Diabetes and Me: Finding strength through failure

The best thing I have seen this week is Natalie Portman's arms in her costume for the newest, Taika Waititi-directed, Thor movie. I am here for women superheroes who have actual muscles, who look like they could lift a car. For no other reason than seeing powerful women makes me smile.

I am especially excited about Portman saying the goal was "to get as big as possible". While working out for two hours a day and having an entire staff making sure there's enough protein around to continue building muscle isn't possible for most of us, it reminded me how great getting strong feels.

I started going to the gym because I wanted to do something good for my health, both physical and mental. I kept going, in part, because working out makes me feel like I can keep the diabetes in check. In part it's because learning the ways my body is powerful is a revelation. And in part it's because the gym is as good as a decade of therapy.

I wrote back in April that one of the challenges of this diabetes thing is that I want to be perfect. Every meal, every workout, taking my meds and keeping an eye on the side effects all need to be the best I can manage. Not doing so would be a massive failure, or so my brain tells me. Being a perfectionist means I have control, particularly when the world feels so very out of control.

A lovely reader emailed me this week saying diabetes is often seen as our own fault if we develop it, and I have certainly felt that.

"My whānau is riddled with it," she writes. "Without going into the gnarly details, I've heard the stories about my ancestors, witnessed the complications for my family, and mourned the early deaths within my whānau. I've seen the avoidance of those too scared to go to the doctors in case they are asked to take a HbA1c test."

Ooof. I get that. I was that. I put off that test for years.

In weightlifting, people often talk about training to failure: you lift as much as you can until your muscles give out. Either by lifting a heavy weight for a few reps, or doing many reps of a lighter weight, you work until your muscles fail, or you can't keep up good form anymore. You're actively aiming for failure. The idea is that muscles grow more under more stress.

I did four reps of a chest press this week with a weight I couldn't have lifted with two hands six months ago. It was the last of four sets, where the weights got heavier each time. On the last rep, my arms shook as I pushed up, my trainer behind me guiding my hands in the air, until I nearly - but didn't - dropped the weights on my face.

I actively celebrated failure. I was stoked to see what my body could handle, and where it still has room to grow. And I know that it can grow. I've seen it happen. I've seen the progress, but I also understand it's not linear, and I don't have to be perfect.

So many things will come along that will hamper my progress in the gym: a bad diet week where I don't get the balance of protein and carbohydrate right; a particularly stressful week with bad sleep and out-of-whack hormones; as a person with a uterus, I am very conscious that my menstrual cycle changes how much muscle I can build (not to mention whether I actually feel like working out).

Then there's my body's ability to manage glucose; injuries of all kinds; even holidays, because I am not so far gone that I'd rather hit the weight rack than sip cocktails by a pool.

What if I - we - treated our health with the same compassion? What if I said to myself that learning to live with Type 2 is complicated and hard and will be the work of a (hopefully long) lifetime? Even if I can reverse it, it will still require maintenance and understanding how my body, diet, activity, and my genetics work together.

What if I understood that failure isn't something to be avoided, but that failure is where the muscles grow and get stronger and bigger. That failure is necessary for growth, and indeed strength.

I am not the first person to make this metaphor, of course. But maybe those of you reading who have type two, or a predisposition to it, might find it comforting to hear from someone who spent three months weighing every meal she ate that I have also failed a bunch of times. And it wasn't the end of the world. In the past six months, I've learned to be a little kinder to myself.

When I was first diagnosed, I felt like my body had failed me. I don't know if I still think that but, if it was, taking it as an opportunity to get stronger and better seems to be working out.

Every diet I've ever done has required perfection. You eat to a perfect meal plan every day for a set amount of time, (usually involving products you can only buy from the purveyor of the diet) and then, when that time is up, you go back to normal and wonder why all the weight comes back on. Plus some. And if you fail, that's your fault, not the fault of the diet.

Here's my last question: what if that striving for perfection, that need to get it right every single time, isn't just my personality? What if it's the hangover from all those diets - from all those times I failed and beat myself up for failing.

My diabetes isn't a thing I have to be perfect at managing. That seems like a pointless goal. Like lifting weights, it's about progression. And understanding there will be setbacks along the way - and that's where the strength comes from.