At the end of May 2022, a routine blood test (my parents were insisting that I had one done) discovered that my HbA1c was over 7%. In other words: I’m diabetic.
It came as a surprise because I didn’t feel particularly bad. To me there had been no change in my system over the previous months. I was very overweight and didn’t necessarily eat very well (too much sugary stuff), but I didn’t feel like anything was off in my body.
I had some experience with diabetes because one of my cats, Fleas, had been diagnosed with diabetes several years earlier. It was bad enough that he couldn’t climb the stairs anymore without being out of breath. At the time, the vet had prescribed daily insulin injections. At first small ones, then gradually larger ones. It hadn’t made sense to me to blindly inject massive amounts of insulin into my cat, so I had started looking around to learn about cat diabetes and how to to treat it. I eventually found a great community of diabetic cat owners who were implementing the tight regulation protocol developed by Dr Hodgkins. That method made sense to me and the community was very supportive. After 3 weeks my cat was freely moving around again, and in 2 months I had stopped insulin injections completely and he was back on his normal food.
So knowing that, learning I had diabetes was more of a challenge than a disaster. Also I’m an engineer. So if you tell me something is broken, I start thinking how to fix it. Before I saw my GP to discuss the test results, we had switched into action: diet change, exercise, tracking.
The good news was that I didn’t need insulin injections. My diabetes was caught early enough to be manageable with other medication. But to me that wasn’t the solution: I didn’t want to spend my life with medication, I wanted to manage it through diet. I knew it was possible, so that became the long term aim.
That was the start of my journey through life with diabeties. This is that journey that we’ll relate here.
