The Man With the Insulin Pump

He looked lost. He asked us, “Do you know this area?”

“Not really.”

He almost missed the window of kismet because he wasn’t asking the right question.

“Where are you trying to go?” I asked, assuming GPS could help us figure it out.

Veggie Grill, he said, and he was in luck, because that’s where we were going. Follow us, we’ll show you the way!

The first layer of the story: This nice man is picking up something for dinner for his buddy, who is at work.

Oh, and by the way, he’s never been here before, what should he order?

The second layer of the story: This nice man has just been put on an insulin pump, after less than a year of rapid weight gain. He shows it to us. He’s the kind of workaholic who will go twelve hours on a cup of coffee, and then eat a bag of fast food in the car because he got called in to cover someone else’s shift.

Changing jobs or getting a promotion are fairly common causes of sudden weight gain.

We see it all the time. Someone will beat themselves up for gaining weight, when it’s a natural and predictable result of their punishing schedule. Especially in a caring profession, like nursing, there can be a tendency to see self-care as somehow robbing others. How can I do things like, say, eat meals or sleep, when there are people who need me??

One way to reframe this is that self-care is a way of making sure that you yourself don’t become the patient. How can you help someone if you collapse or wind up in a hospital bed yourself?

Our new friend didn’t seem to think much of his own insulin pump. Meanwhile, if someone *else* got one he would probably be all sympathy, fussing over them and trying to make sure *they* had everything they needed.

Our position is that we must care for ourselves because we consider ourselves first responders. We never want to be someone else’s crisis if we can avoid it. We’ve figured out what we needed to do in order to fit healthy meals into our extremely busy schedules. If others are curious about what we’re doing or why we’re doing it, we’re happy to answer their questions.

This is how it happened when we met the man with the insulin pump. First he asked us how to find the restaurant. Then he asked what we would recommend. We saw this as an opportunity, and we put our strategy into play.

We take turns, depending on who is asking and how they present their issue. I immediately passed this one on to my husband because he had more credibility in this case than I did.

One big dude to another, two tall and large-framed men of about the same age, both of whom look like they have a background in sports, and most likely impact sports such as football. Check, check, check.

“I used to weigh 305”

Head swivel: YOU DID???

Most people, and by “most” I include health professionals, teachers, parents, and other working adults, most people have no idea how to “eat healthy.” They are absolutely bewildered by competing plans and mutually exclusive directives. They have no idea where to start sifting through reams of information, misinformation, and disinformation.

I believe all of this will have changed dramatically over the next twenty years. A combination of big data, wearable tech, advances in research and medical devices, and snack marketing will make it much simpler and more straightforward for people to eat customized healthy diets. I also think that eventually, gamers will be the fittest athletes, but that’s a futurist article for another time. For today, everyone is as confused as possible. It helps a lot to meet someone who has something in common with you, and to hear them say, This is what worked for us.

We’ve lost a hundred pounds between us, and we’re middle-aged.

Wow, really??

They’re surprised because we don’t look like we did fifteen years ago. Nobody believes either of us was formerly obese.

We know a few dozen diabetics. We also know a bunch of people on insulin pumps and/or CPAPs or half a dozen prescriptions, and several with foot-long incisions down their torsos. Sadly, we’ve also lost quite a few friends our age who had some of these health issues, or others, people who should by rights have had decades left ahead of them. We’ll mind our own business when it comes to issues like saving for retirement or estate planning, but here, we’ll share as long as someone keeps asking questions. We like this guy and we want him to have a better outcome than our lost friends.

The basic rundown my husband gave the man with the insulin pump was, yes, eating plant-based helps “guys like us.” We didn’t go into details, but he could have pulled out his phone and shared his recent lab results, including blood pressure, resting heart rate, glucose levels, and the rest. He could have shared that at 52 years of age, he doesn’t need any prescription medication. The question on the table was sustained weight loss, and yes, ten or twelve years of a 95% plant-based diet has successfully done that for my hubby, a man who used to eat a lot of Double-Doubles.

In a roughly ten-minute conversation, this is what he told him, one man to another:

It started with Weight Watchers. I learned how to track points and avoid the foods with the highest points, like cheese. One ounce of cheese was 1/6 of my points for the entire day, and it wasn’t worth it. I memorized the list of zero-point foods, like, you can eat an entire cabbage or a head of broccoli for zero points!

This is what I told him, one fitness coach to one willing listener:

Eat four cups of vegetables a day, and eat soup, any soup that isn’t cream-based. Get one of those four-cup Pyrex measuring cups and fill it full of veggies every day. Make sure you eat something at least every four hours and pack your lunch bag ahead of time, breakfast, lunch, and snacks for the whole day.

We have a lot of practice at this conversation, my husband and I, because it comes up a lot. We’re unusually fit for people of our age. That will most likely be even more true in another ten years than it is today. We found a way to avoid the pitfalls of others around us, like going hungry all day and grabbing fast food every night because we’re too exhausted to do anything else. Even more than that, we’ve found a way to avoid winding up on prescription drugs or medical devices, something that is distressingly common.

“You can get off that thing,” we told the man with the insulin pump, “and it doesn’t even have to take very long.” He has every motivation to listen hard and then try it for himself.