Fighting diabetic fatigue

It’s normal to feel tired. Everyone has days when they just can’t be arsed, everyone has moments where they think about giving up and moving to a tropical island to live with the coconuts. It’s part of life.

What everyone doesn’t have to feel with is feeling tired due to something you have no control over.

When you’re diabetic, you can’t just give up. You could move to a tropical island but the chances are there won’t be a pharmacist there, let alone a fridge to keep your insulin in. If you give up, things go wrong, fast.

That feeling of being stuck is known as diabetic fatigue, and it’s a bitch. It can creep up on you without warning and make you really resent your condition, and can even tempt you to stop looking after it.

Diabetic fatigue can easily become diabetic depression.

It often comes on after a period of bad blood sugars. You think you’ve got everything under control, but your levels keep dropping low or going high, and no matter what you do nothing seems to change. It’s like banging your head into a brick wall.

I know all about it.

When I was first diagnosed I sat in a state of mild depression for years, letting diabetes get the better of me and giving up when it came to controlling it.

I never (seriously, never) checked my blood sugar, never managed to gain any weight and never got over the feeling that it was all just totally unfair. I mean, what had I done to deserve this? Why was I being punished? Why had my life been changed so abruptly?

Years later I got properly unwell. I passed out in a Starbucks car park, spilling a very overpriced latte everywhere and cracking my skull open in the process. I did the exact same again two weeks later. My blood sugar was all over the place, I had a bleed on the brain, I looked like a skeleton and it was everyone’s fault but mine.

Diabetic fatigue was winning.

So how can you combat something that you can’t cure?

To start, you stop thinking of it as an illness and start thinking of it as a way of life. Diabetes isn’t something that will go away, so you’re wasting your time resenting it and feeling angry. If you embrace it as part of your everyday, it starts to feel like you’re in control. Think of checking your blood sugar as something that gives you freedom. If you’re in control of that, you can go out, you can exercise, you can eat, you can live.

I, for example, decided change was needed. I went hard on the gym and started paying a lot more attention to what I ate. It helped me put on some weight and look less like death. It helped make diabetes feel less like something that was dragging me down, and more like something I was living with side by side.

I’d love to know if diabetic fatigue is something you’re struggling with. This site is full of tips to help you live a happier life, but it’s not always as easy as flicking a switch. If it’s dragging you down, let me know. We’ll try and get you back up again.

On the left I weigh about 7 stone. On the right I’ve almost doubled that. Sorry about the vest top, no amount of healthy living can improve my fashion sense.

On the left I weigh about 7 stone. On the right I’ve almost doubled that. Sorry about the vest top, no amount of healthy living can improve my fashion sense.