More crazy photos for Dr. X........

......and a story too.

So, yesterday I had to go to our local Diabetes Education Center through our local hospital. My doc said it would be good for me - even after having diabetes for the past 34 years, he thought it might be valuable to get up-to-date on all the latest and greatest in diabetical stuff.

Yeah, whatever. What are they gonna tell me that I don't already know????

Well, 4.5 hours later, I left that facility in a state of shock. And the reason? I told them that one of my main goals in life is to be a racer - a bike racer - and I don't wanna suck. How can I do that as a diabetic? The answers they gave me were eye-opening.

My Dietician at the Center - Mary - actually coaches elite athletes on better ways of eating for performance and recovery. She's got a list of credentials a mile long, and she herself is an athlete. My conversation with her went something like this:

"Uh, Rodney, you know how you eat this and that, and you eat it at this time and that time in relation to your insulin injections everyday?"

"Yeah."

"Well, um, that's exactly 180 degrees opposite of what you're trying to accomplish if you wanna be a bike rider/racer. In fact, I would say that, at the moment, you're doing your body more harm than good."

"What the hell???!!!"

And my Diabetical Guru at the Center said pretty much the same thing - and she did it in a way that I can understand. She took my blood glucose meter and downloaded all the info on to the computer.......and put my stats in graphical format(for my accounting brain to understand). Whoa.

"See Rodney - all your tests are either in the Blue range or Red range. There is no in-between. You want the graph to be all Green - that's the normal bloodsugar range. But there's not much Green on those pie charts."

"Dang it!!!"

4.5 hours of diabetes and nutritional education. It was priceless. I left there with a completely different mindset. Not so closed out from new information and new ideas to achieve a goal.

Now for the hard part - actually applying it.

Up next - Coaching from Nicole Freedman.