The diagnosis may give you the sense of it suddenly “happening”, (as it did for me) but the honest truth is that to have diabetes, or to not have diabetes, was a choice you made every day for years.

For as long as we’re willing to continue blaming, we are completely powerless to change the present. It’s easy to justify blaming, because the alternative is much more difficult (in the short-term). When you choose to be accountable to your choices of the past, you might be faced with a wall of pain; it takes a great deal of courage to acknowledge the consequences of the choices you made before you had your current level of consciousness and awareness.

In being accountable to the consequences of your past choices, you have a rare opportunity to see just how far you’ve come, and just how much you’ve grown. Here’s an example that will illuminate your progress; answer these questions with pen on paper because you will integrate it more deeply:

Name one thing you did five years ago, that you choose not to do today because you realize that it harms you.
Now, name one thing you do today for your health that you learned in the last five years.

An example of something you used to do could be smoking a pack of cigarettes a day, eating deep-fried food, or consuming any of the toxins from my last post. An example of something you do now could be reading about your health, exercising more, or eating more raw food.

It begs the question, why did you stop the unhealthy behavior, and start a healthy pattern? You might be blaming someone else for your improved health too. I’ve heard people say things like, “I’m exercising more because my doctor told me to”… Bullshit! If you’re taking better care of yourself, the reason is because you’ve made it important enough. You’ve made yourself important enough. You’ve already begun to take responsibility for your choices, and the more accountable you are the consequences of your choices, the faster your health (physical, mental, and emotional) will improve.

“Don’t Read This…Your Ego Won’t Like It!” is the first book I’ve read that digs deep into the destructive force of blame, and how powerful personal accountability can be in transforming your life… so powerful that your ego is bound to hate it! It’s deep, and it’s also broken up into smaller easy to read chapters. I highly recommend you check it out, it’s got a five star rating for a reason.

and not on how they are themselves.”

~Carl Jung

Are you willing to get uncomfortable,

to completely reverse your diabetes?

Life is like a long, muggy summer; we seek comfort. Why?

It’s natural to dislike being uncomfortable, we take the path of least resistance and do what’s most “comfortable”.

Comfort comes in many forms, like old slippers, or a good friend, but have you ever considered that what brings you the most comfort, might be the way you see yourself? The stories you tell yourself about yourself?

Imagine this:

You want a “magic bullet”; a drug, a supplement, or quick fix diet that will cure all. You don’t want to face the pain of being accountable to your choices. Because you don’t want to get uncomfortable and confront the symptoms, that’s exactly what you end up with – discomfort and pain.

The person in that internal battle is fighting against the way they see themselves, and the reality of what they’re creating in their life.

It’s what many people go through during pre-diabetes and undiagnosed type 2 diabetes. Did it sound familiar? (it does to me, I went through it)

Have you grieved for the loss of your once well functioning body?

Grief is uncomfortable, however:

The only way to improve anything is by doing what is uncomfortable, yet necessary.

When I say uncomfortable, I’m not just talking about changing physical habits, like your diet and level of physical activity and fitness, though those are important too.

I mean being willing to be emotionally uncomfortable.

Ask yourself these questions, don’t settle for the first answer that pops into your head, dig deeper:

• Are you willing to fully accept the positive and negative consequences of your actions?
• What are you now willing to do to cure your diabetes that you weren’t willing to do before?
• What are you now willing to not do that you have been doing?
• Are you now willing to think differently?
• And who would you be without chronic illness?

Are you feeling uncomfortable yet?

Would you be more comfortable if you could stop taking insulin shots, stop taking strong drugs with mood altering side effects, stop losing your vision, and no more pins and needles? Because a new lease on life is the benefit of getting uncomfortable short term.

Are you willing to get temporarily uncomfortable for that kind of payoff?

Here’s another question, and I want you to know, it should make you uncomfortable. Why?
Because discomfort is the path to change. It’s the path to finding an answer to the question, “There’s got to be more to life than this, right?”

