What’s Been Happening, Part 2. Finding Health Through the Diabetes

Jet Nialle, LMT CMLDT EPC

I left off from the last blog post about my surgery and starting on working out more to help aid healing. But we will get back to this (the exercising part) in a bit. At this moment, I would love to talk about one of my favorite things!!!

Food and eating.

As I was recovering from the surgery, I allowed myself to find a new pattern in my eating. At this point, I was still very much in the mindset that I’m going to get sick everyday, which can be a very difficult thing to live with. But the more things I ate, the more things I found left me feeling fine, which was a complete opposite of what I was feeling beforehand. As I experimented, I did find things I still wasn’t able to eat.. However, what my stomach was allowing me was much, much more. I was very nearly blissful!

None of which helped my blood sugar, to be honest. However, getting that lab result back got me to thinking that this is really something that I want to change. And at this point, now that my body isn’t fighting me with every meal, it may be time to change some habits for the better.

Better food for a better me.

First and foremost lets start with that I am not a nutritionist by any means. I’ve taken several nutrition classes and know the basics of things, but that’s pretty much it. What I did was I started to trade out the things that aren’t as nutrient dense and changed them out with veggies. One or two things as first. And there were plenty of times I let those veggies become less than optimal… (Yes, they went bad and had to be tossed to the places that bad veggies go.) However, the more that I ate more veggies, the better I felt and the more veggies I ate… Which allowed me more energy for the other thing… exercise.

Exercising my right… to a better me.

All of this food stuff happened over a course of 5ish months. Which seems like a long time and yet no time at all thinking back on it. While I was trying out all of my favorite foods and figuring out my needs to eating better, I was also continuing my cardio journey. I had enjoyed the Supernatural App on my Oculus before the surgery, and was having a great time exploring workouts within the app. Now mind you, I started very slowly post surgery, as in I was sitting down instead of standing up along with some other modifications to what I was doing. I didn’t want to hurt myself right after major surgery. But the further I got into my healing process, the more I tested my own limits on what I could and could not do. Increase intensity one day, decrease it for the next few after that. And as that 3 month mark of full healing came, I steadily increased the days I did a medium intensity workout. Which was feeling good. And then I worked with increasing and decreasing my times.

But there was one thing that was still aggrivated….. My hip hurt like it’s hurt for at least 7-8 years. And the research began. Trying to find something that could help this problem without going to PT, because I just didn’t seem to get anywhere the last time I did physical therepy. And then I recalled that I had friends who went into a yoga program and I thought “I should try that.”

I signed up for the free trial… and found out that I started to feel slightly better within my first week!!! I was very excited. And so since that time, I have been doing both exercise at least 4-5 days a week.

How does this whole thing tie in to the Diabetes?????

I’m very glad you asked this! If you have diabetes, you know that most doctors like to put you on some kind of insulin to help get your numbers lower. I myself did not wish to be on medication due to side effects. And so my option is to change my diet and exercise. Which, if you guessed correctly, I only really started doing in the last 6 months.

Since changing the diet along with doing the exercise, has started to change. My daily numbers are lower in general.. Even though my body is still definitely affected by carb and sugar. I do get spikes when I eat a high carb meal. That being said, as I continue to do the things I have started these last few months, I expect that do affect me less…….

As always, stay tuned here for more updates…. for life is always quite the journey…..