This month marks my 15th anniversary with diabetes. Perhaps you think celebrating with cake (and candles) seems ironic, or even gruesome — OH NOES THE DIABETIC HAS CAKE! CALL THE PARAMEDICS! — but I do not. If anything, the past fifteen years have been all about learning how to eat chocolate cake and maintain a healthy blood sugar level.
Sometimes, in fat communities online, I feel like I’m the person no one wants to talk to*, in order to maintain the idea that fat people can be healthy, dammit! It isn’t that I think because I’m fat and have diabetes, then other fat people must have diabetes, too. I have been super, super lucky to have found a path that has led me to being able to enjoy really good health overall. I have to grudgingly thank my parents, and my mom in particular, for exposing me to mostly healthier foods early on, and exploiting my love of food to expose me to a wide variety of vegetables, fruits and other tasty things. Although I felt deprived and didn’t figure out my limits around sweet foods until later on**, I had an idea of what to return to that was balanced and right for me, once I felt ready to do so.
I’m full of advice for people with type 2 diabetes***, and I sometimes even take my own advice. But mostly, I’m grateful that I stubbornly sought out or carved out relationships with my health care providers (including therapists) that allowed me to manage my own treatment and to thrive****. I am far from perfect about all of this. But I have integrated having type 2 diabetes into my identity to a large degree. It’s not as visible as my fatness (unless the person looking assumes all fat people must have diabetes) but I tend to mention it fairly early on as I get to know people. Not in the first or second conversation, for the most part, but early on. I don’t feel the need to hide this aspect of who I am and what I’m dealing with. I don’t always mention that I take insulin***** until I know someone better, unless they ask, because that level of detail isn’t essential (but I do think that demystifying insulin isn’t a bad thing).
I might find that for me, my needs for physical activity are relatively high, or my ability to tolerate lots of carbs at any one time is relatively low, but I don’t put that on anyone else. We all have a right to experiment with what works best for us, helps us to feel calm, to help manage our lives, to provide us with energy, to be healthy by our own definition — if that is something that matters to us.
One thing that has felt particularly healing about dance has been the way that I meet people through my body first. It isn’t my intellect, or garrulousness, or vivacity that I have an opportunity to wow them with. I have to rely on this physical, wordless experience upon which to connect. I’m always stunned when someone appears to want to dance with me. My body is usually having such a good time, while my mind is busy munching away on the idea that there really isn’t anything wrong with me that another person is perceiving. There isn’t anything driving them away, in fact, it’s the exact opposite, my body (not my mind or words or sweetness or something else my mind can grok to) is what is pulling them in. Wow. Especially suprising for this body that “betrayed” me by developing something as yucky as type 2 diabetes.
And yet, understandable. When I see someone dancing in a way that I think is cool, I want to dance with them. Bodies are just like that. They are fun-seeking entities. My body wants to be grooving next to your body, cool?
I hope you are having a festive June, and get a chance to shake your groove thing, if you enjoy that sort of thing.
* In all honesty, I harbor that feeling in other communities. Maybe it’s me?
** Still figuring this out, honestly. From the tummy’s “oh, that was maybe too much” perspective, not any moral judgement.
*** Not a medical professional, by the way
**** My last A1C was 5.7 for those of you who care about such things.
***** Levemir.
Angry Gray Rainbows 
Mr. Twistie was diagnosed with type II diabetes a few weeks before our wedding. That means we’ve been living with it for a little over sixteen years.
Sometimes it’s nice to read your entries not just because you write well, but because it’s another voice in the community talking about diabetes as simply a part of your life. I may not be the one with diabetes, but my life is affected by it. I have to think about diabetes when planning a meal to feed my husband. He’s not always perfect with it, either, but then who is?
I think it’s important to remember that diabetes doesn’t get us thrown out of the FA club, nor should it. We don’t owe anyone perfect health, even though I completely understand (and have been known to join into) the discussions of how fat doesn’t automatically equal ill-health.
Anyway, all of this is just to say that I’m glad there are people out there with health issues being active in the FA movement.
Happy Diabetaversary, and many more!
