a swift kick in the ass...

... is what I just got. According to my non-medical-expert research consisting of blood glucose testing and medical website reading ... I appear to have pre-diabetes. (i'm in the yellow in both diagrams) Groovy. And the things I am supposed to do to keep diabetes at bay longer is to lose 5-10% of my body weight and maintain an exercise schedule of walking (or some other similar activity) for 30 minutes 5 days a week. This is where the "swift kick in the ass" comes in. I don't have the energy to exercise nor are we scheduled enough. I'm just gonna have to kick my ass in gear and do it. I'm thinking of some sort of positive reinforcement (other than the obvious health benefits because hello, if that were enough i'd be out there doing it already) like allowing myself to purchase one song for my mp3 player each week that I walk at least 5 out of 7 days. At less than a $1 a song I could certainly find a way to fit that in the budget.

Of course there is also the diet issue. We eat pretty good but I'm going to start on the diabetes diet and see if it makes a difference in anything. Brett and I were talking this afternoon about working out a schedule to make ourselves stick to so we fit exercise in. It will also help us get moving earlier in the morning and hopefully get us prepared for our new schedule that will start on September 2nd. That's the day Houston starts at The Blake School and he has to be there between 7:30 and 8. It's about a 15-minute drive but with morning traffic I'm sure it will be more like 20 or 25. Then I'll drive across to the opposite side of town (another 20 minutes if not more) to drop Brody off before returning home to work. We're usually getting out of bed at 8am and getting to the daycare around 9:30am so that is going to be a big change for us. (before you call us slackers, keep in mind that several nights a week we step out to the office after the kids go to bed and work until 2am or so)

I also found that it's fairly common for people with diabetes to suffer from arthritis. The hypoglycemic-type symptoms I've been having are also symptoms of hypothyroidism and since my blood sugar is telling me I'm closer to diabetes than hypoglycemia (both run in my family - hypoglycemic grandma and diabetic grandfather & uncle) I'm really curious to see my test results on Monday. Luckily, the doc that I go see tested my thyroid (TSH, T3 & T4) along with everything else. Less than 48 hours until I get the results.