Why Diabetes is The Best Thing That Ever Happened To Me

Diabetes: Curse or Blessing?

Life throws stuff our way. Some of it is good, an we call it a blessing, other is bad, and we call it a curse. The perspective we pick makes all the difference in terms of how we get to live with that ‘stuff’. I

n my case, type 1 diabetes could have easily fallen in the ‘curse’ bucket: who wants a life made of needles, blood glucose monitors stuck on their bodies, and of constant alert of hypoglycaemia? And all of that, without even knowing what actually causes diabetes…adding insult to injury, as it seems!

However, since day 1, I reframed diabetes as the immense blessing that it proved itself to be. So far, the benefits that resulted from it outweigh the struggles by a million. Let me explain in the next couple of lines.

Blessing 1: Understanding The Importance of Good Food and Nutrition

Well, I had no alternative, hadn’t I?

If I had to name the one, most impactful aspect that improved my health (read: my life) as a consequence of having diabetes is understanding that difference between a good life quality and a poor one really comes down to what one eats.

And I’ve been on both sides of the story: during my first years with diabetes in high schools I regularly ate the kinds of food you eat when you’re a teenager hanging out with friends. Kebabs, fries, hotdogs, pizzas and the likes were the main course most days. I was not even intentionally avoiding fruits and vegetables, since they were not on my radar at all! Food was just food, everything went into the mix, the good and the bad (mostly the bad).

Moreover, I was only measuring my blood glucose 4-5 times a day, I was completely blind to its ups and downs. One could mistakenly conclude that health status is perfect because the glycemic index is 120 if one doesn’t know that it was at 300 for the four hours before the measurement.

This has changed thanks to Continuous Glucose Monitors (CGM): I can now witness the glucose evolution in my blood in real time. Starting to develop some awareness around the effects produced by the various types of foods I ate simply compounded the benefits of these devices. The detriment of junk food became so evident and exposed that ditching it was just the logical next step. No more fries, kebabs, hotdogs. Not good, not needed.

Blessing 2: Finding Joy in Eating What I Love and What is Good

“But you got to let yourself enjoy some pleasures from time to time! Let it go a bit man! A pizza or some fries won’t kill you!”, one may object. Indeed, it is the case that when a person’s dietary landscape only includes highly palatable junk food, avoiding them looks like a tragedy and no less than a life deprived of any pleasure.

That was surely my case at the beginning.

But luckily we do change! Once I saw the harm of junk food and the benefits of whole foods, I could start to make some informed decisions, and at least try to eat more of the latter and less of the former, without forcing it.
As a result, my tastebuds changed, so as my food preferences.

In one year time, ‘I’ll try to eat one less kebab this week’ became ‘today I’ll have a chickpea salad for lunch!’.

Now I simply love eating what I eat because I know is good for me, and have no problem ignoring what is not. My inner dialogue for choosing chickpeas over a pizza went from ‘oh I really wish I could eat that pizza but I have to stick to an healthy diet because the doctor says so, so I’ll have to make this sacrifice…but that pizza…oh, what a sad life’ to ‘pizza is fine, I can have a slice. In any case, I love chickpeas (or fruits, or potatoes, or any other whole food), so I’ll default to those. Plus, they’re super healthy. Two birds with one stone!”. From impossible task and inhumane effort to default behaviour: that chickpea salad has been a staple of mine ever since, and I simply do not crave nor seek its former unhealthy alternative.

Eating by default what in the past I had to force myself to eat was a gradual process, it took time, but it happened quite naturally. It’s been all facilitated by an increasing understanding of the impact of food on my health: developing the necessary awareness to discern what harms me from what propels me forward made this transition almost effortless.

Blessing 3: Falling in Love with Physical Activity

Despite my early concerns that any physical exertion would be impossible with type 1 diabetes, that I could never enjoy a run anymore or a simple stroll, I quickly figured that it was all nonsense. In fact, diabetes made me a fitness lover. For the past 7 years, literally no day has gone by without a workout, be it endurance/cardio or strength or other creative movement practices.

Once again, I started from nothing: nothing more strenuous than walking up the stairs during my early high-school years. Then I got diabetes. And I quickly picked up that staying active could be a nice fun little tool to deploy for my good health. So I started with 5 to 10 minutes simple workouts before dinner, after a day of studying. Then it became 20 minutes, then 30, then 1 hour. Now I don’t even bother counting the minutes, I just take every chance I have to move during the day. Besides working out and running, I walk or bike instead of taking the bus, I take the stairs instead of the elevator, I stand instead of sitting.

I bet you’ve heard all these things too. And like me, you probably ignored them for a very long time.
But once again, diabetes to the rescue! It kindly (or not so kindly!) nudged me towards these very needed lifestyle changes, which are now effortless and default behaviours that are simply part of who I am. Not doing them is simply not an option anymore. As a result, I am happier, I feel and am healthier, and I am surely leaner than I was, which is a well welcomed side effect for me.

I went from couch-potato with zero exercise to genuine lover of running, strength and movement training. Most importantly, I simply value a life lived actively: waling instead of driving, standing instead of sitting…start small!

Blessing 4: The Power of Sharing

Lastly, I realised how important sharing one’s experience is. To my partial regret, this epiphany came fairly recently, from a personal need: training for endurance sports, I needed to find out how other diabetics were doing it. What and how do they eat? What devices do they use? What struggles to they face? I searched, but I found very little. Additionally, I have been consuming (and applying) so much knowledge and information about nutrition and exercise that I started to gather some personal evidence for the stuff I go rumbling about. As I experiment on my health trying to optimise it, I often find myself discussing successes and failures with my parents, relatives and friends.

After all, I think, not everyone has to have a CGM stuck on their body, so not everyone has a real-time view on things as what eating this instead of that does to your body, your mental and physical energy. Or how beneficial going for a walk most days of the week can be. Etcetera, etcetera. Nor everyone has the interest to spend their free time studying and reading about the science of nutrition and fitness, and then apply that knowledge, and then even report on it. And understandingly so!

But I was blessed with type 1 diabetes, and blessed with the curiosity of exploring it, understanding it, and befriending it.
So why not share the stuff I discover along the way?
Why not make it transparent and accessible to others that can’t or don’t want to go through the same as me?
Why not make it quicker for others to bring about a health improvement that took me months or years to identify? Why not just create a small piece of writing, an opportunity for me to reflect on my attempts to enhance my longterm health?
Why not create a place for others to find out what these attempts resulted in?

Sharing is caring, and this blog is for me a vehicle of care for other fellow human beings.

Type 1 diabetes can be seen as a curse or a blessing. As I claimed at the beginning, it is all a matter of perspective, and the perspective we choose determines the type of life we get to live.
We can accept what life throws at us and make the most of it, or try to resist it and hope for as less suffering as possible in the struggle.
I chose to accept diabetes as an ally and a friend. And what an amazing friendship so far!

If you made it this far, thanks for reading! What challenges are you currently facing? And are you embracing them or resisting them? I’d love to know in the comments!