Thank you much, Twistie. Your “The Rampaging Lingerie Edition” had me cracking up. For some reason, although I always appreciate your comments wherever I read them, I hadn’t noticed your blog posts until recently. Fun, thinky and great!
I am not expecting to be rid of diabetes anytime soon, so thank you for wishing me happy diabetaversaries to come. Mr. Twistie is fortunate to have such an appreciative and caring partner. Happy anniversary to you two!
I’m really glad you talk about diabetes, WRT2. Because it really does need to be demystified for people. Type 2 diabetes used to go largely undiagnosed until the end stages of the disease, when gangrene had already set in, and because of that people seem to have it in their heads that it’s still a devastating illness that leads to early death. It can be if it goes untreated, but people rarely have to have amputations from diabetes any more thanks to earlier diagnosis and better treatment, and it’s a lot more manageable than it used to be, especially if caught early.
It’s even worse when people think our greedy appetites are what make us get diabetes, when in fact it’s mostly genetics. Agree with Twistie, nobody should have to display “perfect health,” whatever the hell that is, to gain membership into Club Fat. I have PCOS; how is that any “better” than diabetes? I have it in my family tree, just as you have diabetes in yours, although PCOS didn’t have a name when my grandmother had it.
Anyway, I think what you’re doing is really important, because there’s this myth that in order to control diabetes you have to have to HAVE TO lose weight and be thinner, and you certainly provide ample (hee) evidence to the contrary.
Maybe I need to change my handle to “ample evidence”!
I suppose the point about writing about these things, whatever they are, is to demystify them.
I suspect that one of my grandmas may have had PCOS too, and I don’t know about the other one.
And what you are doing is really important, too.
Thanks for the uplifting post. I think that because type 2 is blamed on fat, FAs like to downplay type2. Not fair. Fat doesn’t mean bad health but it doesn’ gaurantee good health either. I think we all need to accept that health problems occur regardless of size and that at some point or another, we will all have a health problem.
I admire your spirit and how well you take care of your physical and emtional health.
“I think we all need to accept that health problems occur regardless of size and that at some point or another, we will all have a health problem.”
I completely concur.
I’ve discussed diabetes before on my blog, only I emphasized the fact that regardless of lifestyle, you have to have a genetic predisposition for it to develop it and the ways in which it can be successfully treated outside of weight loss. One of the reasons I started the diet that would develop into an eating disorders so many years ago is because I was told that I was on the verge of developing diabetes. The fact that I was on a grapefruit juice craze the two weeks before the test might have skewered my results some, but I didn’t realize the connection then. In any case, my grandmother was an insulin-dependent, type-1 diabetic, so I have a family history of it. That (and being diagnosed in the past with insulin resistance) is why I now try to follow a relatively low-glycemic diet. I just had blood work done a couple months ago and my insulin levels are well within the average range even though I’ve actually gained weight in the past couple of years.
I sometimes feel like a FA outsider because I do promote healthy diets and while I don’t classify foods as “bad” or “good,” I do talk about healthy and less healthy foods. I feel that a healthy diet is necessary for a healthy brain which is necessary for a healthy body image. I think that some people feel that any valuation of foods — even though classifying foods by how healthy they are for your body is not a moral categorization in itself — represents a slippery slope back into the same dieting mindset that FA is trying to overcome. In the early days after finding FA, I felt like an outsider then because I blog about eating disorders, especially non-typical EDs like binge eating disorder and emotional overeating problems. There are some in the FA community who’d rather not discuss these issues at all for fear that every fat person will be assumed as having disordered relationships with food. But eventually, I got over the worry of what others would think and just began writing what I thought, which is, of course, my entire motivation for blogging to begin with. There is no typical fat person and I think that the FA community is large enough for us all (no pun intended).
Rachel, congratulations, again, on your degree. I think that you have been a pioneer in finding the shared points between ED recovery and FA. I’ve always been in awe of your perspective. And your research skills, and knowledge and discipline of history.
For me, it’s been really important to figure out that I don’t binge, that I rarely even overeat these days, and that when I’m eating in the way most consistent with my values, it’s unlikely I’ll lose any weight.
I also am not sure that having a relative with type 1 diabetes is a risk factor for developing type 2. I will have to look into that.
You are so right that there is no typical fat person.
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