HOPE for Type 2 II Diabetes

When I started out my journey two years ago I was a broken woman getting divorce weighing 225 pounds over my estimated body weight for a woman my size. I had an A1C at 8.0 with cholesterol of 211. I had high blood pressure and was in a serious danger zone diagnosed with Type II diabetes. My doctor was real with me and said I needed to make some serious life choices if I wanted to continue to live.

The doctors sharing my need for change was a whole new world for me of medication and numbers telling me how I needed to change. It was a world of keeping track of my food, painful checking of my blood sugars, and caring about myself while dealing with emotional trama. There is always a bit of hurt when your making a drastic change in lifestyle. I knew that there was a hope that the doctor hadn’t shared about that day that would get me through.

He prescribed all kinds of medications to heal me enough that I could live but I knew there was something more that was actually going to get me to live and thrive. I knew there was that drive that would take me on this journey to health. I knew that drivers name and that is what got me where I am today.

Truly I had to do my own thing to get better because I can be a headstrong woman who doesn’t like to do things the way people tell her to. I like to do things differently in my own unique way. It can frustrate people in my life that I sometimes look for a different way and try to approach things differently. In this case I had no choice to but to dig deeper and find out why I had gotten to this point so I could move forward and live.

I had to take a honest look at all the things that had brought me to that point so I could find out where I had gone wrong so I could choose to change it and turn it around. I looked at the healing journey I had taken for five years during my marriage of healing from sexual abuse that happened when I was a child. I looked at the marriage journey that had just ended with me feeling like I had failed myself and God. I looked at my struggles with learning disabilities, self esteem and relationships. When I looked at all these trials in my life I found that the way I had gotten through them all was through my addiction to food.

Food was a safe comfort when I was a hurting little girl lost without knowing what to do in the dark with a secret of the abuse. Food kept me chubby providing a layer of protection from men and boys who I thought wouldn’t want me physically if I kept eating. It didn’t always work having that layer of protection but most of the time it did.

It didn’t work when I got married and now divorced. So in the end I had to make a choice to get focused and pursue my health like my life depended upon it because it now did. I needed to shed my layer of protection if I was ever going to be truely free.

There wasn’t any question of how or when or if I started. I just had to start Now and never give up until I had finished this race and won the prize of a life of peace that I desperately wanted. I was not sure how to start so I just started.

I had to start making healthy choice, after healthy choice, after healthy choice. After having not worked for 6 years outside of the home God planted the first blessing in my garden. I got a full time job within 2 weeks of making a final determination that we were getting a divorce in 2006. I knew I didn’t have a college degree or work history and was severely overweight so for me to find a job that fit me so uniquely well was amazing and beyond what I could have asked for. It was a job where I could sit or stand for 10 hour days 4 days a week. It was the most physically I had done for work in many years but it was a start.

The next step I took to be healthy was to start tackling the huge amount of paperwork and financial aspect of divorce proceedings. I got everything done for my divorce and filed in January of 2007 and had it completed by April 2007. During this time I found that I could work off my emotional impact through my new disciplines of working out physically.

It was a healthy way to work out my pain. The emotional impact was there but because I had this inner drive that kept me passionately burning the midnight oil literally and figuratively to become a healthy person that I had actually never been I had some peace in the midst of my storm. I will share what that drive was that kept me going in a bit.

Physically how I did it was through new disciplines that I never had before. For me food had to become something that was for me to be eating to live and not living to eat. I stopped eating because I needed emotional comfort and started depending on the drive I had inside for strength to choose to live. This was not easy and it does not mean I am perfect in this area but that drive that I will share about later is what made me see I didn’t have to be perfect in order to be successful.

Literally I stopped eating what was normal to me. I started eating bars for diabetics that my doctor recommended that gave me all the nutrition I needed for the day. Basically I ate 2 of these bars a day, vitamins, water, 100 calorie snack packets and very little else. I exercised every night for an hour of cardio on a treadmill that I had bought that could handle my weight.

I lived at night working the afternoon to 10 or 11pm shift so that I combated my night cravings and lonelyness. I lost the first 100 pounds in without realizing it was gone which was actually good for me.

Not everything in this journey was roses and most of the time there were so many scars on my fingers from the thorns of this journey I wondered if I was getting well. But finally 9 months after I went to the doctor and they said. "We can lower your dosages your doing better".
I found a glimpse of hope and knew my lifestyle changes were working.

That is when I crashed into the wall. I got really excited and made some choices that were not healthy. I got excited and impatient. I started to want my job that was halfway there done right away. I had caught a glimpse of a free life and wanted it. I started extreme dieting basically not eating and exercising off the charts. I had gotten excited and took it to the extreme. My body started shutting down and I had a major meltdown. I had to quit my job and then lost hope.

In the summer of 2007 I crashed and burned mentally and physically ending up with a mental illness as well as being type 2 diabetic. This is when I had to find the drive again that I had lost somewhere along the way that was truly my source of strength. It was when I had started to depend on myself to do everything and give myself all the credit for what good was going on in my life that I crashed.

I had to go back and look to what had been by my side my whole life through every trial I had faced. It was in those weakest of moments living to eat, lost hurting from sexual abuse, desperate to be loved from a cheating spouse, and crying for God to just take me to heaven that God was with me. He was carrying me through and even though I was not depending upon Him. He still loved me and was always just waiting for me to see His face.

He was looking down on me smiling seeing the beauty of who I was even as a abused scared woman who had so many challenges in life. He saw my value that I could not see within myself and loved me in my place of needing a rescue from a loving Savior who would never leave me. His passion for me and belief in me was my drive that gave me the passion to keep on even in those darkest of moments when I felt like I had failed myself and God.

So I learned to pursue God with the same passion and found that in my relationship with Him was my greatest treasure. It has taken me to the place I am at today and will continue to take me to my goals. I got back on my feet again by the grace of God. I found my peace that I wanted so much before to be a healthy person. I have friends, a great fun job, wonderful church family, ministry in serving, and a relationship with God who will never leave me.

So I made the choice to do it the right way. I choose to have the driver of me be the God who makes all my paths light. Today I just got back from the doctor’s office and found out that I now have a 5.2 A1C, normal blood pressure, 177 cholesterol and lost 167 pounds. God is good and it is only by His grace that I found the strength with God in the driver seat of His spirit to get me here to this point in my journey to health.

I am not a type 2 diabetic anymore and you can be too. This is my story of Hope of how the power of God in my life brought me to this place of a journey to health I am still on today. His power can change your life. Cry out to Him and let Him love you too. Then love Him with all of your heart, soul, mind and strength and you can find that peace of health too. God loves you and is patiently waiting to hear from you.

Fruit: JOY
Song in my head: Savior Please – Josh Wilson
Verse: “Give thanks to the LORD, call on his name; make known among the nations what he has done.”- 1 Chronicles 16:8