Change

Good Food(s) and Such

/ Jeff Hora / Leave a comment
Graphic by CoPilot AI

I’ve been diagnosed as a Type 2 diabetic for about eight and a half years now. As this has settled into the regularity of what I have to learn about both the disease itself and my particular response to it, the evolution of what works for me and what doesn’t work so well has taken and continues to take place.

At the first there was the “Holy Crap!” realization of the diagnosis. The internalization of what I needed right away and some of the changes I needed to make in my lifestyle. Fortunately, I am married to someone who has a Ph.D. in Microbiology and Immunology, and knew a LOT more about food, etc. than I did (and still do….). The first several months saw some draconian changes in what and how much I ate, how much I exercised, and medical changes….including needing to inject myself with insulin every day. THAT took some “getting used to”, although I never REALLY got used to it.

Several years ago I got a new physician who led me through some more changes. For me (please, if you have diabetes and are working every day with it, don’t make changes to what you’re doing without consulting your doctor…I’m lucky..I’ve got a Real Peach!), the changes consisted of:

  1. stopping insulin,
  2. changing the number of times per day that I eat from 3 to 2, and
  3. discovering, mostly on my own, the things that I eat that have horrific effects on my blood sugar and others that have little effect, although there have been a couple of surprises.

So….

(1) I take some other medications for the diabetes, but I’m working a lot harder on managing it with diet (including weight loss…) and exercise. I have truly appreciated not having to stab myself every day with insulin. I wear a Continuous Glucose Monitoring (CGM) monitor now, which really helps me stay relatively honest.

(2) I was brought up in Iowa and I ate three meals a day. That was the rule. Honed over the years in the military and in corporate, I ate regularly, and if someone was kind enough to bring in goodies, well, I didn’t want to hurt their feelings by not joining in the frenzy. Changing from the lifestyle of three meals a day to two meals (and minimal not-so-good-for-me goodies) meant I needed to analyze what I ate at each meal, balancing protein, sugars, carbs and calories. I had to look hard at WHEN I ate, giving my body a chance to work with what I was giving it to best metabolize effectively. Fortunately, again I had the solid advice and guidance of both my doctor and that Ph.D. who lives with me.

(3) This has meant that I have had to completely give up a couple of things that I loved (particularly pastries…..especially big ol’ glazed donuts!), and cut WAY back on several others (I’m a card-carrying choco-holic [if we actually HAD cards, that is…]). I still allow myself teensy treats of dark chocolate very occasionally , but not the way I used to.

The real surprises I have come across include:

  • I can eat cheese! I love cheese, man! I don’t go nuts with it, but it is included in my regular diet as a good source of protein, which is something I need to watch.
  • I can eat ice cream! Ice cream has an almost negligible impact on my blood sugar. Granted I need to stay away from the ice creams that have a lot of candy in them, and toppings are mostly right out, but just being able to enjoy ice cream is good enough for me.
  • I can eat pizza!…at least particular kinds of pizza. I went through a phase where I tried (I really did…) to like what I term “Faux Pizza”. You may know the kinds that I’m speaking of – interestingly concocted crusts, tweaked toppings, simulated cheese product sprinkled lightly. These did NOT cut the mustard, so to speak. Then I discovered, totally by accident, that there is a brand of pizza (I’ll not disclose the brand, but the stores are everywhere….) that I can order their double-crust pizza and it has little peak effect on my blood sugar. My usual strategy is to buy one, bake it, slice it into six pieces, and then I get one per week (invariably on Saturday night…), freezing the other pieces for subsequent Saturdays until I’m out and it is time to go and get another one.

So, WOO-HOO for cheese, ice cream and pizza!. I may sound like a little kid here, but way in there someplace is a twelve-year-old that needs placating, or life gets too gray-colored and I have to up my anti-depressants. Not something I want to do, for sure.

Anyway, I guess the point here is that this diagnosis was a real turn from healthy to not-so-healthy (as I perceived myself at the time…), but I feel that my lifestyle is much more healthy in a lot of ways now.

And THAT is a gift and a good thing!

One Fades Out, One (sometimes) Fades In

/ Jeff Hora / 3 Comments

Sisyphus Photo by Gerard Van der Leun

I have a lot of things that I find of interest….some more, some less. Still, I feel that this is the norm for most of us. There’s a handful of things that you’ve held dear for your whole life, or at least for such a long time that it can FEEL like it’s been your whole life.

Then there’s the entire ocean of all the other stuff in this world that can latch onto your attention and time. The massive bulk of this you just “let be”, if only because there’s not enough time in your day or life to pay attention.

As I’ve gotten older, I’ve noticed a cognitive pattern for me that lines up, more or less, with the the attentive emotions for the duration of a deeper interest and engagement with something. An example in my life was my passion for painting. Right at the beginning of the COVID shut-down, I decided that I would try my hand at painting. I have a friend who had been doing this for awhile at that point (this friend has since excelled WAY beyond what I felt I could do….her work is, well, “jaw-droppingly wowser”….), and I felt it would be a new and different outing for my creative side. I have been a musician most of my life, but my active engagement with that side of my creative self (other than CONSTANTLY listening to music….) had drawn down, and I felt that going a new direction that I’d never even considered before would be fun and an adventure.

And indeed it was. For about two and a half years. Before I get further into that experience, I’d like to give a shout-out to all the fellow travelers who created (and continue to create) an enormous number of helpful online videos with tips and how-tos, as well as all the members of various online groups and forums of others willing to not only give a guy a hand, but commiserate about tough nuts to crack for a newbie.

