I’m Amy Ryan, and I started this blog to share my story and help others looking for inspiration and motivation to prevent diabetes and improve their health from the inside out.
“Picture of Health” is meant to convey an irony – that you can appear to be the very image of “healthy” and yet, under the surface, problems are brewing. I am a case in point: a slender person diagnosed with pre-diabetes before age 40. No one ever believes me when I tell them I’m pre-diabetic, because in our culture, being slender is synonymous with “healthy.” Just as being overweight does not necessarily make one “unhealthy,” being thin is only one indicator of health, and maybe not even the most important one.
Appearances can be deceiving. When my A1c levels started creeping up, I looked and felt fine. But that’s how this disease starts – insidious and invisible. You don’t feel a thing. I knew I had to pay attention to the numbers, to what was going on at the cellular level, not just how I looked on the outside.
Where to begin? I found very few resources for pre-diabetes when I first was diagnosed. Thankfully, that is changing now, as the problem becomes more widely recognized. But I could see that my doctor’s well-intentioned advice, to “be careful with diet and exercise,” wasn’t going to be enough. I realized that no one was going to spoon-feed me in terms of what changes to make and how to make them. So I began to do research and experiment on my own.
Every single choice you make impacts your health at some level, whether you’re pre-diabetic or not. Nutrition, exercise, sleep, lifestyle – and family. Your family and close friends are integral to your health, as you and your choices are to theirs. All of these elements make up your “picture of health.”
So these are all topics for this blog. I’m not a doctor, dietician, or wellness coach — but I made the decision to break with my old lifestyle and put myself and my family on a new course, and I’m passionate about supporting others who would like to do the same. We need all the support we can get!