These changes I wrote about recentlyare going pretty well. I'm choosing better foods to eat, only having human sized portions, and even cutting back on the soda.

I cannot believe I just typed that.

Soda. Diet soda is a vice I am not ready to give up entirely. I love soda in almost any flavor as long as it's diet odds are I'll like it.

But I drink a lot of soda. Way too much to be honest. And although diet soda doesn't seem to affect my blood glucose levels, the salt in it is not good.

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From deep in the throes of pre-Passover cleaning and shopping, old questions are renewed and new ones added to the litany.

As part of the seder (ritual Passover dinner), a child makes four observations, called Ma Nishtanah, starting with the question, "Why is this night different from any other night of the year?" He goes on to ask about the foods and rituals of the seder, leading the group into the maggid, or story, of the Israelites' Exodus from Egypt.

My questions may be more secular in nature, and may change from year to year, but they are no less perplexing to someone who was not brought up in a Kosher home, and whose sympathies lie with those of us whose lifestyles are dictated -- at least to a certain degree -- by our personal health.

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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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When friends in one of my Pagan communities talk about disclosing their religion to others, they borrow a metaphor from our LBGT friends: they "come out of the broom closet". It's kind of appropriate, considering that many are Wiccan and that witches are associated with brooms in both folklore and practice. When we disclose our diabetes to someone, we may talk about "coming out of the insulin closet". I'm not sure the modifier is appropriate for those of us who have type 2 diabetes and who don't (yet) require exogenous insulin. Still, "coming out of the diabetes closet" doesn't have the same sort of "ring" to it...

I've been open about my diagnosis (hard not to be when you're blogging on a major diabetes site!) for long enough that my original migration from denial to the "closet", and gradually stepping out to the degree to which I'm open about it now is beginning to get fuzzy.

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