So why only two plus years, you might ask? Good question. Age and growing personal awareness has led me to learn a couple of things about myself (“FINALLY!”….my inner voice exclaims). One big one one has been that, in those areas of interest and engagement, when it stops being fun, so to speak, it’s time to either take a break or give it up.

Now, I know about perseverance and cracking a tough nut. Those were and are the areas where that virtual “cloud of witnesses” encourage and support me. I’m writing about when it stops feeling like fun and starts feeling like work. I HAVE to make myself do something that I liked and might present me with a challenge for the period of time, or confront me with a hill that I need to get over. I don’t know about you, but I spent a LOT of life having to go ahead and just DO something (or take up the tug-of-war-rope ONE-MORE-TIME just to get to the next Sisphusian point) regardless of what I felt.

Well, I’m in a time in my life where I don’t really need to do that any more. Are there regular chores? Sure. But I’m not writing about those. I’m writing about stuff over which I have the agency to say, “Nope. Don’t want to do that any more. Buh-bye…”

I’ve discovered that there are more of those in my life than I thought. Over time, I examine the things I spend precious time and attention on and evaluate whether I can, or want to, scale down, ramp up, or drop them. I now know that this has NOTHING to do with being a “quitter”. What others may or may not think about my actions in that regard has had less and less an impact on my awareness and acceptance of myself than it might have had in earlier days.

I’m going to limit my banging on about this for now, but I wanted to get this out there as a testimony, and maybe as an encouragement to any one else who might stumble across this post and is confronting the ongoing changeableness of everything in this life. It’s OK. It’s normal. If it really isn’t fun any more, think about whether you want to keep going, or move on in some way.

Don’t worry about making “the wrong decision”. In most cases, there really isn’t such a thing.

Embracing and Being Transformed by the Storm

/ Jeff Hora / Leave a comment

Storm chaser

Embracing the Storm

As I sat at my PC this morning attending virtual church, some of the dialogue focused on the fact that this is “Graduation Weekend” for most of the schools in our area. The pastor spoke of the different kinds of ceremonies taking place, given our isolated and socially distanced frameworks today. One thing he mentioned that stuck with me was that the student speakers used the themes of “Embracing the Storm” and “Transformed by the Storm” as their context for these significant times. These struck me in ways I didn’t really expect.
First, a bit of context (those of you who know me well know that I’m big on context and am a storyteller….). I was born and raised in Iowa, and grew up with the regular late spring and summer dangers of tornadoes. Since then I’ve lived in places where I’ve gone through super-typhoons, volcanoes and earthquakes. Still, there’s nothing like a tornado to make you feel like Mother Nature has drawn a bull’s eye on you (if you’ve ever seen the movie “Twister” you can get an idea of how personalized it can feel…). I’ve seen the inside of some pretty nasty storms, seen the destruction and felt the fear.
The big difference between any of those kinds of storms and what we are living through together now, in my observation, is that they had pretty distinct beginnings and endings (and then the clean-up could begin…). Nowadays, not so much. While we think we have an idea of where and when (and even a bit of how…) the whole COVID-19 pandemic began, we literally have no idea when, or even if, it will end (is ti going to be something that we just get a shot for every year like the flu, for instance? I don’t know…).
And, as if that didn’t throw the world into enough of a whirl, we have all the political and socio-cultural upheavals that have been boiling along for 40-60 years (and actually longer……) and have come to a head in the past 4 or 5. To lift out an obvious example, as a global concern, and especially here in America, the baked-in, systemic racism for which the death of George Floyd has served as a tipping point of awareness and anger for a significant portion of our world. These, and other, storms take our preconceptions and societal blind-spots and either blow them completely away or, at least, grind away at them to show us glimpses of Reality. Generally, it’s not pretty…
I return to my analogous experiences of embracing the storm:
  • I didn’t want to be there when the storm took place, but there I was.
  • The view of the storm I had was Real, and not removed by a TV screen or a news report. I was IN IT…..and I was scared.
  • My first prayer was one of survival for myself, and then for the others who were going through it with me. Regardless of whether you had a shelter (such as it might be…) or not, the storm did not care.
  • My next thought was one of fearful/hopeful wondering when it would be over and what things would be like afterwards.
  • During the long periods of clean-up and restoration, the community became more visible and provided hope, strength and the kind of caring that did the heavy-lifting of healing and repair, at all levels (that is, from literally picking stuff up to taking the data and event info and figuring out how to better protect life and limb in the future…).
That last point is the “Transformed by the Storm” bit.
Disasters have a way of breaking the points in a structure that are weak to begin with, as well as helping us to discover the unsung and previously unsuspected strengths of our communities. Transformation takes place when we as individuals, communities and societies honestly take those learned and painful bits and actually work to change and improve.
No recriminations (excepting criminality, which needs to be addressed and dealt with in a just fashion [“Let he who is without sin cast the first stone.”]). If institutions need to be created, destroyed or adjusted, do it. If ways of doing business work really well, keep and enhance them; if not, chuck them. If people and roles are “essential”, they need to treated as such all the time, not just when things go south and we need them.
We do not have the luxury of choosing when the next catastrophe will take place, or its nature.
The sooner we face the facts of our individual and collective complicity in our own inadequate and frankly disastrous existing paths of response (or lack thereof…), the better chance we have of still being on this lovely world of ours in a hundred years.