I've been on insulin for my diabetes for a little over two years now. Judged objectively, the treatment was a failure; it was supposed to help me control my blood sugar, but since I didn't make more than a half-hearted effort to change my diet or my exercise habits, the dose kept going up as my blood sugar readings oscillated between bad and worse.
Over the last five and a half months, though, I've finally made a serious move to change my diet, predicated on the simple notion that if my body can't handle carbohydrates any more, it would be better not to give it any - and failing that, cut them down to under 50 grams per day. I was confronted by my friends and family and told that I was at a point where I could change my diet, or continue doing what I was doing, which was failing, until I died. Obviously, none of them wanted me to die, and despite what I may have written earlier, I wasn't ready to shuffle off this mortal coil either.
And it's worked. I don't eat hardly any breads, fruits, starches or sugars any more; I carefully log everything I do eat for my friends and family to review. I've lost over thirty pounds since the beginning of April without doing any exercising worth mentioning, and I've cut the amount of insulin I've been injecting from 34 units at night and 28 in the morning (plus a little extra fast-acting stuff if things got out of hand) to 6 at night.
Even that may be too much now. For the last couple of days, I've had abnormally low blood sugar readings. I haven't been hungry. I'll eat breakfast, several hours will go by, and then I'll notice I feel a bit light-headed. So I check my blood sugar, which inevitably is below 80, and then carefully get up and get something to eat. Rinse, lather, repeat since Tuesday morning. It's not a pleasant feeling, this hypoglycemic floaty feeling. It's a sign that something's wrong with the broken mechanisms of my body, except that instead of too much glucose floating around, I don't have enough. That's been pretty rare these last ten years. Still, not enough is just as bad as too much. It's just a different kind of bad. So I think I'm going to put the needle and the vial away for good, and see how I do with just the pills and the diet.
I'm pretty sure I'm going to be okay.