Sep 10 2008
The Diabetic’s Paperwork
Living as a healthy diabetic means being disciplined, aware and proactive. Which is bad for me, as I’m fundamentally slack. As evidence, I present my failure to keep a food diary.
The point of a food diary is to first, help you figure out what foods affect your blood sugar and second, to help you monitor your food intake. After diagnosis, I kept a food diary religiously. Each meal was detailed down to the crumb. Notes were kept on my other healt factors, including drowsiness and water intake. I took two blood glucose readings each day, one in the morning for my fasting sugar and one after either lunch or dinner.
If I were to restart the practice of keeping said diary, I’d consider my previous efforts a bare minimum. I only stuck myself once for one meal, where as I should have at least a few times taken my sugar before, one hour after and again at two hours after.
On the plus side, I figured out that keeping my food diary in a spreadsheet was more convienent than keeping a print version. If I were to do it again, I’d use Google Documents, most likely. Spreadsheets make it very easy to analyze the collected data and I’m around computers enough that I’d practically always have it available to me.
The fact that I don’t keep a food diary regularly now isn’t catastrophic or a cause for self flagellation, just a sore spot with myself. More information is better than less, generally speaking. When my morning blood sugar is high and I can’t remember exactly what I had for dinner, I get irked at myself. Plus, it’s also neat to be able to say what you had to eat at 7:48 on July 17th of last year.
So maybe I’ll start one again… tomorrow.
