Living with Diabetes and Lapband

It really wasn't hard. It took the following:

• Sleeping right -- and it isn't that easy
• Exercising
• Eating right
• Having the right attitude -- and that was a hard one too

So let me take one thing at a time:

Sleeping right
Again, this can be the hardest thing. Remember, my first entry tells that I have sleep apnea. This has been attributed to an accident I was in when I was 20, where my jaw was broken. It has been theorized that I have been suffering from sleep apnea for almost 20 years untreated.

This goes back to the insurance game too. I had two allergy doctors who were convinced I needed to go through a sleep study and that I probably had sleep apnea. However, my primary care physician refused to listen to them and would not refer me. Dummy me listened to him, not the specialists.

I should have changed primary care physician because he was not getting me the treatment I needed. In fact, he begrudged even sending me to allergy specialists and wanted to treat me himself, even though my previous HMO insisted I see an allergy specialist. I am sure he did that to get more money.

The previous HMO was organized much better than my current one. They owned the facility, and hired their own doctors to work the facility. When they saw that many of their patients needed to see a particular type of specialist, they hired one and set up the facility for that specialist. What I should have done, was to switch primary care physicians until I found one that would send me to the sleep study. At the time, I didn't know enough about sleep and didn't have enough sense to do that.

By the time I did see a sleep specialist and get a sleep study done, I was very close to dying from sleep apnea. I was so bad, I could be at the board, going over a lesson, with a book in one hand and a marker in the other and fall asleep. It was very embarassing, but something I couldn't help.

But I'm getting off topic. In order to lose weight you must get enough sleep, and it must be high quality sleep. You need to go to bed at the same time, and get up at the same time every day. Try not to nap, with some exception, which I'll mention below.

Exercising
I can maintain my current weight if I exercise 30 minutes 5 days a week. I lose weight if I go any over that, as long as I maintain a good diet. The more I do, the more weight I lose. You do have to build up slow.

Eating Right
I don't make good choices, so I went and got some help on this. I went to an outfit called Diet Gourmet. This is close to the house, my husband likes it, and it makes life REAL easy. I'm sure if you do some looking, you can find something like this in your area. I would also suggest seeing a nutrionist. Now since I've become diabetic, I've done some adjusting on the meals, and I make sure that none of my meals are over 75 grams of carbs. Their breakfasts are way too high for me, as I do better with zero carbs in the morning. More on that later.

I substitute their meal salads for any meal that is too high in carbs for me, or if I just don't like that lunch. I also mix and match some of the evenings meals. They do a line of extremely low carb dinners that I swap for some of the higher carb dinners, or ones that I just don't like.

Attitude
You have to like yourself, and you have to believe in what you are doing. That's as hard to do as sleep. The good news is that I found a tool to help both the sleep and the attittude. Hypnosis. Yeah, you heard me hypnosis.

It was actually the idea of my sleep (pulmonary) specialist. I was having trouble going to sleep because I was anticipating pain. I actually went to Dallas Hypnosis center, and they do have a good set of canned tapes. Their individual hypnosis didn't work that well for me, but the group hypnosis did a lot for me. I actually don't recommend them any more. What I do recommend, is contacting the mental health portion of your insurance and asking for a specialist that does hypnosis.

There are a lot of reasons I don't recommend lay hypnosis. To be able to be hynpotized and for it to work, you and the hynpotist need to believe in what you are doing. Frankly, the only person who believed in himself was the guy who was running the place, and he even was a bit of a con artist, which made it all stop working. The other problem with this approach is the cost. They do it in a package.

I did have good results with a Psychologist who specializes in weight loss, called Dr. Davisson. He charged a flat fee -- the first was most expensive, and the follow ups were cheaper. He produced a personalized tape for you each time you visited him. I like this route better as you can schedule the appointments according to what you can afford and you can walk away from it any time.

But most of all, I recommend going through your insurance company.

And I'll be making more entries about losing weight, since I have managed to lose some even on insulin.

FYI: The weight did come back ... I had some major life events that interrupted the sleep and changed the attitude. I also think the diabetes had a major factor in gaining the weight back.