Those who live with type 2 diabetes, and those who have lived with diabetes since before rapid-acting insulins and home glucose monitoring, are familiar with lists of dietary restrictions. If we are diagnosed early enough in life, and our families adopt our diets, there may be little difference between our feelings about "forbidden" foods and those of someone whose diet is mandated by religious observance. For those who are diagnosed later on, the adjustment can be a bit more difficult -- especially if the diet is imposed with a heavy hand and a sharp whip, and if the foods we must now eschew are not replaced by foods which are equally sensorily fulfilling.

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My friend Scott, who has spent enough time on insulin to make my head spin, just vented his frustrations regarding the carb count for a meal of soup and crackers. While I've not had to become quite as precise on carb-counting as those of you on insulin, having to completely rewrite my doctor's office's 1000 mg sodium/day diet (following the flyer they gave me would have had me consuming closer to 2000 mg sodium/day) made me much more sensitive to calculating serving size than the average person with diabetes -- or the average person with hypertension, for that matter.

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Too often, we look at the 7-day, 14-day, and 30-day trends on our blood glucose monitors, see numbers that look great (or horrid), and rather than seeing an A1c that confirms those readings, we get a number that would appear to have come completely out of left field. (Or Mars. Or the Andromeda Galaxy. It's hard to say exactly where.) We can either scratch our heads and wonder why the numbers aren't correlating, or we can take out our manual readings logs, our meter downloads, our CGM downloads, and our personal journals and try to figure "what we are doing wrong".

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Three topics that come up on any diabetes blog or forum, as certain as death and taxes, are blood glucose levels, hemoglobin A1c levels, and guilt. The usual dialog goes like this:

"No matter what I do, I can't get my blood glucose levels to stay within 'normal' non-diabetic levels. This is going to really screw up my A1c, which means more medications, getting yelled at by my doctor and my spouse and my family, not being safe to get pregnant, and all the 'Diabetes Police' coming down on me. If only I had avoided that one jelly donut three weeks ago...!"

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I'm not sure what it is about Lindsey's recent post about how we, as a society, tend to gloss over the daily rituals and worries of diabetes, but I flashed back to the rituals of the Nacirema people, and came to the following conclusion:

Diabetes is a religion.

Or more correctly, diabetes management reflects certain aspects of religious practice.

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While diabetes may affect the way we celebrate our holidays, those holidays should never be about diabetes. Holidays are about family, about G-d, about freedom, about love... not about chronic diseases and disease management.

That being said, I sometimes find the holidays give me greater insight into my diabetes, and ways to deal with it. While changes in diet (rarely good for my numbers!) are certainly a component of most of my religious and family holiday celebrations, when I am "properly introspective" -- that is to say, doing the sort of "soul searching" that one is supposed to do when approaching these holidays -- I find many ways to put myself "at peace" with this condition, and to turn it from a negative into a positive. I believe some Christians refer to this as "giving it up to G-d (or Jesus)"...

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