I haven’t posted about this yet, because
a) I’ve been too busy being sick and with knee pain
b)I haven’t formed an opinion.
Anyway, both diseases disgust me today. Today I’m going to be judgmental and angry with people who are taking their health and trashing it by not eating and exercising to their advantage.
I do have an opinion about this though.
A lot of people look at me and assume I got here because I don’t care about myself, and that I got here because I wanted to.
That’s not really true.
And there are plenty of skinny Type 2 diabetics out there.
I think it is wrong for people to stamitize diabetes. It’s a disease. People don’t choose to get it. They even often don’t choose NOT to get it — sounds weird, but people assume just diet and exercise will do it. It’s not that easy.
As I said, there are plenty of active, thin people with diabetes. I have a friend who is a principal at one of our schools that exercises every day, eats right, has never little excess body fat, but takes 3 different types of oral medications daily.
I also have friends that are very overweight, have been for years, and yet they don’t have diabetes at all.
Even if someone is over weight, it’s often something that the individual has no control over. For years, I exercised every day, dieted, and did everything I could think up. Only one problem. I was only sleeping a few hours a night and had sleep apnea (from a broken jaw, not from being overweight). I kept gaining weight, and once the sleep problems were solved, I started losing weight.
Educating people is a good thing. When a student observes me testing my blood and says — “oh, my grandmother (or other relative) tests her blood like that”. My response is: Make sure you get screened for diabetes every year, since you have a relative, it is more likely you’ll become diabetic someday.
Just make sure you are giving correct facts and you are not adding to the stigmas!