What's good for the soul ...

Very soon I'll tell you about what I am actually doing on a day-to-day basis.

The food will be so fantastic, you too will be inspired to join me on this journey!

I promise to provide photos and recipes and quantities!

I promise to share the highs and lows and whatever I can that might help.

I promise to record as much information as I can.

But there is a little more to cover off first.

Like the fact that I never recovered from the gestational diabetes. So this is about long-term quality of life, not losing a few kilos or fitting back into a pair of jeans.

And the fact that I was never going to do this until I got my head in the right place. This has to be for me. I have to choose to do it. I have to understand where the responsibilities lay.

I really needed to begin to see food as good or bad/helpful or unhelpful, not yummy or boring.

And with that nagging voice in my head constantly growling at me, it had to happen eventually.

I work with some really lovely lasses, and two have recently started a healthy-eating campaign at work. I am jumping on that bandwagon!

Image: Ambro / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

What motivates you?

So I have learned that what motivates makes an enormous difference.

When I was pregnant with my first son, I became obsessed with managing my condition like a medical emergency. In fact, I lost 7kg with that pregnancy before I began gaining weight as my belly swelled.

I think one of the reasons I loved pregnancy is that it seemed that 'having a ruined figure' was kinda an accepted part of pregnancy. The fact my overeating had ruined it in the first place would become irrelevant in the histories.

Apart from my pregnancies, I can't really recall any other effective motivation. And by the third pregnancy, I admit that I was less motivated than my first (hey! I already had my heir and spare ...) to manage my complication.

As a result my last wee monkey has a birth defect, probably caused during some of the first cell splits. He has one fully-functioning healthy kidney, but not the second for redundancy.

I've come to terms with this: missing kidneys may occur in up to 1:7 people and most older-types have only found out when going for unrelated tests later in life and I expect my monkey to live a long life too.

Had I really understood the risks though, like really understood, surely my motivation would have been greater.

So what will motivate me on this journey?

Diabetes

So sometime when I was about 28, my very thorough doctor sent me for a Glucose Tolerance Test since I have Polycystic Ovaries. Impaired Glucose Tolerance (or Insulin Resistance) and Polycystic Ovaries are often linked as something called Metabolic Syndrome.

I remember lying in bed once and understanding the links between the chemical imbalances caused by my ovaries and pancreas and the resulting excess weight, but it glimmered and disappeared.

Suffice it to say that there is a sliding scale between "Normal" (under 7) and "Diabetic" (over 14) and at 28, I was impaired (it may have been about 9 at the time or as high as 11, I just don't remember ...)

My doctor told me that this would mean that I may have problems conceiving and if I did, I would need to be monitored for Gestational Diabetes and ultimately, I was a candidate for Type II.

Hard to say what went through my head, but I do remember crying about my failure to be risk free and not really doing anything else about it. Except stopping birth control. And starting Metformin with a warning not to get pregnant on it. Not a great start.

I knew the odds of 1 in 10 the old-fashioned way, so I "couldn't really get pregnant" and actually stopped birth control so that when I did want to start a family at the planned age of 30, and we needed assistance, we could say we had already been trying for two years.

It really was a fine plan.