Holiday Excess is Nearly Over and Diet Season is Coming

I am seeing people all over the web posting messages blaming themselves for being weak, sinful and worthless because they have been eating all the same holiday fare everyone else eats and seeing their blood sugars soar.

In fact, they are doing exactly what everyone else does this time of year. All that is different is that they have diabetes and blood sugar meters so they KNOW what the impact is on their bodies of this season of "holiday joy."

There are a lot of factors that have nothing to do with personal worthlessness which have been driving us all to eat: It's dark. It's cold. Millions of years of evolutionary pressures have taught our bodies to store every bit of nourishment we can get this time of year because it is going to be four long months until the first green shoots appear, and unless we've packed away a good store of body fat we may not live to see that distant Spring.

And, of course, this is also the time of year when zillions of advertising dollars are put into convincing us that everyone else has a much more wonderful family and far more thoughtful friends than we do. Merchants give us the message that we can only demonstrate our love for others by showering them with perfectly chosen, extremely expensive gifts. To make it even worse, to mention our less than positive feelings this time of year risks being labeled a "Scrooge." Is it any wonder that comfort eating can quickly escalate into obsessional drownings in food and drink?

The good news is that the Season of Excess is almost over. On Friday the supermarkets will put diet food on the "Seasonal Aisle" and for a few brief weeks everyone --with or without diabetes--will struggle to undo the dietary damage they've done to themselves through the holiday season.

Most will fail. By Superbowl Sunday, the supermarkets will replace the diet food in the "seasonal" aisle with chips and dip and cheese whiz. But if you are sick of being out of control, January 2 is a great time to use the momentum of the brief Diet Season to achieve some small but useful goal.

Keep your chosen goal simple. Do not resolve to lose 100 lbs, go to the gym five times a week, get control of your spending and achieve a 4.7% A1c. Indulging in fantasy is fun, but unless you chose a goal you have a good chance of achieving in three weeks, your "goals" will remain fantasies.

My goal this January is to lose the weight I put on this holiday season--3 to 5 lbs. I was able to keep my blood sugar in range the whole time, which I'm proud of, but only by using more insulin than usual, which invariably leads to weight gain.

So I'll be cutting carbs so that I can cut my insulin dose. I'll also have to cut back dramatically on calories because that is the only way I can lose weight. I do this every January and I know that by Super Bowl Sunday I will be sick of it, but hopefully by then I will have knocked off a few pounds and gotten back into better eating habits.

Are you setting yourself any special goals for January?