Wednesday, September 09, 2015

I started Starbuck

I decided that was the sweater I had had the yarn in-stash longest for. So I wound off the first skein of each color and began. The first part of the sweater is knit flat (to shape the scoop of the neck - it's a top-down sweater). It's also all done in the main color (I'm using an off white that is very slightly tan).

I wound up having to rip back several rows and start over as I was doing the increases wrong, doing too many at a time.

(I also didn't gauge swatch, I figured I'd treat this part as my swatch. And yes, I know, they say "wash the swatch" but I almost never do, figuring that if you're close enough, blocking won't change things much as you can pat the sweater into shape when it's wet). So far, it looks to be on-gauge.

***

I also came home to a reminder from my doctor that I needed to get bloodwork done. As nagging always bothers me, I made an appointment for next Tuesday, seeing as things cannot wait until early October when I have a day without classes. So I get to teach my first class next Tuesday on an empty stomach, boo.

I'm also trying to clean up my diet. Oh, I eat pretty healthfully to begin with but I panic over these things and I actually wrote NO SUGAR! NO SUGAR AT ALL for the next week on the kitchen calendar. I worry, probably needlessly, about type II diabetes (and yes, I know: it's how you eat all the time, not just in the week before bloodwork, but I want things to look their best). I think the tv ads I see for the million medications they have, some you have to inject, some with scary sounding side effects, that has the paranoid part of my brain convinced that probably everyone is actually diabetic and just doesn't know it yet.

So I ate my morning oatmeal plain. No chocolate chips, no sweetener. Just the oatmeal and milk. It was....more okay than I feared it would be. Still, I hope my bloodwork comes back good so I can go back to putting something on it (NB: I cannot eat any artificial sweeteners, they either upset my stomach or give me migraines. I can do stevia, but that's it).

I don't know. It's so difficult for me. This is one of those "how you do anything is how you do everything" things - I worry about my work, if I'm doing "enough" and I feel like I can never live up to my standards for myself. It's the same with diet and exercise. I COULD push myself to do a half-hour more exercise in the evening when I get home instead of knitting. And I COULD cut way back on fruit and grain and live on a mostly vegetable and protein diet and never have anything sweet. And I don't know where the point is where you say "good enough" and have that piece of cake. I honestly can't tell you if my diet is healthier or less healthy than most people's, because all I can see are the standards I set for myself and what I read coming out of the CDC and stuff. And things like the DASH diet, that encourage eight servings of vegetables in a day. (I tried that. I tried getting six for a while. My digestion did not like it. So I've gone back to somewhere between five and seven and counting fruit as servings too)

It really does feel like everything is a moving target: you do, but you could do MORE. And it just wears me out. More exercise, more vegetables, less food that actually tastes pleasurable, less time spent just relaxing. (And I've seen several sites lately that remind us how awful sitting is for us, and we should, I guess, stand all the time, like horses or cattle....)

And I get that I'll eventually not be able to outrun the Grim Reaper, it's not that.....it's the whole fact that medicine in some sectors seems to be coming back to an idea not unlike the "you sinned, so you got sick" idea of the medieval era - "You sat too much on the job, now you have diabetes." or "You relaxed when you could have exercised, now you have heart disease" and it feels to me like unless I keep pushing, pushing, more, more, more, eventually something terrible is going to happen and someone in the health-insurance office is gonna shrug and go, "You were insufficiently pure so you are on the hook for this financially, even if you can find a doctor willing to treat you."

This is why the "fitness/wellness program" makes me so crazy - I feel like I am already doing all I can, but the impression I get is that it's not enough, it's never enough.

5 comments:

Charlotte said...

You might try a sprinkle of cinnamon on your sugar-free oatmeal.

Kucki68 said...

I am looking forward to see the scoop swatch!

As for the more, more, more I think that sitting and knitting is also important as it will give you a time where you do not need to have the pedal to the metal.

Anonymous said...

Medical profession is psychologically disturbed, I think.

On one hand, they are used to be treated as semi-gods; they paid a lot of money for their framed piece of paper, plus their office staff dependents worship them. So: self-aggrandizing.
On the other - they are judging people's health exclusively by test results - and what else can they judge on in 7min sharp they allow their patients per visit? And they will not spend more time because: greed (and student loans...and malpractice insurance...and that 3rd Lexus) But people are not getting better with their treatment - even if their tests sometimes say otherwise. Symptoms persist. Or the pills the medico prescribed give horrible side effects, worse than original complain

So, to escape it all, their knee-jerk reaction is to blame the victim. Even preventively.

At last visit with my doctor she learned about history of diabetes in my family and declared: for your next visit we're going to do pre-diabetes screening and most likely I'll prescribe lowering-appetite-medicine. WHY? My blood sugar is fine, I am not obese, my appetite is normal, not excessive. "Because!".
Because I made a mistake mentioning my family history- so I am already a marked woman, forever.

Nancy Reyes said...

One of the saddest quotes about this was uttered by Jackie Kennedy, who when dying of lymphoma lamented that if she knew she'd die of cancer in her sixties, she probably would not have dieted and exercized so much.

just enjoy yourself and remember: if you don't die of diabetes, cancer will get you.

as for "prediabetes": blame your ancestors. The metabolic syndrome gene is there to keep you from dying in famines.

Carol Mello said...

I have Type 2 Diabetes. When I was 37 years old I developed a case of vertigo and the ear doctor I went to ran lots of tests including the long version of the glucose tolerance test. In addition to measuring blood glucose, they also measured insulin level. Glucose was low normal but insulin levels were unusually high. Here I was, 5 feet 7 and 1/2 inches tall weighing 135 pounds and the doctor told me: You are going to eventually get Type 2 Diabetes no matter what you do. Because he had seen it before. If you are normal weight and normal glucose but have high insulin, you are going to get insulin resistance. Yes, I too had a family history of diabetes on my father's side. The health profession acts like anyone overweight is going to get diabetes. But diabetes is about genetics and not weight. Countries with socialized health care are publishing studies based on long term patient information in goverment health care databases. They are finding they can predict who is going to get type 2 diabetes later in life by looking at insulin levels in people who are merely in their 20s and not overweight. So it is not anything you did. You were born with the genes. Do not beat yourself up. Allow yourself 120 carbs of any type per day. That is what I was told. Mix carbs with protein and fats (perferably healthy fats but any is better than none) to lower your post meal glucose spikes. And you only need 30 minutes of exercise per day. So knit whenever you feel like it. It is more important to be happy and emotionally fulfilled than regimented and unhappy. I remembered that Jackie quote too. It was a shocker but she was right.

We have Type 2 Diabetes. We should not obsess about it. We will probably die from it but in the meantime, let's enjoy our life and let's knit as much as we want.