The Ten Cannots (1916)

1.  You cannot bring about prosperity by discouraging thrift.
2.  You cannot strengthen the weak by weakening the strong.
3.  You cannot help the poor man by destroying the rich.
4.  You cannot further the brotherhood of man by inciting class hatred.
5.  You cannot build character and courage by taking away man’s initiative and independence.
6.  You cannot help small men by tearing down big men.
7.  You cannot lift the wage earner by pulling down the wage payer.
8.  You cannot keep out of trouble by spending more than your income.
9.  You cannot establish security on borrowed money.
10.  You cannot help men permanently by doing for them what they will not do for themselves.

– William J. H. Boetcker (1874-1962)

Today I found out how frustrating it can be when the so-called “specialists” and “experts” aren’t even up on the latest research in their own field.

When I was first diagnosed with Diabetes, I started taking a single medication and it seemed to really be helping. However, the first blood test that I took showed that I had high cholesterol/triglycerides (common in people with high blood glucose). As a result, my doctor prescribed me Niaspan (extended release Niacin). Immediately, almost all of the progress I had made since taking diabetes medication disappeared and left me almost in the same place I was before (fasting blood glucose around 300 mg/dL).

I told my doctors of the problem and that I suspected Niaspan as the culprit because I had read somewhere that was a possible side effect. They insisted it was temporary and it would come back down. Almost a year later with no further progress on bringing down my blood sugar, I came across a discussion of a study that suggested that Niaspan increases insulin resistance which results in loss of glycemic control. Finally, after much arguing and attempts to guilt-trip me, they relented and prescribed me a statin instead.

Since switching from Niaspan to Simvastatin, my blood sugar readings have come down dramatically – 168 mg/dL so far this month. This is the lowest average I’ve seen, even pre-Niaspan. I’m certainly looking forward to my next A1C to see if it’s come down from the 8.8% in December.

Some of the trust I had in my regular physician has been lost for two reasons. First, he was not aware of the study and second he had the “I know better” attitude and refused to listen to me as the patient. Not being aware of the study I can forgive, he’s not a specialist in this disease but to not listen to the patient is a serious problem. My physician prescribed additional expensive, no-generic-available medications to treat my still-high blood glucose that most likely occurred because of the interaction with another medication he prescribed. So, I decided it was best to go see an Endocrinologist for a 2nd opinion on my course of treatment.

The appointment with the Endocrinologist went pretty well and she acknowledged that Niaspan can have the effect of increasing insulin resistance in some people. She agreed that the medications I’m taking are the right ones and we discussed some different options for getting off of some of the, assuming that I can meet my weight goals. However, there were a few things that came up that concerned me about her.

First, she said that being overweight causes diabetes. This is a toxic myth because it blames the victim. It sets the expectation with medical professionals who are taught this nonsense that you did something to get yourself into the situation and that you likely won’t do anything to get yourself out of it. I tried to tell her that there is new evidence that points to genetics being the cause of insulin resistance which in turn causes diabetics to be overweight (the more diabetes genes you have, the worse the insulin resistance), but she got the “I know better” attitude with me. Granted, I don’t have a medical degree but I can read and understand things written by people who do. Even I can understand that not all overweight people have diabetes and not all diabetics are overweight.

Second, she told me that I needed to be on a low-carb, low-fat diet. I can only imagine this comes from a) the need to reduce blood sugar through carb restriction and b) the need to reduce cholesterol/triglycerides through fat restriction. However, she stated herself that the high blood sugar is also the cause of the high triglycerides and out-of-balance cholesterol. Studies have shown that when carbs are restricted, the body is forced to burn the excess fat resulting in a better lipid profile without medication or a low-fat diet.

I know this from experience because several years ago, before being diagnosed with Diabetes, I went on the Atkin’s diet after reading his book, lost 60 lbs and my doctor took me completely off all of my cholesterol and blood pressure medications. I didn’t gain the weight back because I started overeating, I gained it back because the diet is unsustainable long-term and I went back to eating “normally”.

On top of all of that, the  diet she suggests doesn’t even make logical sense. How can you restrict 2 of the 3 macronutrients that your body burns for fuel? How can you possibly get enough energy from eating primarily protein without adding either carbs or fat? My experience is that you can achieve low-fat or low-carb but not both.

(Side note: The New York Times had an awesome article about the history of food fads,including the low-fat and low-carb fads, called Unhappy Meals. Go read it and tell me it’s not right on the money.)

