It’s interesting how my thoughts and feelings about life with diabetes have changed over the years.

Take, for instance, this blog post I wrote three years ago in which I wrote about my strange, strained relationship with food. I blamed my diabetes for significantly impacting how I feel about food because I have to be so careful every time I eat and make sure I carb count accurately so I don’t experience blood sugar swings while also trying to maintain a healthy, balanced diet…yeah, it’s a lot to think about every single time that I eat a snack or a meal.

So when I revisited that post in question and was reminded of my complex thoughts on food, I couldn’t help but wonder…has my diabetes really ruined my relationship with it?

My answer to this question now is a definitive no.

Do I get annoyed having to carb count everything that I eat? Sometimes, I do, that’s for damn sure. But for the vast majority of the time, it’s honestly more of a reflex for me than anything else – I’ve gotten very used to this practice in my 25+ years with diabetes, and it has become second nature over that span of time.

Plus, it’s not as though my diabetes has prevented me from enjoying the foods that I like eating, or the ones that I want to try for the first time. It can definitely mess with the timing of when I eat certain foods due to factors like glycemic index or overall carbohydrate content, but this is something that I can typically work around. Even if I don’t nail my carb count for each and every thing that I eat (which trust me, I can mess this up several times in a given week if I’m eating a wider variety of foods), I can still learn from it and apply it to the next time that I eat whatever it was that threw me off my carbohydrate game.

I’m not saying that my relationship with food is easy – it can be far from it. But I am recognizing that perhaps I’ve been a bit harsh in my previous evaluations of how I feel about food from a diabetes perspective. Maybe now that I’m taking some time to think about it more and realizing that I’m able to enjoy a nutritious and delicious menu of food, despite my diabetes, I can begin to look at my relationship with food from other angles and find ways to gain a greater appreciation for how it fuels me to live a full life – pun intended.