I suspect there are diabetics out there who say that being diagnosed saved their lives. I wouldn’t go that far, but it surely got me to take my health more seriously.

Despite the fact that losing weight would have to be job one, I didn’t make any goals with my weight, at least not until this year. Instead, my goals were more around fitness, like, “lift weights three times a week.”

Full disclosure: I worked then, and work now, for the health maintenance organization where I was insured and got my care. I was blessed with having a great primary care physician in Dr. Pek. Besides diagnosing me, she would go over my labs regularly. She’d encourage me when I was doing well and tell me when I needed to improve. She hooked me up with a nurse who would go over my foot exam and review my sugars. I was less happy with the nurse because I thought her goals were unrealistic, and nothing was ever good enough for her–but then again, in the rest of my life, very little is good enough for me.

I learned to use a glucometer, a blood sugar meter, which is not the most fun thing to use. Poking yourself 2-5 times a day is definitely not fun, but it helped me learn more about my sugars. For me, what was important about this was equating what my numbers were with how I felt; I figured out not just what the numbers meant, but how I felt when I was running “low”. I also learned that my low was not the low for non-diabetics; I’d feel like I was low, take a sugar, and discover I was 109. And I also learned what lab results looked like for cholesterol, hemoglobin a1c, and all kinds of other stuff.

In the meantime, weight was coming off. But it was coming off not because I had a goal of losing weight–I really didn’t, despite the fact I knew it had to happen–but because I was making big changes to my diet and my exercise routine–or rather, I started a serious exercise routine for the first time in years.

Things were happening. And they’d continue to, but not without some stumbles along the way.

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