Having lunch over the weekend at work–I’ve now worked 15 of the last 16 days–one of the nurses I worked with commented that, “Food is good,” then looked at me and stated, “but for you, food is the enemy.”

It’s a double edged sword, this relationship diabetics have with food.

Like most but certainly not all Type IIs, the trigger for my diabetes was obesity. There’s no denying it–I was obese. As I said previously, my weight was either 265 (by my scale) or 272 (by my doctor’s) with a Body Mass Index (BMI) of 38, way above the 30 that’s considered obese.

Why was I obese? There’s really three different parts in that–genetics, activity level, and food.

My belief is that many people use genetics as a rationale for being overweight or obese. There are many relatives I have who are obese or at least overweight. I don’t have to look outside my immediate family for those–my father was also a diabetic (unfortunately, undiagnosed until he had a massive stroke leading to his death) and was definitely overweight at the end of his life, and my sister is likely in the obese category at this point. Yet, it’s not the case throughout the family. For instance, my dad’s brother–my uncle–is a marathon runner, and decidedly slim. More generally, if you look at health issues in my native state of Hawai’i, many of native Hawaiian descent are overweight if not obese, but if you look back to the Hawaiians at the time of their discovery by the Europeans, they were certainly not overweight or obese. So yes, genetics may play a part–see the “thrifty gene” theory in the excellent Type II Diabetes: The First Year–but it’s clearly not the only thing that matters.

Activity level is something that this entire blog covers; let it simply be known that during this time in my life I clearly wasn’t as active as I needed to be.

Finally, food. Food’s where we started this with, and food was an issue. I don’t necessarily agree that food is my enemy, but I can certainly say that it needs to be dealt with. Food doesn’t ever go away; I’ll always need to eat. And like others, I enjoy eating–the problem I have isn’t that I don’t like food, it’s that I like food too much. It’s the biggest issue in this whole equation for me–something I have to manage every day. I had to figure out my relationship with food, and improve it, or I’d be unable to win this fight, no matter what genetic and activity factors were on my side.