I did so well for so long – then just stopped.
I’m not exactly sure why it happened or how it happened, but I just stopped logging.
I went for about two and a half months, logging consistently almost every day. Weekends were hit or miss, but the weekdays were all good all the time. Uh, not necessarily good blood sugars mind you – but whatever they were, they were being logged.
Recognizing that the simple act of logging improves my control, I set up my weekly action plan for last week with my therapist:
what: to log a complete day 3 days out of the next 7
when: starting right now
confidence: 10
Seven days went by and I logged two and a half of them. And I was really pissed off about it. I could not identify what about it was pissing me off. I was very surprised by this, and it caught me completely off guard.
Was it the logging itself or the fact I had to keep track of everything? You know – I had to keep close enough track of things to be able to write them down accurately. Why should that bother me when I already have to keep close enough track of things to be able to bolus accurately?
Ah-ha!
I had become the king of SWAG and LADCS bolusing!! In other words, not taking good care of myself. Being lazy with the carb counting and doing too much estimating and not enough hard core counting.
But what set it off and why was I so bothered by it for those 2.5 days?
I think that I don’t like to log stuff that I know is not good for me. I also don’t like to log stuff that I find hard to quantify. Like when I eat a bunch of junk food and don’t like being honest with myself about exactly how much I’ve eaten. What good does that do?
I think that it bothers me that when I decide to have something like Doritos or some other chips that I have to count or weigh them. So instead, I will take a good sized bolus, eat whatever, then wait for it all to wash out of my system and adjust for it later (by either correcting for a high or eating more for a low). Maybe it comes down to not wanting to feel limited by a certain serving size? I mean, how exactly do you bolus for something you have no idea how much of you’re going to eat? Christ, even that sentence is jumbled, much less the scenario I’m trying to describe! But you get what I’m trying to say.
You sit down with this big ass bag of chips, with no real thought of how much you plan to eat because you have no plan. But that just can’t work with diabetes.
That’s just one aspect of it – the point is that I have felt very angry at the thought of logging everything. Where is that coming from? What’s it all about?
How do I move past the recognition that I’m angry about it, and start uncovering why I’m angry about it? That’s the part I’m having trouble with – uncovering why I’m feeling these things. The recognition is great – a step in the right direction. But what is the next step? So what – I recognize that I’m angry about it. Now what?
I have to be Ok with logging – for me, it’s an important part of control – so I have to figure out how to deal with these emotions and get back to a place where I’m comfortable with it.
Preferably at a place where I’ve worked through the powerful emotions and have a better understanding of myself. Maybe even working towards some sort of balance and acceptance.
