"There’s a problem with Christmas," Charlie blurted out on Wednesday after dinner.

He looked troubled. His face was pink and he hid his eyes from Susanne’s with his forearm as if she was Medusa.

"What’s the problem with Christmas?" Susanne asked.

He shook his head.

"Charlie. Tell me. What’s the problem?"

"I can’t say it," he mumbled, his sleeve stuffed in his mouth like a gag.

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Some years ago, I joined an online "healthy eating forum", expecting support in eating healthy (fresh, whole, medically-appropriate) foods in reasonable amounts -- the same sort of community support one expects from a community in which people are looking to lose or maintain weight. What I found instead was a community of young women in various stages of recovery from eating disorders or disordered eating, or progressing from one type of disordered eating to another.

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Just as hyperglycemia is but the tip of the iceberg when discussing the physical ravages of diabetes, depression is but the most visible diagnosis of how diabetes affects our minds.

I'm not talking about the temporary states of anxiety or paranoia, lassitude or somnolescence, that accompany our glycemic highs and lows, but the long-term, "you should get psychological help for this" effects of living with chronic disease in general, and diabetes in particular.

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At some time during our diabetic self-discovery, we are told that diabetes -- like most chronic illnesses -- is often accompanied by a second "D": depression. Considering the amount of time we need to put into consideration of our diets, exercise, drugs, and doctor visits -- and how much that takes out of what would otherwise be disposable income -- it's hardly surprising. Nor should it come to anyone's surprise that this level of attention to detail often smacks of another mental-health issue: obsessive-compulsive disorder, or OCD. It is considered "normal" -- even encouraged -- for people with diabetes to arrange our lives around our blood glucose levels, logging every single reading, every single milligram of metformin or subunit of insulin, weighing and logging every single morsel of food or fluid that passes our lips, every step of exercise, every moment of every day of our lives. (READ MORE)

There's something that haunts every person who remembers Life Before Diagnosis. We describe it as spontaneity, carelessness, social acceptability, freedom.

What it boils down to are food and money.

For starters, diabetes robs from us the ability to "just" eat when we are hungry, not-eat when we're not, and not have to weigh, measure, and log every morsel that passes our lips. Then, it robs from us the (admittedly ill-advised) pleasures of the occasional ice-cream sundae or wolfing down half a pizza pie. And because we can't be certain of the foods that we don't prepare ourselves, it robs us of the ability to eat at friends' and relatives' homes, or even casual-dining restaurants.

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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.

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