So there's been a lot of talk around Blogbetes lately about logging. Why we do it, how we do it, what tools we use to do it. I have a confession to make: I haven't logged in a very long time. Frankly, I'm afraid to.

It's weird because I actually like to have my logs around. More than two years ago, shortly after I was diagnosed with type 2 diabetes, my certified diabetes educator gave me some papers that looked like they had been copied for the last 100 years. I tried to make my life fit into these log sheets, but it just wasn't going to happen. So I created my own complete with a box for what I ate at breakfast, lunch and dinner; a spot to record what I had for a snack; and rectangular openings for fastings and post-meal numbers. I even modified it when I started Novolog to include a place for pre-meal numbers and how much fast-acting insulin I took for that meal. I was pretty proud of these log sheets, and even my CDE thought they were pretty snazzy.

I was quite diligent about writing down most of what I ate and my numbers. And then I guess the practice got old; no one was asking to see them anymore so I felt like I didn't need them. However, there have been a number of times that I've eaten something and gotten a two-hour post prandial reading that I wasn't expecting and was able to go back through old log sheets to determine what happened another time I had the same meal or snack. You can't do that if you're not logging, though.

I have tried a number of things to motivate myself to log again: snazzy pens (I'm a pen freak), different colored pens (love pink pens!), using nice hand-writing, being very specific in my logs, being very general in my logs and on and on and on. It seems like I can stick with it for a day or two and then I quickly abandon it.

Part of the reason, I think, that I have stopped logging in the past is that I often start logging when I have a renewed sense of doing diabetes right. And then when I fall off the wagon, I lose the ability to log.

So that fear I talked about a second ago is the fear of logging=Michelle going downhill fast. That a=b and b=c so a=c syndrome.

I was looking in my new diabetes supply bag last night at dinner and I spied the old logs that I've kept in my bag sort of 'just because.' I sort of wished that I had been keeping those up. I didn't want to wreck the good thing I have going, though, so I bolused for dinner and went on with my evening.

I like the visual reminder, though, of how I'm doing. Such a sticky place to be.