When I gather my team to support my diabetes, i will give each one of them a job. Example: “Will you check my feet every night before bedtime, using a flashlight?” or “Will you text me on Saturday mornings to ask how many times did i exercise this week?” or “Did you eat one vegetable serving at dinner every day?”
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You are saying that the decision to improve one’s diet and to engage in exercise result in causing MOST TO DEVELOP A MENTAL HEALTH ISSUE?!!! So it’s better to eat a poor diet and avoid exercise? It makes absolutely no sense.
Of course, it takes determination to follow a healthy diet in this day and age with all the temptations around us. And it’s far easier for all of us to flop on the sofa instead of going for a walk. But once a habit is established and with the added result of better health and feeling great, it becomes routine…like getting up at a certain hour, showering, brushing one’s teeth, leaving the house at a certain time etc…
I think you should perhaps see a psychologist to help you sort out these ideas of equating poor diet and little exercise with better mental health.
If you are a Type 2 diabetic, you can even beat the condition. If you are overweight, you will not only feel better physically AND MENTALLY through establishing the habit of eating well and getting fit but you will feel better about how you look. Even Dr Phil says that our self worth is wrapped up in how we feel about our appearance.
Think VEGGIES as the centre of your meal with a bit of protein and probably little to no rice, potato or bread…and just by eating 6 - 10 veggie servings per day, you will crowd out any nasty beige foods on your plate. When meal planning, think vegetables first…and then what accompanies them second (meat, potatoes etc…). You can even establish the habit of going for a walk after dinner to control cravings instead of looking for something sweet (which should not even be in the house).
You can’t say that including a good walk every day and a diet of mainly beautiful, jewel coloured vegetables is going to cause a mental illness. On the contrary. Putting a regime in place and sticking to it for 6 weeks makes it become a habit. You will look healthy and radiant and feel energized and with a pep in your step. And that will be motivation in itself, to stick to the habit.
I believe you may have misinterpreted my post. I’m certainly not claiming that the decision to diet and engage in exercise leads to the development of a mental health issue.
In fact, the core of this post has nothing really to do with exercising and eating specifically, but rather the challenges between managing mental heath and managing diabetes. Obviously, exercise and diet play an important role in that; however, exercise and diet are only one part of a healthy life and also are only one part of managing diabetes.
I do actually agree developing habits is an important and valuable tool with regards to this, but also I think unintentionallyyou’ve almost re-enforced the point I was trying to make.
There is sometimes, I believe, an dangerous discourse around health, that in fact all you have to do is stick to a healthy diet and exercise regularly, and somehow this will fix any problems. This applies across health broadly, but I’d say it’s pertinent to discussions around diabetes care.
Although there is some truth to that point, a healthy diet and exercise do demonstrably improve health, it also raises a problem of what happens if you are following these steps and are still unable to achieve your health goals. I think this type of discourse is part of the problem, that can cause such frustration and mental anguish at times with balancing managing glucose and life.
In fact, often I struggle to keep my blood glucose in line the most when I exercise, as it throws a number of extra variables into the equation.
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My husband who has been a diabetic for over 50 years:
Goes to bed at the same time each nite. Rises the same time each day.
Takes his 18 pills per day.
Goes to all doctor’s apt. Tries to follow doctor’s orders.
Plays the cards he has been dealt. His mantra.
Goes to cardiac rehab twice a week.
Is outside working on his old car as much as possible. Mows. Plows snow etc. whatever he is able to do. No shoveling. No raking.
Would rather talk to someone about themselves rather than himself.
I count his carbs and tell him what they are and make his meals for him. Low salt. No fried foods. Pizza. Ice Cream. Little treat each day. Popcorn and yogurt with fruit and maybe a slice of my homemade berry and whole wheat bread are popular choices. Not all in one day.
Any road blocks we tackle them together.
Tests his blood sugar many times a day.
Does the best he can and tries to enjoy each day.
Diet, exercise, testing blood sugars are all super important and critical but being who you are and enjoying the day is what is best for good mental health.
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Hi Donman90, I am not at all sure if I am responding to your post at all, but I will tell you what bothers my mental health the most. I have been a type 1 for 60 yrs and during the past 20 yrs have kept a nondiabetic A1c, so under 5.7.
I have read extensively about how to treat diet and diabetes for years and so many well educated, bright doctors and scientists have disagreed about how to stay healthy living with diabetes. I loved the The Bernstein diet, except for the need to eat meat, and stayed on it for 11 yrs until my body rebelled. Many, many diabetics can eat this way and do very, very well. Unfortunately I couldn’t.
I switched to a strict low fat vegan diet on which I seem to be doing very well, but it has only been 3 yrs. Healthy plant based non processed carbs don’t hurt diabetics. Very
low fat plants and vegetables greatly reduce insulin resistance.
There are endless arguments about whether fat is good or bad for us. They are no, as of yet, any clear answers. All one has to do is read experts on opposite sides of this battle. Then also read the criticisms of their books.
I am so tired of the arguing. I wish there were firm answers to some of these diet questions. I would rest easier if we had some firm answers as to whether cholesterol numbers are important. I have read that 1/2 of people who die from heart attacks have normal cholesterol numbers. Of course who can be sure that the statistics I read are correct.
