One thing Megan Whelan didn't consider about having type 2 diabetes was how it would affect her brain - what to do with all the feelings she would usually stuff down with carbs? In this week's instalment of Diabetes and Me, she speaks to photographer Pati Tyrell about the emotional side of it all.
Pati Tyrell has seen his father's long journey with type 2 diabetes and was himself then diagnosed in 2015 when he was 21. Photo: Supplied
A few months after my diabetes diagnosis, I had settled into a routine. I lifted my weights, went on my stupid walks for my stupid mental health, ate my protein, limited my carbs, took my drugs. I was feeling better than I had for a long time.
About a month after my diagnosis though, I had a bad day. I can't remember what happened, but I was upset. I was tired, grumpy, probably hormonal in a way those of you with uteruses will understand. I didn't want to walk it off. I knew it would help, but I didn't want to do it. I wanted to crawl into bed with a bag of chips and a bag of pineapple lumps and read my book and eat "empty calories" and be comforted. (Before you ask, yes, my counsellor and I talk about this a lot.)
I texted my boyfriend about what I wanted to do, and that I was having a tantrum about it. "I CAN'T DO IT AND IT'S NOT FAIR AND I JUST WANT SALTY CARBS TO MAKE ME FEEL BETTER."
After a few more months of all this, I am better at managing emotional eating - though God, not perfect. These days, I would probably just eat the chips and forgo the sweets. Balance. (Next week, we will chat to a dietician who has much better advice than me about this.) But that episode was a really good illustration for me of how diabetes was going to affect my life in ways I hadn't considered.
Pati Tyrell understands this more than most. Pati is a photographer and has seen his father's long journey with type 2 diabetes. Pati was then diagnosed back in 2015, when he was 21. It was, he says, a "shitty time".
"I actually found out because I had an abscess. And so I was taken to hospital and had a whole procedure done. And then they told me that the reason why is because I had diabetes, and it's what caused all the complications.
"It didn't really hit me until a week later. My dad's been diabetic for a while, and so I've seen his journey, but I guess I [still] didn't really understand."
Pati says he didn't realise how much control his sugar levels would have over his mood: how he interacted with people - and how he interacted with himself. I sympathise with this. One thing I have to be really careful about now is making sure I eat regularly. If I skip lunch - a regular event pre-diabetes - by the end of the day I find myself wondering why everyone around me is so annoying. And if it's a gym day and I haven't eaten, I can tell because not only am I unable to lift heavy things, I also want to scream at the people who walk too slowly around the Wellington waterfront.
I am new to this diabetes thing, but Pati, he's been doing it for years. And it has been a rollercoaster. "At times, I've had really good control," he says. "It always comes down to my eating. I have a really - I don't want to say toxic because I don't want to put my relationship with food as a bad thing - but I do over-consume sometimes.
"The times I've been really good have been during my periods of exercising. I'm eating well. I'm exercising, and I might be dropping weight. But when I'm off, I'm really off. There would be weeks - maybe even more than one week - where UberEats might be the main source of food."
Megan Whelan Photo:
Again, this sounds very familiar, I used to come home from work, too tired to cook, and I would stare at the food in the fridge and not have the energy to think of a way to cook it, so deliveries and takeaways were the norm. (Pati hates meal prep, but to my eternal Wellington hipster shame, a version of meal prepping is what has helped me a lot in the past couple of months.)
When he doesn't have the food he loves, Pati feels almost a kind of paralysis - he knows eating the thing he wants will put him off achieving better blood sugars, but he still craves it. I feel this so much. Logically, I know that some potato chips are not going to make or break my health. I know that stopping myself from having them is just going to make the craving worse . But I convinced myself that not eating potato chips was the right thing to do - a moral win, if not a physical one. And all it led to was a tantrum.
Pati's partner is on board with his healthy eating, and both are trying to change their relationship with food. "It's nutrients that help us with our daily work."
"We've been off fizzy drinks for some time now and last night we had a Coke. And it tasted yuck. It had the same chemical feeling and the sugar rush was still there. It was such a weird thing, because we looked at each other and said, 'That's not really that nice, is it?' But the same emotional response wasn't there."
Like me, Pati has been seeing a personal trainer, and is doing great. "I realise how important exercise is - when I miss it, I feel bad. Not in the way that I am not helping my diabetes, but I get excited after I workout and I miss that feeling."
I asked Pati what one thing he wished people understood about type 2 diabetes and he said the emotional strain. "That's the hardest thing to deal with. I feel like my mental and emotional state is shifting so dramatically based on my sugars. And it can lead to some bad decisions - for your diet, for your relationships.
"If you have diabetes in your family, really try and avoid [getting] it, because it's a bitch. I know people know about diabetes, but I wish they could see how much hurt there is in it."
- Diabetes and me is a weekly column published on Wednesdays