“My doctor said, ‘Look, if you can weigh as much as you weighed in high school, you will essentially be completely healthy and will not have Type 2 Diabetes.’ And then I said to her, ‘Well then I’m going to have type 2 diabetes because there is no way I can weigh as much as I did in high school.”
So said Oscar winning actor, Tom Hanks, 57, when he revealed on the Late Show with David Letterman last October of his diagnosis with Type 2 Diabetes.
I weighed 180 when I graduated high school in 1988 and up until I landed an IT support helpdesk job in 1996, I managed to keep my weight in between the 180- and 200-pound mark simply because the brainless under paid assembly line jobs I held involved always standing up and moving around. In other words, I didn’t need to exercise much.
As I said earlier, Diabetes, which involves the body’s failure to produce insulin, is a “pain-in-the-ass” disease. Like Cancer, it attacks everything in the body but on a much slower rate. Just because the drugs you are given to take orally during the early onset of Type 2 help bring your sugars down to the double digits between 90 and 110 like they should be doesn’t mean they will work forever. Nor does it mean one should rely on the meds and think they can continue to eat what they’ve eaten before.
Hanks might have been joking about what diabetics must do to fight the disease, but he was certainly right.
“You’ve just got to lose weight and exercise a lot and change everything you eat and never ever ever ever ever have any fun whatsoever,” he said.
I have sometimes avoided taking my meds simply because the minute I checked my blood sugars the numbers were still in the low even after eating and my taking the meds could only make the sugars go lower which can be a bad thing. That didn’t stop one of female friends on Facebook from giving me a little tongue lashing about staying on my medications.
“You gotta stay on your meds and be so diligent with that,” she told me. “You will kill off every other organ slowly if you don't control that. My dad was diabetic, and a smoker and it was a terrible painful death. Don't you give up on your meds even if it is the one thing you can try to accomplish each day.”
It shouldn’t take an actor’s diagnosis, or this blog, for that matter to get people to start looking at their own health and consider seeing a doctor to find out if they could be heading in that self-destructive direction of Type 2 Diabetes. People should be taking every precaution to keep from becoming the next number the Centers for Disease Control keeps track of yearly when it comes to how many Americans have been diagnosed with that dreaded “D” word or what I refer to as “a pain in the ass” disease.
©1/15/14
So said Oscar winning actor, Tom Hanks, 57, when he revealed on the Late Show with David Letterman last October of his diagnosis with Type 2 Diabetes.
I would have said almost the same thing to my parents and grandparents who up until my diagnosis in 2006 with Type 2 Diabetes, told me every time about how if I didn’t do something about my diet and exercise more, I was likely going to get Diabetes or encounter worse health problems later on.My comment to them would have been, “Well, I am sorry, but I like my pastas, pizzas, pastries, hamburgers, steaks, cokes, eggs with the yellow stuff and anything else that’s likely on the NO list that causes high blood sugars and heart disease. I equate working out with that of going to church. I hate doing both but when I do work out, such as walking, or going to church, I find I feel a lot better after an hour. In short, I am going to get Type 2 Diabetes sooner or later whether I work out or not.”
I weighed 180 when I graduated high school in 1988 and up until I landed an IT support helpdesk job in 1996, I managed to keep my weight in between the 180- and 200-pound mark simply because the brainless under paid assembly line jobs I held involved always standing up and moving around. In other words, I didn’t need to exercise much.
One of the greatest ironies I have learned about Diabetes in what I refer to as a “pain in the ass” disease is I remember back in my senior year in high school my business law teacher, Coach Evans, telling our class how AIDS was going to be the kind of disease where we will know at least one or more people who either died from or have been diagnosed with HIV.Today, I know more than a dozen people, and I am not just talking about family members, but friends and co-workers past and present who are diabetic. One friend of mine I knew died of the disease before he was 60 and if he were reading this column today, he’d agree the reason he passed away was because he didn’t do anything to keep his symptoms from getting worse. I had no idea another person I knew who worked at the post office even had the disease until I saw his obit picture at the front desk one day and when I asked another postal service carrier what happened, he told me the guy passed away due to difficulties with Diabetes. He looked completely healthy to me in all the years I went there to mail stuff.
The irony is I have only met one person in my lifetime who was HIV positive and that was for a news story I was doing back in the 1990s interviewing someone who got the disease from unprotected sex.
As I said earlier, Diabetes, which involves the body’s failure to produce insulin, is a “pain-in-the-ass” disease. Like Cancer, it attacks everything in the body but on a much slower rate. Just because the drugs you are given to take orally during the early onset of Type 2 help bring your sugars down to the double digits between 90 and 110 like they should be doesn’t mean they will work forever. Nor does it mean one should rely on the meds and think they can continue to eat what they’ve eaten before.
Hanks might have been joking about what diabetics must do to fight the disease, but he was certainly right.
“You’ve just got to lose weight and exercise a lot and change everything you eat and never ever ever ever ever have any fun whatsoever,” he said.
I have come full circle on learning such hard lessons. Since 2006 I have continued to assume the meds would keep everything under control and I just have to show up every 3 to 6 months for a checkup. That is not the case. The past seven years, I have seen my weight loss go from 300 to 260 to as low as 240 over the course of 6 months or less. Not because of dieting and exercising but because the medications stopped working and yet, I thought, “How cool is this” that I can fit back into jeans that have accumulated dust in the closet the past few years.I had vision problems, which baffled the eye doctor because I am nowhere near close to developing Glaucoma. It turned out I got Central Serous Retinopathy which attacks males between 20 and 50 and is brought on by stress and can only by cured if you stop letting everything get to you.
I have sometimes avoided taking my meds simply because the minute I checked my blood sugars the numbers were still in the low even after eating and my taking the meds could only make the sugars go lower which can be a bad thing. That didn’t stop one of female friends on Facebook from giving me a little tongue lashing about staying on my medications.
“You gotta stay on your meds and be so diligent with that,” she told me. “You will kill off every other organ slowly if you don't control that. My dad was diabetic, and a smoker and it was a terrible painful death. Don't you give up on your meds even if it is the one thing you can try to accomplish each day.”
For the past seven years now, my doctor has been asking if I want to consider weight loss surgery in particular the gastric bypass or gastric sleeve as he has said repeatedly, the Diabetes will go away as a result. Every time he has brought it up, I said no. This past November, however, I told him I’d consider it but only after I decide to dedicate at least six months or a year to some weight loss/exercise program to see if any improvement is made. For the time being, my doctor just wants me to silently tell myself constantly, “Weight loss surgery.”If you’re wondering if there is a point to why I am telling you this, there is. Every time a celebrity whether it’s Tom Hanks, Good Morning America’s Amy Robach’s battle with breast cancer, or the fatal heart attacks that felled actor James Gandolfini and Dallas radio host Kid Kraddick last year, the drive by media go all out with articles about such devastating health conditions in an attempt to educate the public who likely already know about such diseases but do nothing to prevent them.
It shouldn’t take an actor’s diagnosis, or this blog, for that matter to get people to start looking at their own health and consider seeing a doctor to find out if they could be heading in that self-destructive direction of Type 2 Diabetes. People should be taking every precaution to keep from becoming the next number the Centers for Disease Control keeps track of yearly when it comes to how many Americans have been diagnosed with that dreaded “D” word or what I refer to as “a pain in the ass” disease.
©1/15/14
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