Falling Apart

In the past six months, I've started taking medication for my joints and my blood pressure. Tomorrow I'm going into my doctor's office to have my blood sugar checked; it's come back high on two blood tests, so I have to do a glucose tolerance test. These things scare me -- a lot. I want to go to "fat camp" so I can finally lose weight and get my body back under control, but that's probably unrealistic. What might be feasible is to work with a nutritionist.

What scares me most about this is that these are the same problems my mother had. She didn't deal with them and they ended up killing her. While I know everyone dies from something, I'd prefer that my demise be from something else, something perhaps less potentially preventable. My doctor (along with my sons) reminds me that I am not my mother, that the way she dealt with her hypertension, and now possibly diabetes, doesn't have to be the way I deal with it. Essentially, my mom didn't deal with it; she never lost weight, cut down on junk food, or exercised. She took pills. I don't want to take pills.

People who haven't struggled with their weight think it's just a matter of willpower; if you consume fewer calories than you burn, you'll lose weight. That might be true in theory, but different people burn calories at different rates. I don't think it's that simple, no matter how often it is presented that way. Regardless of what my blood sugar test shows tomorrow, I need to find a better way to deal with my weight. It's leading to a lot of problems, and it's not going to get better by itself.