To summarize, my frustation boils down to one simple thing. As a diabetic, you start to view food as the enemy. You cannot simply sit down to enjoy a meal and not think about the effects it’s going to have. I was hoping for a little comfort or reassurance that the doctors are on my side – that I’m doing what I’m supposed and they are rooting for my success. Instead, I realize that no one else has my best interests in mind except for me. To them, I’m just the overweight guy who gave himself a chronic disease, but more importantly, is going to help them make their next boat payment.

So, here’s what I’m doing about it. First, I’m taking charge of my medications. I’m no longer going to take medications because the doctor told me to. I’m going to do my own research and I have the means to measure the effects of most of my medications. I’m not going to wait for permission to stop taking a medication. If  I stop and my monitoring shows negative results, I can always start taking it again. I know my own body and I should listen to it.

Second, I joined Dailyburn, a social nutrition and fitness website and I’m loving it. I can track literally everything. Everything I eat, every metric, and every exercise. I can join groups, add friends as motivators, do challenges (e.g. Biggest Loser competition), and find new workouts. I can have my progress and activities posted to Twitter (see my Lifestream). My next goal is to get a Wi-Fi enabled scale that automatically updates Dailyburn with my new weight whenever I step on it.

I know, it’s nuts to share so much information.. but it works better than you would think to keep me motivated and that’s what I need most.

I’d like to wish everyone a joyous and memorable Christmas. I’m grateful to have this time with my family so that I can  try to make each and every Christmas one that my children will remember and tell their children about. Our family traditions are unique to us and, while they may resemble traditions other families share, we have grown them with our own special flavoring. The seeds of these traditions began with those that my wife and I each had with our families as we grew up. We’ve taken these and made them into something unique and special to us.

• We always follow Santa on Norad’s Santa Tracker using Google Earth. As Santa makes his way along his route, the kids’ excitement builds and eventually come to tell us that they need to go to bed so that Santa will come to our house.
• We always watch A Christmas Story at least once, but sometimes it just stays on in the background as TBS plays it in their yearly 24 hour marathon. I first watched this movie in elementary school as the last activity we did before school let out for Christmas break. Everyone said Ralphie looked just like me and I accepted that as a compliment, though you might be surprised that I’m quite not so cute anymore.
• The kids always try to convince us to open a gift Christmas Eve and each year we insist that they should wait until Christmas morning and open all of their gifts at once. Inevitably, though, the kids win the argument against our feeble protests and we let them open just one.
• The kids always bake cookies for Santa to eat along with a tall glass of cold milk. The last couple of years, though, Santa has requested sugar-free cookies and skim milk.
• We always try to get up before the kids so that we can have the camera ready so that when they come wandering out of their rooms wiping the sleep from their eyes and squinting at the bright lights, we can see their expressions as they gaze on all of the things that were left under the tree for them.

These are just a few of the hundreds of little things we do to make this holiday our own. This year will be the first year that we don’t have to travel at all to see family. We’re so excited to be able to spend all of Christmas Eve and Christmas Day together, playing with our new toys.

I was appalled when I realized the other day that the most recent post I made was on January 4, 2009. I find it (Alanis Morissette) ironic that the first (and almost only) post of the year was about my goal to become a more social person. Go ahead and read that post (or just find it on the main page, you won’t have to scroll very far). I’ll wait.

So, how did I do, you ask?

Small talk was one area that I actually felt like I improved. I made a point to speak with people I randomly met in the elevator and to ask acquaintances about their families or some other event in their lives that I knew about. I still need to work on this, but it helped to learn how to break the ice.

Engaging in debates with people in subjects that I’m only moderately versed in or about controversial subjects is still something I need to work on. I did make an effort to do this with people I was already comfortable with and had a good idea of how they would react, but I didn’t go much beyond that.

Out of all of the areas that I identified to work on, I thought online conversations would be the easiest to tackle. It turns out it was the most difficult. I know that my blogging suffered greatly because of lack of time (or initiative) and what little I did have was taken by short posts to Facebook and Twitter. Even then, those were primarily one-way conversations and my goal was to increase my interactions with people.

It turns out that I’m of two minds about online social interactions. One one hand, I love the openness of everything and ease of finding whatever information you could want. On the other hand, there’s privacy to be concerned about as well as the very real threat of saying or doing something wrong. Anonymity (well, perceived anonymity anyway) makes people a lot bolder when they decide to express themselves online. They’ll say things online that they’d never say to your face. I try to treat people online the same way I’d treat them in person (the online version of the Golden Rule?), but I’ve been around long enough to know that not everyone follows that philosophy.

