Aren’t you ashamed of yourself?

Most of us can still remember those words of admonishment from our mothers years ago. And many of us berate our kids with that phrase now.

When what we do is bad — when we violate the Golden Rule — the innate sense of shame that all normal people have can lead us back to ethical behavior. This normal human emotion can bring us to maturity in our actions.

But many of us are ashamed of who we are or the diseases we have. We feel shame about the physical condition of our bodies.
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Like most people, I used my pedometer passively to note how many steps I took each day. Now I use it as a prod for better performance and to help control my diabetes.

We can use pedometers to motivate us to get enough of the moderate-intensity physical activity we need. The government’s official 2008 Physical Activity Guidelines for Americans, which I covered here last year, calls for us to get a minimum of 150 minutes of this moderate-intensity exercise each week. That can work out to 30 minutes on five days of the week. We can also get it in shorter bouts, typically of 10 minutes each time.

But many of us can’t figure out what “moderate-intensity” means. Until I read a brand new research report, I certainly didn’t.
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Last night I returned from my first long road trip since learning I have diabetes. Trying to eat as well as I could and making time for enough exercise every day were the challenges that I had not addressed before.

On the last leg of my 4,500 mile journey I was musing last night about these challenges and what I had learned about them and myself. I was on the road for 27 days, traveling alone, except for my SUV, my laptop computer, my camera, and other essentials.

Traveling in the off-season gave me tremendous flexibility. Nowhere were the highways or parks crowded, except at the Grand Canyon. I can only imagine with dread what the crowds of summer will be there. Never once did I need to make a motel or restaurant reservation.
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When we lose weight, we need to lose our fat and not our muscles. But few of us eat enough protein to succeed.

That’s the conclusion of a study that The Journal of Nutrition just published. “A Moderate-Protein Diet Produces Sustained Weight Loss and Long-Term Changes in Body Composition and Blood Lipids in Obese Adults” appears in the journal’s March 2009 issue. The abstract is online.

A team of nine researchers followed the weight-loss efforts of 130 people at the University of Illinois and Penn State University. Led by Professor Emeritus of Nutrition Donald K. Layman, Ph.D. of the University of Illinois department of food science and human nutrition, the researchers watched how well the participants in the study succeeded during four months of active weight loss and eight months of maintenance.
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We think about controlling our diabetes with diet and exercise and usually with medication too. Seldom do we even consider the fourth leg.

But a study published in the latest issue of the Annals of Behavioral Medicine and a forthcoming one by a Ph.D. student who just wrote me emphasizes the importance of our emotions for controlling our diabetes. Emotional health and diabetes health are a two-way street — a bidirectional relationship. When our emotional level is positive, we can more easily control our diabetes. And when we control our diabetes, we feel better.
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When my friend Joe Anderson told me a couple of years ago that he prefers glucose to fructose, I thought he was nuts. After all, glucose has a glycemic index of 103, while that of fructose is only 15.

I had never seen a scientific study showing that using fructose was worse for us than using glucose. I have now.

A study team led by Karen Teff, Ph.D., of the Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia reported its findings a few days ago in the Journal of Clinical Endocrinology and Metabolism. The Monell Center sent me a copy of the full text of the study, “Endocrine and metabolic effects of consuming fructose- and glucose-sweetened beverages with meals in obese men and women: influence of insulin resistance on plasma triglyceride responses.” The abstract is free online.
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The best herbal tea is more a matter of personal preference than the other stuff that we put in our mouths. Unlike food and other drinks that can have some nutritional benefit or disadvantage, herbal tea doesn’t have any proven nutritional impact. Some teas just taste better than others.

But when we drink more of the nutritionally neutral herbal tea, we’re likely to drink less of the bad stuff. We are even less likely to eat less of the bad stuff.

Drinking herbal tea puts something in your mouth, something that people with diabetes especially like to do. The herbal tea is an alternative to eating or drinking something that will give us unnecessary calories between meals.
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