"What's the best diabetes advice you've ever been given," Kerri asked the other day.

As a health writer, one of the perks of my job is that I get to talk to experts. One of the questions I often ask is, "What is the best advice you'd give someone with diabetes?"

And of all the interviews I have done, I think the best response came from Linda Dale, RN, CDE, Clinical Nurse Specialist in the Outpatient Diabetes Eduction Program at the University of Michigan Comprehensive Diabetes Center. The article was about testing your blood sugar.

"Don’t get nuts over the numbers; knee-jerk reactions simply aren’t healthy," she said. "Readings aren't 'good' or 'bad,' but rather, we’re looking at overall trends. If your numbers are in range, yes that’s a good thing, but if your numbers are high, it doesn’t make you bad. You just need to ask, what can I learn from this? Did I eat something I shouldn’t have? Do I need to exercise more? What can I do better to prevent this from happening in the future."

Then she shared a story: "We had a pilot, who’s type 1, come speak to a children’s group. He started by saying, 'I never test my blood sugar.' People in the audience gasped in horror until he explained. ‘When you test, you either pass or fail, but when you monitor--and I monitor a lot--you're gathering information and making adjustments as needed. It’s not good or bad, pass or fail.’ That’s the way it should be for everyone."

So, when I have days where I'm tempted to label my blood sugar as bad, I remember this story and it helps to take the stress out of it for me. Sometimes I may have done things to make it bad, when I "deserve" the highs or lows that I get. But other days, and I think we all have those days when we get readings we don't expect, it helps to remember that I need to adjust my thinking.