A Helpful Book
Reading The Complete Diabetes Lifestyle by Donna Kay with Maribeth Stephens brought me back to that moment when I found out I had Type 2 diabetes five years ago. When you don’t have a family history of the disease, you don’t really know much about it. Your mind starts racing. In my case, when my eye doctor suggested my cataracts at age 48 might be from diabetes, I walked out of his office on a cold but sunny winter day and burst into tears.
Donna Kay had similar thoughts — I’m too young. My family doesn’t have diabetes. Why me? — which she has written about in her excellent primer book for diabetics. Newly diagnosed diabetics, especially those without any in-family experience, are looking for information, first and foremost, and The Complete Diabetes Lifestyle provides a ton of good basic information.
The authors understand the frustration, the bouts of denial, the anger and the moments of depression that hit all of us when we find out we have something incurable. But at the crux of diabetes information is the realization that it is a condition that can be controlled, and that you are the person in charge of your diabetes care. Your doctors can help you with the medical side, but you need to get you mind wrapped around the head game. You are the one that has to take charge.
This book gives you some good tips to how to gain control and keep control. Right on pg. 29 is information I would have killed for early on in my diagnosis, about the “Dawn Effect,” the body’s way of getting you moving in the morning by pumping up your glucose levels. This book gave me additional information about the various hormones that are released as you sleep that can fuel insulin resistance. I couldn’t understand why I went to bed with a 90 reading on my glucose meter and woke up with a reading of 125. I still tend to be a little high in the morning but at least I know why it’s happening.
The Complete Diabetes Lifestyle also has sound advice on keeping good records of your blood glucose, exercise and food, and the relationship between all three. The glycemic index — it’s in here, with a great explanation of how food affects our blood sugar.
I found this book so chock full of sound advise, easy to digest, I’m planning to pass it along to a friend, who was just diagnosed in the past few months with Type 2. I guess that’s the best endorsement I can give about this book. For more info, check out this Web site.