Diabetes and me: Making sustainable changes

In Diabetes and Me, RNZ's Megan Whelan shares her journey of learning to live with type 2 diabetes.

Ever since I was a child, I have liked being the teacher's pet - this is neither a good thing or a bad thing, it's just a thing. Whether it's good or bad entirely depends on the context. When it comes to my diabetes, I am still figuring it out.

When I was diagnosed, I had about three days where it really did feel like my life was over. The spectre of diabetes has been part of my life for as long as I can remember, largely thanks to the people on Twitter who like to remind fat women that they're a burden on society. But what I knew about diabetes wasn't extensive. I thought I would be taking insulin after every meal and that I could never eat a nectarine again.

After talking to my doctor, some friends who also have diabetes, and scouring the internet until all hours, I realised something: There is nothing I love more than a challenge. I probably shouldn't put this on the internet, but the quickest way to get me to do something is to imply I can't. You're my personal trainer and you want me to lift a heavier weight? Say something like, "If that gets too much, I will leave these smaller weights just here". I will grit my teeth and prove to you that not only can I do it, I can do it with flawless form.

Because I don't just want to be good at things; I want to be perfect at them. If you tell me that a low carb diet is 130 grams of carbs a day, well, then by God, I will eat 129 grams of carbs a day. If you tell me that 30 minutes of exercise a day is optimal for diabetes management, I will obsessively track exercise minutes on my smart watch until I get to an average of 32 minutes a day.

This desire is at odds with another part of my personality - the bit that skips entire steps in recipes and once knitted a cardigan in the wrong direction three times in a row. I don't like being told what to do, even if it's following instructions on kitset furniture. But when I am interested in something, I will hyperfocus on it.

For the first couple of months after my diabetes diagnosis, I set alarms to take my medication. I researched sleep hormones and sat outside every morning to help regulate my melatonin (that somehow seemed easier than just putting my damn phone down at nighttime). I tracked sugars and carbs and protein. I bought low carb bread (tastes like cardboard) and didn't eat a potato for weeks. I fretted over summer fruit and how much sugar it contained.

From a 'forming new habits' perspective, it was all very good, but it was also a lot, and I could see myself slipping into some really bad habits. I am not particularly interested in weight loss as a goal in itself (believe me, we're going to get into this in more columns), but I started weighing myself almost every day. Anyone who has ever read a women's magazine can tell you this can be a very good sign of disordered eating, but I would get out of the shower and look at the scales, and think to myself, "I wonder if it has changed since yesterday". Even knowing that way lies very bad things, for a while, I couldn't help myself.

I was chatting to a friend about this - though I didn't admit quite how dangerous it felt - and she told me something a dietician she had seen had said. "What if I told you that an A+ isn't being perfect; it's making sustainable change." It makes so much sense, but it's also so much harder.

I think maybe what's going on in my head is that I've decided diabetes is a test I can pass. If I just get the ratios of my macros (gym people talk for macronutrients, or proteins, carbohydrates and fats) right, then I can tick the box that says diabetes and be done with all this.

But then I think back to my chat with endocrinologist Dr Krebs, and I have a sneaking suspicion it's not going to work out like that. My health is maybe not something I can fix in three months and then I can go back to not thinking about it. But if it isn't something I am being graded on, how will I know I have done well?

I don't have an answer to this question. I started writing this column thinking I would end up somewhere very different, with a neatly wrapped conclusion about health and wellness and some work/life balance to throw in. A nice comforting lesson to take away from all this. But maybe I learnt a different lesson. I don't have all the answers. No one is going to give me a gold sticker for not eating potatoes. Maybe I just have to make what change I can, as I can, and see where I end up. Maybe that's what sustainable change looks like.

Diabetes and me is a weekly column on Wednesdays.