I desperately want to express my views  about any number of important (to me), but controversial topics. I don’t get much of an opportunity in the offline world to do this either (my wife puts up with occasional grumbling and not much else). The whole “don’t talk about religion and politics” thing has been ingrained into me. For example, what if a potential future employer Googles my name, finds my post on the controversial subject of the mating habits of Northern European red-tailed barn swallow? He or she may take the exact opposite view and decide that anyone who believes what I do on such an important subject could not make a good employee. Opportunity lost. It could happen!

Okay, so what does all this mean for 2010? I plan to continue the momentum I’ve started this year with becoming more social. To up the ante just a little bit, I’m going to try my best to blog at least once a week if not more often. You’ll just have to skip those posts that you don’t agree with and tell me what a great job I did sticking to my goal.

This week I finally sat down and tackled a project I’ve been meaning to get to for at least 6 months. The project was to revamp my blog and create a site which would essentially become the hub of my online presence. A single place where someone could find out about me, connect with me, and get to know me. In other words, a lifestreaming site.

The idea first started when I registered a domain of my own, digitalcraig.me. I started by making it simply a redirect to a storytlr site, a hosted lifestreaming solution. I kept my blog over at wordpress.com and the storytlr site would still pull in posts from the blog so that everything would be centralized, right? In reality, it didn’t feel centralized at all. WordPress.com and storytlr.com were just other sites that I joined that provided a service, nothing different that Twitter or Facebook or Flickr. I still felt I needed something of my own before it would truly be centralized.

This point hit home even further when storytlr announced that they were shutting down operations on December 31, 2009.  Although I give them credit for shutting down in an orderly fashion and providing tools to export my data, I was still a little shocked to realize that 3rd parties owned every piece of my online presence. If all of them suddenly shutdown or decided to sell all of my personal information (I’m looking at you suspiciously, Facebook) then there isn’t anything I can really do about it.

So, here we are. A brand new blog on my very own webhost under my very own domain. As an added bonus, this page contains links to my profiles on over a dozen other sites. If you want to know more about me, look me up on any of those sites. If you want to know what I’m currently reading, find me on Goodreads. If you want to know what news I’m reading, find my Google Reader shared items. If you want to know what short witty comments I’m making on Twitter, you’ll find a link to me there.

You may also notice a link at the top of the page called “Lifestream”. This is the page that aggregates all of my activity on those other sites into a timeline on a single page. It lists every Twitter post, every movie I rented at Netflix, every blog entry I write, and every news item I share.

On the other hand, you may not care. Either you don’t know who I am and don’t care or you simply aren’t into the minutiae of my life. That’s fine, it’s there if you’re interested and you can ignore it if you’re not.

One of the goals that I’ve set for myself for 2009 is to be a more social person. I’ve always had a problem making “small talk” in situations where I’m not entirely comfortable. If the topic or situation is one that I’m extremely interested or discussion is in an area I consider to be myself well versed in, I usually don’t have a problem speaking up and being heard. However, if I’m in a completely social situation or there are discussions of a topic that I don’t know very well I tend to clam up and just listen.

This tendency that I’ve noticed in myself also extends to online conversations. I tend to be more of a lurker and rarely jump into the conversation unless I can speak with absolute authority on a subject or I know lots of people from the community really well. Out of the dozens of forums I formally belong to, I post on two of them with any regularity. The same goes for Twitter and Friendfeed; I lurk and rarely jump in with my own comments.

I have sat down to write a new post at least a dozen times since my last post and probably a dozen times before that. The main reason I never did it was because I found myself wanting to discuss the election or politics since that was what was mostly being discussed anywhere. I am very confident in my beliefs and thought processes about politics, but that is the area I feel the least comfortable discussion with total strangers. So, I opted to keep quiet and just listen instead.

It’s not that I’m shy, if someone asks my opinion I’m glad to give it. It’s more of a control thing. I want to know how each person is going to react to what I say. If I know the subject really well or I know the people really well, I can gauge their reaction and make my response as non-controversial as possible. Otherwise, I feel out of control of the situation so I’d rather not saying anything.

I’ve come to realize that I’m probably missing out on some great opportunities to learn new things, explore ideas I’m not familiar with, and most definitely I’ve missed out on some great networking opportunities.  I attended a training class in December and won a book on breaking the ice. The book made some great points on what can come out of being bold enough to break the ice and talk to total strangers.

I plan to start slowly and working to increase my comfort level with jumping into the fray with people I don’t know. I hope that will translate into blogging more often (maybe starting a new blog), posting more meaningful posts to twitter and friendfeed, and even striking up conversations with random people I meet on the street. What trouble could that possibly get me into?

