By Martha Funnell MS, RN, CDE

Daily diabetes care is all about making choices—what you will eat, whether you will exercise or take your medicines and how often you will check your blood glucose level.

For many people, the daily care of diabetes involves making changes. These changes often include the kind of physical activity you do, how you eat, how you handle stress, whether you are quitting smoking, what medications you are taking and whether and how you are checking blood glucose levels.

Some people find these changes easy to make, but for many people, these changes are a daily struggle. They just cannot seem to find the willpower they need to make and stick to changes.

Many people try to make all sorts of changes in their lives all at once, often right after they learn they have diabetes. You may have been told by your health care provider that you “need to” or “have to” make these changes for the sake of your health. But it is also common for people to run out of steam gradually and give up.

Finding the wilpower you need

Sometimes people give up because they were trying to do too much at once. Sometimes it is because they were trying to make changes in response to a scary diagnosis. Or maybe they were trying to please their family or health care provider. Sometimes it is because they feel like they just don’t have the will power.

Willpower is not something that some people are born with and others are not. Willpower is simply the sum of how important it is to you and how confident you feel you can make the change.

How important is it to you?

It is easier to make changes and stick with them if you feel they are important. The changes people struggle with most are those that feel imposed or forced on them. It is human nature to resist making changes that others tell us we need to make, no matter how good the advice is.

Ask yourself: “How important is this change to me, on a scale of 1-10,” with 10 being very important. Let’s say you have decided to lose weight. If your honest answer to this question is five, then it is only mildly important to you. Then ask yourself what it would take to change your answer to a seven? To a nine? If nothing would raise your answer, then you may want to put weight loss on hold for now. If there is something that you need to do first to help it become more important, then take care of that first. For example, learn about how this change will help you. Once you have reached that goal, you can go back to the question of how important losing weight is to you.

How confident are you?

Experts tell us that you will be more likely to succeed in making changes if you are confident that you will succeed. As the saying goes: “Whether you believe you can or cannot, you are probably correct.” If you are like most adults, you have probably tried to make changes in your eating or physical activity habits at some point in your life. Your feelings about those experiences will no doubt affect your confidence. While it is important to learn about yourself from what happened, try not to let them affect your belief in yourself.

Increasing your activity level?

If you are thinking of increasing your activity level, ask yourself, “How sure am I that I can exercise more, on a scale of 1-10,” with 10 being very sure. Then, ask yourself what it would take to change your answer to an even higher number. You might also want to ask yourself what might lower your number. In other words, there may be barriers that you will face, and it is a good idea to plan ahead for how to deal with them. Many people find that it helps to focus on the daily choices, rather than the future goal. It will also be easier if you break a big change into several smaller steps. Take one day at a time. Success along the way will boost your confidence and help keep you on track.