I got a bit of flak from a number of folk in the type 1 community for juxtaposing the You Can Do This project with the "you CAN eat this if you have diabetes" mentality of, well, many of the same folk. The issue is, the same folk who are, on the one hand, encouraging us to test and inject and correct are the folk who are talking about Food Police and Diabetes Police and how we, as people with diabetes, have to fight against those stereotypes by -- well, by eating all those things we should never touch with a ten-foot-pole.

This may work for people with type 1 diabetes, but it can be deadly for those of us with type 2.

The bottom line is that many of us with diabetes have a conflicted relationship with food to begin with. For those with type 1, the relationship often becomes skewed because of diabetes, while for many of us with type 2, the diabetes often occurs because of (or in association with) an already-conflicted relationship with food. We may eat too much because of our culture or our living and working conditions, or we may eat the wrong things because of our culture, our budget, or our living and working conditions. Taming the Type 2 Monster often requires wholesale changes to our diet -- called ILM (Intensive Lifestyle Management) therapy. It is not cheap, and it requires learning new habits as well as new recipes. Some of us do well with it for a while, others are able to keep at it longer. The majority of folk, though, never manage to succeed at it.

Part of the reason for this is that there are as many different "diabetic diets" as there are types of diabetes, and -- just like the oral medications that are the first line of therapy for type 2 diabetes -- without isolating the particular variety of type 2 diabetes a person has (and I'm pretty sure there are at least three or four distinct varieties, none of which modern medicine recognizes as such), it is easy to prescribe the wrong diet for that person. It is also possible to prescribe the wrong diet for any person, diabetic or not. And once comorbid conditions come into the loop -- of which hypertension and high cholesterol are the most common companions of type 2 diabetes -- further changes and restrictions must apply.

But that isn't the whole story. Along with the budget and availability issues that constrict many of our diet choices, our version of the Food Police is the inverse of what many people with type 1 diabetes rail against: "Just a taste won't hurt you", "But this is a special occasion", "You only see us once in a while; you can eat rabbit food when you're not with us", "We're not going to eat rabbit food, and you are going to eat whatever we're eating". Excuse me but yes, a taste can hurt us: it can cause us to go high so that when food is finally served, we have to either refuse it and not eat at all (screwing up our metabolisms even further) or we must Eat While High. Diabetes doesn't understand or respect special occasions, holidays, or family traditions: we need to watch our diet (and our numbers) regardless of whether our best friend is getting married or our religion says we must feast (or fast).

We don't have the Food Police -- we have the Food Pushers and the Obesity Enablers. And sometimes it seems as if the worst offenders are the folk in our own community.

Now here's the deal: for me, the safest way to maintain a restricted diet is to set it up in isolation and to remain in isolation. This is how I was able to get much of my health under control when I was first diagnosed. It was not without familial stress, but I managed to figure out a plan which worked for me. It worked as long as I was in control of my own food, and -- to a lesser extent -- the food in the household. It worked as long as I never ate out, never ate at (or with) friends, and as long as I cooked for one person only (or one person at a time). Yes, it was the obsessive part of obsessive-compulsive, and yes, I was in a lot better shape financially (and job-wise) at the time. That's still no excuse for me now: Diabetes and hypertension brook no excuses.

But on the flip side, if I've slipped and fallen so far off the wagon that it's a mile or more in front of me, money is tight, and/or I'm dealing with multiple levels of stress, the other side of disordered eating comes into play and I fall into the bingeing and constantly-grazing modes, eating the wrong things, in the wrong quantities, at the wrong times. Often this puts me into further isolation, afraid that people will see that I've slipped, and paradoxically putting me in a position for those who I need to support my eating correctly to be less likely to take my efforts seriously.

Right now I'm in the downside of the curve, stressed about everything from making the rent to not getting enough sleep (especially when The Other Half is up to all hours of the morning and my schedule is so topsy-turvy that I can't fall asleep early enough for my early mornings, and I can't sleep late enough to make up for them on my late ones). And because my slip-sides have included large quantities of all of that high-sodium, high-fat, high-calorie, low-nutrient-density stuff that is inexpensive, readily available, and displaces healthy food in the marketplace, when I fall, I fall hard. Hearing "I can eat cheesecake" (or any of those I-should-never-touch-them items), with the implication that we can, we should, and we should tell the "You have diabetes, you can't eat this!" crowd to go somewhere they'll be terrorized, feeds that dark side even more.