While I’m not a copious journal keeper, I have, for years, written down every penny I spent (see my personal finance blog if you want to know why). When I started my diabetes journey, I started doing something similar. I would write down everything I would eat.

I was also hoping to manage my diabetes without medication as much as possible. Yes, I work for a healthcare organization, and yes, I realize there are times that medication is necessary. But I wanted to try to avoid it as long as possible, to see if not only could I do it without, but keep that medication as a reserve for when I was older and really needed it.

I’m really not sure what my diet was like beforehand except it wasn’t working. I was bringing lunch to work every day, usually a can of soup and some white rice, or for awhile, a bagel. But knowing that I had to cut back on carbohydrates, it was time for changes. I switched to only brown rice, and for lunch I’d have some low sugar dry cereal. Breakfast would vary, but was sometimes also cereal, sometimes cheese sticks, sometimes left overs from the night before. Lots of ground turkey or chicken would substitute for pork or beef. And eventually, as much as it displeased me, I basically gave up rice altogether (which, for someone of Japanese and Okinawan ethnicity, is about as tough as any change).

I got one diabetic recipe book–my friend in Rochester who was also diabetic told me that if you got one, you had them all, really, and to try to get the most for my money, I got one with 500 recipes, thinking if 5% of the recipes were actually decent, I’d have 25 things I could eat. If I got a book with 50 recipes, it’d only be 2.5!

I also got into a daily routine of taking a fasting blood sugar, weight, and blood pressure when I got up and entering them into the food journal. I did this six days a week (Wednesday, which is the morning after my really long day–I work two jobs–was my “day off”). I’d also build in some stretching and weight lifting into the equation–I was already doing some of that–and tried to keep track of how I was progressing.

Things were going pretty well. My sugars were down–my first post-diagnosis hemoglobin a1c rating was well within normal range. I wasn’t on any diabetes medications, although they did put me on a statin and an ACE inhibitor (once they found the correct one–the first one gave me chest pain for the first time in my life!). And my weight was coming down.

According to Dr. Pek’s scale, at my peak I was 272 pounds; my scale at home read 265 (of course, I was fully clothed and shoed at the physician’s office, and only in cycling shorts at home). I’m not sure where those old journals are now, but my personal blog tells me that on September 26th, 2005, I was about 210 pounds. That, of course, is about 3.5 years after this journey began.

It wasn’t all easy, though. Sometimes my blood sugars spiked–at one point my a1c, which the lab I deal with originally considered normal at 6.5, then 6.1, reached 8.1 (my first post diagnosis result was 5.7). I eventually got put on a couple of diabetic medications, metformin and Actos, and those combined with diet and exercise have me hovering right around 7, which is what the target a1c was set at. Fortunately, I have very decent insurance, so my out of pocket costs were minimal.

The most difficult thing of all for me was when Dr. Pek took a different job in the organization. I needed to get a new physician–I did, Dr. White–but Dr. Pek was pretty tough to follow. Dr. White did his best, but then he also took a different position, so I ended up largely in physician limbo.

All that said, I was doing pretty decently. Weight was coming off. I lost several pants sizes–I went from a 42 waist to a 36 today, although I still prefer a 38 just because it feels more comfortable. I went from wearing extra large shirts to large (some folks think I’d be okay in a medium, but I seriously doubt that). I can’t compete for weight loss with, say, Large Fella on a Bike, but I’m still losing and still doing fine.

Exercise had to fit in somewhere, though. We’ll see where soon.