Don’t settle for the easy answer. Be willing to be uncomfortable enough to admit that the true answer may not be what you want it to be.

Watch your knee jerk reactions, and question if it might be something deeper.

“Do I deserve to be cured of diabetes?”

When I say “deserve”, I’m not talking about what you’ve done, or not done.

If you say, “Yes, because I’m exercising more” or “No, because my diet sucks”, that’s not what I’m talking about.

Those are justifications, logical rationalizations, but don’t necessarily reflect the truth of how you view yourself. (remember the opening quote?)

Do you feel that you deserve to be cured, regardless of your actions?
Unfortunately, most people see their actions as their “identity”.

Your actions have consequences, but that doesn’t mean they’re who you are.

“what does that mean?”

Saying “We are what we do” is the same as saying that a wake in the water is a boat.
The boat caused the wake through the action of moving.
The wake may be used to identify the boat by others, but that’s not what the boat is.

The wake is set in the water, while he boat is free to stop or change directions and take a new path. So are you.

Who are you, if you’re not your actions? Who are you if you aren’t your intellect? Who are you if you aren’t your Body? What does it mean if you are not your history (your wake)?

Who you are is independent of what you have done, and what you deserve is limited only by your justifications.

So how about this question:

“If I were five years old right now, would I deserve diabetes?”

Your answer?

No!

Of course.
But when we look at ourselves as adults, we don’t have the same level of compassion as we would for a child.

Shit happens, it doesn’t make you shit.

The only difference between you and a child is that you have history. Because of your history, your actions, and the reactions of others, how has your level of deserving changed?

Because the truth is, you deserve to live with vibrant health.

What would it take for you to know that you do deserve to be healthy?

Welcome to the world of uncomfortable questions

Here’s the really tough part:

There are no right answers here.

Your healing lies in asking yourself better questions, and not in obsessing over the answers.

These are principals of neuro-linguistic programming, and in this context, the purpose is to alter the way you see yourself. Maybe you’ve taken time to figure out who you are separate from your environment, to observe yourself. Maybe you’ve never even considered that there is a “you” that you could get to “see”.

Why does it matter? Because how you see yourself plays a major role in how you behave. How you behave creates your immediate physical reality, including your body and therefore your health.

For example, if you’re reading this, you probably see yourself as a human, and so you behave like one.

You can say, “Well, that’s absurd, of course I see myself as a human”. I’d like to remind you that there are cases of children raised by dogs. They are human, but they have seen themselves as dogs because that is what was reflected back to them by the “people” they grew up with, and so they behave like dogs. Even after years of attempting to integrate with humanity, most never lose the sense that they really are animals inside. Do you see yourself as a dog, due to what you saw in others around you? Who are the dogs in your family?

You are intrinsically magnificent and whole, as magnificent as you are human, and that magnificence may have been hidden because it’s not what you had reflected back to you in the people around you as you grew up.

Maybe what you saw reflected was people who neglected or damaged their bodies, or were emotionally shut down, or people who abandoned others.

If you could see yourself as someone who deserves to eat healthy living food, someone who deserves to be physically active, that would simply be normal for you, and you would not have diabetes. Unfortunately, that’s not what was modeled to you.

That is why you can hire as many personal trainers as you like and go on as many diets as you like, but until you change the way you see yourself, you will continue to go back to the old, comfortable ways which have been normal to you, and which you believe you deserve.

If you want to change the way you see yourself,

change the questions you ask yourself,

and the people you spend time with.

Seek a group of people who have no diseases, and live a naturally healthful lifestyle (Yes, they exist). Once you find them, don’t tell them about your “condition”, just notice how they behave and follow the “pack”.

Here’s one the most important questions you can ever ask yourself,

especially if you’ve had some knowing that “there’s got to be more to life than this”:

“Who am I?”

If your response is, “Well, I’m me, of course, who else could I be?”

