't go well with diabetes, so that will be a little harder to put down.

My goal is to stave off having to take medication for as long as possible. So long as I'm range and pay attention, I should be good for awhile. 

We'll see...my next blood work appointment is next month.

Darryl
Copyright 2016 - Darryl Musick
All Rights Reserved