The Rosa Chronicles: The Ups, the Downs, and the Wardrobe Changes

Sometimes you seek guidance from others instead of trusting what you are already doing. This was my experience this week when I sought out help from a nutritionist in my fight against diabetes. Here's what happened. As I have mentioned in previous posts, I have been taking a nutrition course online. It has been great; I have learned a lot and as a result have been able to make some changes to my diet. Now I know the balance I must have between carbs, protein and fat, and I have been adjusting my meals to try to keep with that goal. This has meant that I have had to let go of some foods that I liked but that were not contributing anything but empty calories to my diet. I have moved away from refined grains to whole grains, I am looking at foods with a low sodium count, and I am making sure I get my recommended servings of fruits and vegetables. All in all, it has been a great course...until two weeks ago. Constant companions: fresh fruit and a scale to weight my food. The w

I knew it when I saw the name on my phone screen. "Rosa? This is Dr. Nance." Before she continued, I said "They found something." "Yes," she said. "The mammogram shows something on your right breast. You need to come in for more tests." Wait, what? Did she just said "right breast"?  "That is weird," I told Dr. Nance, trying to keep my composure, "because I found something on my left breast, but nothing on the right one." A couple of days before my scheduled annual mammogram, I was doing a self-examination and found a lump by my left armpit. I asked Andrew to check it out; since I have been working out and doing weights, I thought perhaps it was a muscle; but there was definitively something in there. I was glad my appointment was scheduled for the following Saturday. "What is next," I asked. Dr. Nance said that I had to go in for more diagnostic tests and that she was going to include both both

As much as sometimes we hate it, change is a constant in our lives. It is exactly what keeps us renewing ourselves, reinventing ourselves over and over so that we can keep up with...well other changes that are going on around us. That is what I have been going through for the past couple of months, but most focused during the past two weeks. Two weeks ago I started a Nutrition course through Coursera.org . The course, which lasts 6 weeks, covers a variety of issues as they relate to nutrition, such as heart disease, cancer, and obesity and weight management. This week, we are are working on Diabetes, which is of a lot of interest to me as a Type 2 diabetic . So, in the process of completing my weekly readings and assignments, I have learned a lot of of things about my diet (and by my diet I am talking about what I eat on a regular basis; I am not following a specific diet). For example, one of my assignments required me to track my food intake for a period of 24 hours, including w