How do you break the connection. . .

When diabetic spouse believes that if he has a burger, he simply HAS to have french fries with it?  And if he has French fries, he has to have a gallon of catsup with those. I have tried and tried to both tell him and show him that you do NOT have to have those  fries with burgers (I used to get the smallest-possible packet and eat maybe a half-dozen of them, just for the taste and texture, but then he would take any left-over ones that I would have thrown away and add them to his own plate, so I quit ordering them altogether.)

Or another case:  if he has a sandwich - any kind - he believes that he simply MUST have "something crunchy" to go with it.  The favorite "something crunchy" is potato chips.  If they are not available (as they usually aren't, in my house,) he will settle for pretzels, corn chips, even dill pickles.  But he will refuse to eat the sandwich, not matter how hungry he is, until he has rooted through the kitchen, refrigerator and pantry to find "something crunchy," or he can barely get the sandwich down.

It seems to me that this kind of "linking" - i.e, if you have A, then you MUST also have B with it - is something that must have been "conditioned" a long time ago, to be set so firmly and so irrationally. There is no reasoning or arguing him out of it.

Oh - and I also left out my favorite - ANYTHING chocolate - even something as tiny as a single Hershey's kiss or one of those TINY Halloween-sized candy bars - MUST be washed down with a full, 8 - 12 ounce glass of milk.  Go figure.  He can't just enjoy the chocolate for its own sake.

Is there any way to break these "gotta have it" connections???

Another question for those with more experience:

Is it common for people with blood sugar issues to get profoundly sleepy shortly after they eat?  Unless it's a huge pig-out like what sometimes happens at Thanksgiving, I usually have lots of energy after I eat.  My DH, on the other hand, tends to fall asleep, either on the sofa or in his favorite chair.  He likes to have the TV on, but even if the program is absolutely fascinating, he almost always falls asleep.  Is this typical?

Just wondering.

Hubby has lost about 25 pounds!

He was like a little kid today.  I had been out grocery shopping when he got home, and he was practically dancing with excitement to show me the scales.  We have the kind with slidey weights, like they use at the doctor's office.  It was just a hair above 250 lbs.  By this time next week, if all goes well, he should be able to slide the "big" weight down to the 200 mark, which hopefully will be a big psychological boost for him.

I thought he had started at around 262, but he confessed that he had actually been closer to 275 a couple of months ago.  So he has made a significant start.  I let him know how proud I was of his efforts and did the best I could to celebrate along with him.

I really think that there has been a shift in the way he thinks about food.  At least he is beginning to be aware of what and how he eats.  He doesn't just shove endless quantities of food into his mouth while watching TV.  I realize there will probably be setbacks, but I feel very encouraged just by the AWARENESS.  It's a start.

Could sugar issues have been responsible for years of tantrums?

My DH came from a family of angry people.  Anger was freely and frequently aired in their household.  (My family was just the opposite - emotionally constipated, maybe - and to this day, I have difficulty expressing anger unless I'm so furious that I just can't hold it back any more.)

I had heard from DH's children that "Dad has a temper," but I had never witnessed it until we were engaged, with maybe two weeks to go until the wedding.  Then he had a screaming fit about something that seemed incredibly trivial to me at the time.  I wondered, "What the bloody Hell am I getting myself into??"

But it always seemed to me that behind the largely irrational temper outbursts, there was a genuinely kind, sensitive and caring person.  I still believe this is true, and we have been married for nearly 20 years.

But there have been times - not that many,  but significant - where it seemed to me that he went absolutely berserk about things that struck me as relatively trivial.  I used to think that this was because of childhood traumas.  (Everybody has childhood traumas over one thing or another, don't they??)

For example, early in our marriage, he went stark, raving mad, in a screaming fit, over a roll of misplaced Scotch tape.  I pointed out that it was no big deal to walk across the store and buy another one.  But no - he continued to rant, rave, and scream at me and the kids for three or four HOURS, until the tape was located.  I thought for years that maybe he had lost something as a small child and had been either severely punished for it, or threatened with terrible punishment, and that this was why he comes unglued if he misplaces something. (He has often said he remembers very little about his childhood.)

But now I wonder - could these fits of rage have been due to blood sugar highs or lows?  He has never gone to the doctor very often; he is a great believer in "toughing it out."  But to the best of my knowledge, nobody has ever said that there was anything irregular in his lab work until recently.

Any enlightenment would be appreciated.

Where do you find Diabetes 101 in the Medical Dept??

Our primary care doc told my hubby "OK, you have diabetes.  You need to lose about a hundred pounds and start exercising."  THAT'S IT!!  And this doctor is retiring in a couple of months, so he won't be around for follow-up care.

I feel like somebody just told me, "Sorry to tell you this, but you are blind and you will be blind for the rest of your life.  Have a nice day."

HELLO???  I need tools to deal with this!  If you are blind, you need skills like mobility training and Braille and stuff like that.

I know that DH needs to be followed by an endocrinologist.  Both of us need education in how to live with this disease.  I need to learn more about meal planning and cooking (both of which I loathe; I'd love to move to Mexico and have a live-in cook.  We both speak Spanish so this would not be too hard.) Nobody has said anything about getting a glucometer or whether we even need to worry about this yet.  How will we know?  DH had lab work done on his last doctor visit but we don't have the results back yet.

I'm the one who is going to have to get pushy with the medical system and find out about all this.  DH is being very passive about it.  (Maybe if we don't think about it, it will go away.)  I had DH specifically question our doctor about this stuff and the doctor said, very sadly, "All of that is pro-active.  The medical system is not geared that way.  That's one of the reasons I'm retiring; I'm sick of bucking a system that wants to stall and wait until people become irreversibly ill before they do anything."

This makes me really angry.  What about people who aren't educated enough to research things in the library or on the internet, and haven't any idea where to start or what to do?  Or people who aren't assertive enough to speak up on their own behalf?  I spent 30 years as a government beaurocrat so I can step up to the plate and really get in peoples' faces if I have to - and I will do it for people I love.  But why should I have to?  Why can't they say, "OK, you've been diagnosed with diabetes, here's what you need to do. . ."

He's started sneaking food. . .

It isn't easy playing Jiminy Cricket.  I have tried to be very encouraging, praising every pound lost and saying things like, "We'll start over tomorrow" when a day hasn't been too good.  Portion control is very difficult, especially when he acts like he is on the Bataan Death March and I know perfectly well that he has eaten enough - or more - today.

I don't want to be TOO repressive because I don't want him to start sneaking behind my back.  But after he had been bugging for a while to have more food, I reminded him that he had just had his snack for the evening and maybe a nice glass of ice water would be good.

I heard some odd goings-on out in the kitchen and went to investigate.  He was stuffing the remnants of a slab of bread and butter in his mouth.  He looked guilty, but he did it anyway.

I'm NOT a flipping warden on Death Row!  I'm a wife and I don't aspire to be a widow!  There must be a fine line between helping somebody and imprisoning them, but I haven't learned the fine points yet.  I'll be grateful for any help I can get.  I'm still new at this.