This all hurts my anxiety levels, because no one is really sure about anything. I would really like some well researched answers with years of studies, not just 5 yrs, to back them up. So many questions but so few long term studies. Is a 4.5 A1c actually better than an A1c under 7 or is 7 ok? Is a small glass of red wine daily going to hurt anyone?
We are living in exciting times, I just wish we knew more true answers. I think we are all now sure that smoking is bad, but think about how very many years it took to find that out for sure. I won’t even talk about all of the coverups.
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Thanks for sharing @Marilyn6. I can definitely emphasise with most of your post. I tried the Bernstein diet for awhile, and that was I think when I really suffered from anxiety the worst. I had pretty good numbers but my cholesterol tripled a long with some other strange side effects, so in the end I went to a more moderate diet focused mostly on lots of vegetables and healthy carbohydrates. But I would be lying if I said I don’t occasionally have a cheeseburger still, or a piece of pizza.
I think I’ve found a happy medium for now, I suppose in the end we can only find truth in what works best for us, at some level.
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Unfortunately for us, we must make dietary choices without the definitive studies to back them up. I believe those studies will come but long after we’re gone.
In the meantime, we have to trust how we feel and make the best judgment for us. I’ve concluded that cholesterol is only associated with heart disease and no causal relationship exists.
I keep coming back to the study done in an elderly population that measured longevity against cholesterol. Longevity, it turns out, is inversely related to cholesterol levels. Those with the highest levels lived the longest and those with the lowest levels died first.
I also don’t buy the diet-heart hypothesis that claims that dietary fat causes heart disease. Triglyceride (dietary fat) formation is driven by carbohydrate consumption. Now, maybe it is the processed carbohydrates that do the most damage in this regard. I find it hard to believe that natural whole foods can really be bad for you.
In the years we have left, I don’t think we will enjoy the comfort of dietary certainty. Instead we just need to do the best we can with what we know now.
I know you vigorously exercise most days. Do you practice any contemplative habits? Do you meditate, sing, pray, or play a musical instrument? Or perhaps you commune with nature and just close your eyes and listen to the forest or seashore around you. I’ve found that fasting can engage the contemplative nature in me.
I find that meditating tamps down my natural inclination toward a “fight or flight” sympathetic nervous system dominance and makes some room for the restorative “rest and digest” parasympathetic experience. There’s real healing power in this side of our nature and I think it’s wise to make room for these practices on a daily basis.
Sorry if I’m going “woo-woo” on you but I think this perspective has helped me a lot in the last year since my heart disease diagnosis. We each have an incredible power to heal ourselves if we just allow it to happen.
@Marilyn6 and @Terry4 While I’m also in the camp that believes healthy dietary fats compliment good health, I’m not naive enough to think that it’s the only or best diet option available.
People and their diet options are similar to cars: Some cars run on gasoline, some on diesel, and others are electric powered. The same way people can choose which of the food substrates they wish to optimize for: Carbs, proteins or fats.
The one thing they share is there are healthy and unhealthy versions of each!
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It is all such a mystery. Like you my triglycerides are low. I am eating almost 10 times as many healthy carbs as you do but my trigs which were in the 30’s eating 30 carbs are now in the 60’s eating close to 300 carbs. Higher, yes, but still fairly low.
I did my own extremely small selective study on cholesterol the other day. I was going through a box of my parent’s belongings. My dad died of a leaky heart valve which he was born with and my mom died 4 months later from a broken heart and the lack of will to live. They had been together for close to 70 yrs. I also had lists of their prescription meds. Neither of my parents were taking statins or any kind of heart meds and they both had quite low cholesterol. They both lived until they were just short of 90. I was almost certain my mom had to have had high cholesterol because I know she did when she was my age, but hers was now quite low.
Now for the woo woo stuff.
When at our beach house we see and hear the ocean from our windows. We love it. We helped design and build our other house which is a strawbale on 5 acres in the woods. We are almost always surrounded by nature. I was a long time spiritual director and spent years meditating. I consider myself an artistic contemplative.
My life in the past decade before the stents had been extremely stressful. Meditation helped but couldn’t protect me from the extreme harshness of life. Cardiologist say that my diabetes and low carb diet caused my need for stents, I think it was partly due to extreme stress. Raising a severely bipolar only child who also has full blown Tourette’s syndrome was not a walk in the park. He was so ill and I found the doctors and educators so lacking that we never sent him to school but kept him with us. With a lot of work I found a couple of doctors, across the nation, who would try to help us. We couldn’t teach him because he would become violent, but we made everything available to him that we possibly could and he taught himself.
I knew that the little boy who I gave birth to and adored was in there somewhere. By the time he was 18 he sailed though the GEDs. I still kept my A1c in the non diabetic range and I have no idea how I did it. For a time over a decade, our lives were unimaginably horrible.
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And then there are others who seem to run forever on the worst fuel possible! It just doesn’t seem to bother them. I will never understand it.
I wish I were still like that. For the first 57 years of my life I didn’t give much thought to my fuel mix (just accounted for carbs). And then almost overnight it changed … 
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I went through a stressful time over a ten year period as well. It involved a painful termination of 15-year relationship and a legal fight several years later involving an explicit violation of a marital settlement agreement regarding moving my 10-year old daughter 600 miles away from my home.
Your situation seemed more stressful than mine but my experience provides some insight to me. I do think stress is corrosive to our health. I’m glad to read that you are fully tuned into the value of contemplation.
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This is really useful! Thank you for the share