My answer is, “Exactly. Who else could you be if you saw yourself as someone else?”
Does that sound inauthentic? How do you know that the “you” you are right now isn’t just someone you made up to please your parents?

Chances are, whoever you think you are is just the person you’re comfortable being.

Somewhere inside of you, you know that you deserve to live a vibrant, healthy life. The key is to look for the evidence that will prove to you that you do deserve that. If you can’t see it in your life now, find a new social group who see it in themselves, based on their actions. Spend enough time with them, choose to be flexible, and you will see it in yourself.

The more you ask “who am I?”, the more you gain awareness about who you have been, and the more you get to choose who you will be moving forward.

Click Here to subscribe by RSS feed. Then click “subscribe” again, and you’ll be the first to know when a new article is posted.

Yet so few of us exercise enough to be healthy.”

Who wants to feel like this?

Why is that?

Ask yourself:

When I hear the word “Exercise” what do I really think of?

Does it remind you of pain, guilt, not feeling good enough, being judged, struggling, and generally feeling terrible physically and emotionally?

Does it feel like a lot of work?

If exercise brings up any of those images, why would you do it? No one wants to feel that way.

Why is “Exercise” crammed into a tiny mental “box”?

It comes down to “Conditioning”

Everyone has experiences, and those experiences shape the way we see the world and train our behavior.

What has been your experience of exercise? Exercise doesn’t always feel good physically, especially if you haven’t been active in a while.

When you do something and it makes you feel nauseous or sore, that punishes you and makes you less likely to do it through a process called operant conditioning.

Combine that with past experiences that were painful emotionally, and you end up subconsciously programmed to avoid physical activity.

If you don’t enjoy exercising, you’re NOT going to do it.

So what can you do about it?

You need to make exercising enjoyable. Recently, I shared a way of adding a healthy reward to the end of your activity with hydrotherapy. Find something you can do that will make you want to be active.

What do you enjoy most in life? Use what already motivates you to move in the direction you want to go– Even the pain of knowing what will happen if you don’t take action.

Change the way you Think about Fitness.

If you had an unpleasant experience with exercise, don’t do whatever you were doing when you had it.

If you felt teased while running, don’t start with running. Find a new way of being active, like Pilates, hiking, going for walks with two or four legged friends, or a creative sport like ultimate frisbee.

Once you are feeling more fit and comfortable then conquer the old fears, for now you can bypass them.

You did your best back then, and now you’re going to do better, drop the guilt and move on.

The more you are physically active in an enjoyable way, the more you will see fitness as Fun.

Did you run around as a kid? Did you enjoy playing? When you were playing did you say, “This is a great way to prevent degenerative disease!”? No!

Take a child like view of being active, just do it for fun! No one wants to work for fitness, but everyone want to have fun.

As a kid, you probably had a lot more fun when you were playing with other kids. The same is true today, what ever you do will be easier, more fun and more effective if you do it with others.

If your fitness routine gets boring, do something else!

And if your issue is “I don’t have the time to be active.” The comic says it all. What do you make important?

Are you caught in, “I have to change everything, which is too hard, so I wont do anything”?

You don’t need to change everything overnight, just make consistent, incremental daily step towards optimal health.

“The only way to eat an elephant is one bite at a time!”

Studies have found that walking briskly for just 10 minutes 3 times a day is as effective as going for one 30 minute walk. Go for a 10 minute jog in the morning, then walk to and from lunch, and you’ve just got your exercise for the day!

Start small, and document your successes along the way. If you’re already following a program that works for you, journal about your progress, so that in those moments when you’re not sure if you should keep doing it you have something to motivate you to keep doing what works.

Have you seen “exercising” as a burden or obligation, or something you “should” do?

What would it take to see exercising as something joyful that you want to do at every opportunity?

Think about a time when you were being physically active that made you feel inspired, joyful, and completely alive…

Do more of that!

If you stop labeling exercise, it’s easy to get enough!