Pay No Attention To The Man Behind The Curtain . . .

This post will bore you to tears - do yourself a favor and skip it.

I just need to record some things so I don't forget.

I am taking on the task of cooking low-carb safe meals that the kids will not balk at. It's a balancing act . . . finding low carb things, and adding just enough OTHER things that everyone can feel like they had a full meal.

Since hub has lost about 85 pounds now on Atkins, I am trying my very best to continue to support that, and with my diabetes, well, low carb is really good for me too.

BUT . . . we have two kids in the house that need a little variety, so . . . . I have been experimenting with meal combinations that work for all four of us. When something works well, I want a place to record it. And this is it.

AND . . . if you have read this far AND you are doing low carb AND you have kids AND you have recipes/meal plans that seem to go over, please do let me know.

Low Carb Dinners That The Kids Seemed To Like:
Kielbasa/Pineapple/Onion Skewers - grilled, w/light BBQ sauce
Watermelon
Adamame (steamed, safe for all)
Sticky Rice (steamed, for kids, not us)
Cole Slaw (ok, kids didn't eat this, but it was good. no sugar, Hellman's mayo cut and sweetened with Minute Maid diet Orange drink, Splenda sweetened sweet relish with poppy seeds)

Meatloaf (Hunt's Meatloaf, recipe on the can. Mixture of beef and pork. Used oatmeal instead of breadcrumbs to cut the carbs and minimize the glycemic impact.)
Blue Lake green beans (cooked the beJeezus out of these with Kitchen Gourmet)
Buttered Egg Noodles (for kids, not us)
Cole Slaw (again, we liked this, kids didn't)

The numbers game

"So, Rita, how you feeling these days?"

That's the terms that my friends use these days to ask about my diabetes. I never know how much of an answer to give. "Fine" seems trite, but a more detailed explanation, like "Well, my A1C number is higher than my doctor would like, but I am on a combination of meds, which initially didn't have much effect, so now I am sticking to a under 20 grams per day carb plan plus meds, which seems to be helping a bit" causes people's faces to freeze into polite, but faraway stares, eyes glazed over.

So, it's better to just say, "Fine, thanks!" So I do.

The truth is, I am learning to live with it. I have made some progress:

• I don't cringe and feel like I am losing consciousness when I prick my finger anymore, which is a relief.
• I am not plagued with panic about how long I will stay healthy anymore. The thoughts of possibly having to inject insulin in the near future don't feel as much like a death sentence as they did back in September, when I was first diagnosed.
• I have managed to kick the bread/sugar/rice/pasta/potato habit and most (not all) of the resentment that went along with it. The numbers on the scale were never enough of an incentive, but for some reason, the fear of the blood monitor flashing a high number at me is enough to keep me on the straight and narrow, something I have never been able to do in the past.
• The magic number is 125. More days than not, I am at or under that.
• The numbers on the scale are slowly going down, but they no longer matter to me. Neither does the incentive/punishment of fitting or not fitting into certain clothes, looking or not looking like a certain person, or any of the hundreds of other things I used to entice/torture/bribe/withhold from myself in an effort to forcibly change my ingrained bad habits. Outward appearance used to be my sole focus; I spent alot of time and effort on worrying about how I looked, or didn't look, or should look. I never considered or cared about the toll that was being exacted on my health. That seems to have all slipped away. The only thing that matters now is preserving my life.

Despite all of these epiphanies, I still have several "areas for growth" (that's Human Resources politically correct terminology for things that I am still fucking up):

• I don't exercise nearly enough. For diabetics, exercise is crucial to keep your sugar levels straight. For some reason, that hasn't clicked in my head yet.
• I don't drink nearly enough water. Never have, still don't.
• I only test my blood sugar level in the mornings. I really should test through the day. I don't.
• I don't eat three meals and three snacks a day. The Diabetic Association frowns upon that, and me, probably. But truth is, I threw their diet in the garbage after the first month.
• I still lean heavily on "mock" foods, like diet candy, diet soda, and other stuff that lets me fool myself into thinking that I can still eat junk. I should kick those, too, even if they are supposedly "legal". It's probably as risky as an alcoholic drinking "near beer". It feels like its just a small step back onto the real stuff. That would kill me.
• I haven't done anything to decrease my level of stress, another big important thing for people living with diabetes. I don't know how.
• I have put off going back to the doctor to have a new A1C level drawn. They have called me twice. I am going to go next week. That's what I said last week. And the week before.

So, for all of you who have asked, thank you. This is probably way more than you wanted to know. Maybe seeing these words on my screen from time to time will inspire me to "challenge myself with opportunities to enhance my growth areas", or whatever.

Breathing deep and treading water

So . . . hmm.

Last night, I took the kids to Johnny's NY Pizza to meet up with my uncle (my mother's brother) for dinner. He wanted all of us kids to gather there to talk with him about my parents, their (delapidated) house, their (dwindling) finances, etc.

We all gathered there, me and my kids, my sister and her family, one brother, his kids, and my uncle brought my mom. It's not often that we all gather together, and I can't remember the last time all 6 of my mom's grandkids were in one spot at the same time.

When the food starts to arrive (calzones, spaghetti, and pizza for most, Greek salad and some kind of low carb chicken wrap thingy for me, not bad), the conversation turns to me, and not in a good way.

"You know, you can cure that diabetes with deep breathing and lots of drinking water," Uncle announces to me and the rest of the table. He goes on in this vein, making me feel like, evidently, I have failed to care for myself properly, and with a few obvious changes that I should know, I could be restored to perfect health.

This, embarassingly enough, spins into a discussion about weight management there at the table, which feels strangely familiar to me. For whatever reason, my family has always felt free to discuss me in this way whenever we have gatherings; I can't ever remember it being any different. Being a fat girl in an normally-weighted family is no fun, trust me.

Sometimes the discussions start out on a good note ("Hey! You've lost weight!"), and sometimes they start with a confidential whisper ("Rita, you have to try this new diet that my best friend's mother's hairstylist found.) It's a strange thing to be dissected that way by people that are supposed to love you, but I figured that was just my penance for being a fat girl in a thin family.

He said some other stuff between bites of pizza that I wasn't really listening to, because I was thinking about when he would come to visit us when I was a little girl; he would produce a portable minibar out of the trunk of his Cadillac, and he would have a (nearly) permanent glass of some concoction or other in his hand for the entire visit. I always looked forward to his visits; he lived in Florida in a beautiful house with an indoor pool, played golf, had lots of money, and was always the life of the party. Very Rat Pack. Very charismatic. It dawned on me that even though I admired him, I never felt very good around him.

He was still lecturing when I started thinking closely about my mother's siblings. While he wasn't diabetic or heavy, he was an alcoholic. Ditto for one of my mother's sisters. Two of her brothers were diabetics (one also alcoholic), both ended up on dialysis, losing this or that limb as things progressed. Their offspring (my siblings and first cousins) are comprised of a fairly high percentage of regularly-weighted alcoholics and addicts (my oldest brother included in that count.) In the entire family, there really is only one other cousin that is heavy like me, and like me, he becomes the center and focus of most of the family's clucking and fingerpointing. He just had a quad bypass last month, and everyone down to a person seemed to openly blame him for his poor health, but never mentioned his brother, who has been a longtime addict and alcoholic. Interesting.

It didn't dawn on me then, but it was crystal clear to me last night, sitting in that pizza joint, picking at salad, and listening to a sermon: no one really ever discusses the rampant alcoholism, drug addiction and diabetes in my mother's family, but discussing weight is fair game.

I also realized that maybe my dad wasn't the only one in my family deep in denial. Taking a closer look, it might be the whole damn bunch.