Taking Life In Bite-Sized Chunks

There are a couple of things you should probably know about me before reading this week's post. For starters, I never had a five-year plan or even a thirty-day commitment to much of anything. None of my marriages lasted. Before I took my current position, I had only had one job for more than two years. So my style has never been the old "plan your work and work your plan" mode. Yet somehow, I have stayed busy and productive and have achieved enough to impress myself and a few selected others.

Additionally, with the help of a couple of 12-step programs, I gave up mood- and mind-altering substances more than two decades ago and with the exception of a shot of Jack Daniels on one unfortunate occasion, that's been a successful process from the beginning. So what's my point?

When I was diagnosed with diabetes, I didn't set any goals. For good or ill, it's not the way I work. I just woke up the next morning and did what they suggested -- one day at a time.

It didn't occur to me that I needed to lose weight, for example. I saw lots of people who weighed more than me. So that never crossed my mind. Besides, the regimen the Diabetic Nutritionist outlined for me two weeks after my diagnosis was complicated enough that just focusing on that was all I could do.

She told me to eat a certain number of grams of carbohydrate for breakfast, a certain number for lunch, and a certain number for dinner with smaller amounts in between to keep me balanced and a tiny snack before bed. And that's what I did. In fact, with a full-time job to hold down and the other responsibilities an adult has to take care of, that was all I could handle.

I didn't overthink it. I didn't arm-wrestle the regimen. I didn't make a game plan or set any goals. I just took life in bite-sized chunks and focused on eating the amount I was told to eat at each point in each day. It was easy.

When I added some workouts to my schedule, it was for the same reason. They told me to. So I shrugged and did it. I thought I was going to die if I didn't, so it was basically a no-brainer. And when, six months later, I found I had dropped 50 pounds, nobody was more surprised than me. All of a sudden, I weighed less than I did in middle school and I hadn't even tried to do this. Even the Diabetic Nutritionist was stunned.

That was eight years ago and I put 20 pounds of that back on when I started taking insulin last year, but I'm right where my Body Mass Index says I should be for my height, my latest A1C was 6.5, and at a size 8, I can still hustle up the three flights of stairs to my office without breathing hard. At 69.

So if you're overwhelmed by the enormity of this challenge, maybe you could try what worked for me. After all, like they always say: how do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time.