I can distinctly remember back in the day rocking Obsession for Men by CK and thinking I was pimping. We have to be going back about 15+ years if I had to guess. Since I’m taking a stroll down memory lane, I want to share with you my perspective on improvement whether it’s for work, personal or just about anything, but mostly related to diabetes.
In my professional life, I have been successful because I tend to become almost obsessed with A) doing the best I possibly can each and every time B) constantly trying to improve and C) learning from mistakes (mine and others) to grow personally and professionally.
No matter if I was cleaning up the kitchen, cutting the grass, raking leaves or working on a project for work or school, I found that I excelled at it because I would become obsessed with doing my best. I wouldn’t call it perfection, because I know better than trying to be perfect. I guess you could call it an obsession with determination and execution. I also found my best results with exercising, diet and weight training came when I would fully engulf myself in these activities to the point of being obsessed.
Enough of my past, I now want to share my thoughts on diabetes management. I have done well over the last 12 years by trying to take care of myself and always staying on top of my blood sugar. I’ve never considered myself obsessed with my diabetes control and I’m not sure why. It’s probably one of the most important things I could do, yet I haven’t executed on better control. I have said many times before on this blog that complacency is the enemy of good diabetes control. When I became obsessed with my weight, dieting, exercising and health at the start of this year, I noticed my blood sugars were phenomenal. You could say I became obsessed with better health all around. My wife would certainly say that I’m an exercise addict. I would counter with, that’s when I do my very best. There’s absolutely no room in my vocabulary for “half-ass”.
I also acknowledge that an obsession with things such as diabetes management can become almost a disease within itself. So this all leads up to a question I will pose to my readers:
Is the only way to really have perfect (if there were such a thing outside of a working pancreas) control with diabetes to be obsessed with the numbers, tweaking, testing, adjusting, testing, readjusting, count every carb by 10ths etc.?
To answer your question, no, I don’t think you need to be obsessed, though I think I would categorize myself as obsessed when it comes to diabetes management, so who am I to say? Because diabetes is a 24/7 thing, something you can never walk away from, I think you have to have a balance between managing it and living life. I have found that a hard balance and something that I actively work at to achieve for Caleb. I don’t want an obsession to burn him out so that one day he gives too much slack and diabetes management becomes too low of a priority.
There are so many right ways to manage D and I think it will vary from person to person.