Making your “atmosphere” the right one.

Question: Why is there life on earth and no life on the moon?

Answer: Because of the atmosphere on earth.

Human life needs a specific atmosphere to support it including nitrogen, oxygen, traces of argon and carbon dioxide with some water vapor. We have that kind of atmosphere here on Earth and the moon doesn’t.

We often take the earth’s atmosphere for granted and only really pay attention to it at times of severe weather conditions or natural disasters like hurricanes, droughts and bush fires. Most of the time we go about our day to day lives breathing in the oxygen and drinking the water without giving it too much thought.

Occasionally we may think about the greenhouse effect or global warming.

The Diabetes Atmosphere

Managing our own health and our own lives requires an “atmosphere” too. We need to make and create the kind of surroundings around ourselves the support and encourage each of us much in the same way that oxygen and water help to sustain life on our planet.

Our diabetes “atmosphere” includes the choices we make, the food we eat, the exercise we can take, the advice from our medical professionals, medication where required, our friends, our neighbors, our family members and our community.

We often take our own “atmosphere” for granted and as spring starts this seems like a good opportunity to have a look at the things around us and pay attention to our own diabetes “atmosphere”.

One way may be to talk about the good choices we are making at the moment. For example the changes in diet that we have made so far, the care that we are taking with looking after our feet or even our increasing knowledge of diabetes. Spend a little time appreciating these things because like the oxygen in the air we may sometimes take the good choices and changes we have made for granted. At the same time we might want to think about getting to grips with the things that we have not yet addressed. For example can we move away from choosing those fizzy drinks or the temptation to choose to ignore some of the advice from the nurse educator?

I’m sure that you have many many ideas about your own diabetes “atmosphere” and I look forward to learning all about them.

The purpose of mydiabetes is for patients, family members, friends and healthcare professionals to support and encourage each other along the diabetes journey and to add a little to the “atmosphere”.

Please continue to write about your own experiences, share your stories, swap ideas and pass on the http://www.mydiabetes.com/ details to anybody who you think may be interested.

Members are the "atmosphere" of mydiabetes.com and it was brilliant to learn that this week 20 more members joined our community.