Diabetes/Obesity
No, I am not diabetic...yet and far from ever being obese, but these are my other favorite diseases. I decided to study Health Promotion and Disease Prevention in college, what does that title tell you I learned....not a whole lot. It was a very board science major and you could then kind of tailor make an emphasis. All I knew when I was going through school applications, was that the title explained my life. I was preventing rapid decline of my own disease and the commitment to daily therapies was providing me health. I've always felt health has to be earned, you just don't acquire it. During my time at school I worked on a number of projects and presentations on different diseases, but diabetes and obesity received more attention. I even worked on a research project, studying the affect of a high fiber, low sugar diet in Latino teenage girls. They were deemed pre-diabetic due to certain risk factors. Diabetes II is associated a lot of the time with being over weight, if diet and weight are changed the onset or the severity can be delayed. Brilliant, I thought, by changing your lifestyle you could prevent disease or you could work at getting rid of your disease, I've got to get people excited about this! I felt I could relate to people by sharing how I've tailor made my day to curb the side effects of CF. How by taking care of myself, I am not a hopeless diseased person and my daily life will benefit.
One of my first classes peaked my interest in the area of nutrition. When I saw elementally what fat and sugar do in the body, I became an excited nerd. There is so much hidden sugar in our foods these days and many people don't realize unused sugar is stored as fat. WHOA, what! And your body is super eager to use up sugar and not so much fat. Fat cells fill up quicker than the outside of a Best Buy on Black Friday, but release fat slower than me getting out of bed on Monday. This nutrition class was part food science and part communication. Our main class project was focused on how to communicate facts to the public. We all know the 'best idea' so far in this area, was listing the calories and breakdown of components of foods at fast food restaurants...HAHAHA I'm sorry and how do I apply that to real life? That doesn't help anyone answer the question, why am I so fat!
I always have felt uneasy working with an overweight population. Why would they want to listen to a skinny, frail white girl like me? But I think we could find some common ground, the struggle of maintaining a healthy weight. For me I've discovered its all how your body processes and stores fats and sugars. As I've learned in CF care, CF affects every patient differently, mainly due to gene variations, but other bodily factors just allow the disease to manifest differently. If you take the time to listen and learn from your body, you can take the cookie-cutter treatments (CF protocol) and adjust it to your body. These past 2 weeks, I've done just that, I now only do Hyper-Sal 7% once a day. I've found it to be quite irritating recently. That's what I see most often people struggling with weight, they take only the cookie-cutter approaches. So I hope to find some avenue where health education or counseling can really tailor make health care to people.
One of my first classes peaked my interest in the area of nutrition. When I saw elementally what fat and sugar do in the body, I became an excited nerd. There is so much hidden sugar in our foods these days and many people don't realize unused sugar is stored as fat. WHOA, what! And your body is super eager to use up sugar and not so much fat. Fat cells fill up quicker than the outside of a Best Buy on Black Friday, but release fat slower than me getting out of bed on Monday. This nutrition class was part food science and part communication. Our main class project was focused on how to communicate facts to the public. We all know the 'best idea' so far in this area, was listing the calories and breakdown of components of foods at fast food restaurants...HAHAHA I'm sorry and how do I apply that to real life? That doesn't help anyone answer the question, why am I so fat!
I always have felt uneasy working with an overweight population. Why would they want to listen to a skinny, frail white girl like me? But I think we could find some common ground, the struggle of maintaining a healthy weight. For me I've discovered its all how your body processes and stores fats and sugars. As I've learned in CF care, CF affects every patient differently, mainly due to gene variations, but other bodily factors just allow the disease to manifest differently. If you take the time to listen and learn from your body, you can take the cookie-cutter treatments (CF protocol) and adjust it to your body. These past 2 weeks, I've done just that, I now only do Hyper-Sal 7% once a day. I've found it to be quite irritating recently. That's what I see most often people struggling with weight, they take only the cookie-cutter approaches. So I hope to find some avenue where health education or counseling can really tailor make health care to people.