Saturday, April 7, 2012

Diabetic Hunger Games

Not having read the hunger games, nor watched the movie, the title ultimately made me think of the fight diabetics have with themselves versus food.   Diabetes makes you focus on your food more than anything else, you are constantly seeing numbers swirl around your food choices, doing calculations in your head and guesstimating 80% of the time. An apple becomes the number 30 and 2 squares of a chocolate bar becomes the number 7.

Our food becomes our battle, as we fight with our blood sugars and try to work it out in the end. More so, our symptoms of both high and low blood sugars drive us to be hungry.  We find ourselves glaring into refrigerators looking for a snack, when only 15 minutes ago our blood sugar was above average. Something about diabetes is haunting, the fact that even when our bodies are consumed by sugar in our blood stream, we still have feelings of hunger.

But, for me, the hunger is enormous when my blood sugar drops, often times that is my best indicator when I am low.  I will wake up craving something, and know that for more most people, it would be easy to shake a 4 a.m craving off, but for me, that means take action and while I won't likely fulfil my craving with a Domino's Pizza at 4 a.m I will have to sit there, half awake gnawing on a straw of juice trying to such every drop up.

But, when it comes down to it, most of us are overindulging when we have low blood sugars, maybe even high blood sugars.  At these times, will power flies away and we are left shaking alone looking for something to eat. At many times we are embarrassed to the fact that we can 'eat' so much, but it truly is a game that takes a whole lot of time to play (much longer than monopoly) and in the same breath, I am not really sure if there is ever a winner at the end of a diabetic's hunger game.


Kayla

1 comment:

  1. Very true. I've grown to follow treating a low with a correction bolus, because I always over-do it.

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