Money matters are certainly on a lot of people’s minds these days. Concerns about a recession and possibly a depression, government bailouts of financial institutions and automakers, the holiday retail season , and a dozen other things. Our household has been no different.

It tough for me to admit that we’ve made lots of financial blunders, even the same ones over and over again. Of course, I thought I had it all figured out in college until the credit card offers started coming in. I fell into the trap of thinking that I needed a credit card to ‘build credit’ to buy a car or a house later. That’s where it all went wrong.

The Debt Myth

Dave Ramsey points out that credit is one of the most aggressively marketed financial products ever. It is so pervasive in our society that most people could not fathom living without debt of some kind. The reason is that it plays to our instinct that we’ve got to have more stuff. We’ll figure out how to pay for it later, just give me more stuff. Think about all of the “0% interest” and “No payments for until 2040″ ads you hear or see on a daily basis.

I’ve talked to people who have elaborate systems for transferring their debt from one credit card to another every few months so they can keep paying low interest. No doubt it works, but it’s clearly walking a tightrope and eventually you will make a mistake and fall. A lot of people are finding themselves in similar situations because they bought way more house than they could afford at low interest rates thinking they would sell or refinance before the interest rates went up. Only the value of their house went down faster than their equity went up and they’re upside-down and default.

Is Debt Free?

I’ve been ‘debt-free’ several times in my life. I’ll work like a dog to pay everything off, but because my spending habits and basic philosophy about money hasn’t changed, I end up doing it all over again. It’s like a smoker claiming that they quit every time they extinguish a cigarette.

This time, though, I’m vowing that it will all be different. After reading, The Total Money Makeover, my wife and I sat down and discussed the principals and our goals of where we want to be. The first goal is to be debt-free except for the mortgage and the student loans within 12 months. This is quite aggressive when you consider that this includes some medical bills, a loan for a piano, and two cars.

Fortunately, we already recognized that we were getting killed by credit card payments and took steps to consolidate those earlier this year with a 401k loan that is paid directly from my check. This may not have been an ideal move and one I may not have done if I had been listening to Dave Ramsey before I did it. However, the 401k loan has a definite end date, a significantly lower interest rate (which I’m paying to myself), and the payment is less than 1/4 of what the combined minimum payments were. I’m not counting this loan in my ‘debt-free’ goal as it’ll take care of itself.

The Budget

Before we could start the baby steps, we had to do two things: commit to never using credit ever again and develop a budget.

I’ve done budgets before. Simple, right? Take a guess at how much you need to spend in each category and make sure you don’t spend in total more than you make. Doesn’t work, I always overspend. The trick that no one ever tells you is that I need a 0-sum budget. Every single penny of income must be earmarked for something.

What we discovered works for us is that we first make sure there is a minimum amount in the savings account for the emergency fund and a minimum amount in the checking account so we don’t have to worry about overdrawing if we get stupid for some reason (shouldn’t happen, right?). If either account is below the minimum, we get them to the minimum before spending anything.

Then we start subtracting committed expenses for the month (electricity, mortgage payment, water, cable TV, cell phone bill, etc). Then we budget for items that we will need to spend (gas, groceries, entertainment, etc). Then we take out minimum payments for debt (piano, student loans, medical bills) so they all get paid. Then, and here’s the important part: anything that’s left gets added to the Debt Snowball.

Cash is more painful to use than writing a check or swiping the check card. So, anything that we’ll be spending throughout the month is taken out in cash and placed in envelopes marked with what they are for. If we run out of cash in the grocery envelope, we either have to take it from another envelope (e.g. entertainment) or not buy groceries until the next month. The result is that no one needs to carry a checkbook or check card around with them for any reason. Anything in the budget that can be paid through online billpay is directly taken out of the account and everything else is taken out in cash.

The main reason budgets didn’t work for us before is that we tended to leave a ‘cushion’ in the account to make sure we had enough to get by until the next paycheck. The only problem was that as the next paycheck got closer, this cushion became ‘free money’ and tended to get blown on things we didn’t need. There’s no way to do that when you are budgeting every penny.

The Debt Snowball

We’ve taken all of our debts and listed them smallest balance to largest balance regardless of interest rate or other considerations. When we complete our written budget for the month, we take anything that is left and send it to the smallest debt. Once that debt is paid off, the minimum payment that was going to it becomes extra and gets added to the debt snowball.

If I’ve done my calculations correctly, we can easily make our initial goal of paying everything off except the mortgage and the student loans within 12 months. We will continue the same process and I’m hoping it will only take us another couple of years to get the student loans paid off. Once we do that, it’s off to baby step #3.

Intensity

As I mentioned, we are in a slightly better position than a lot of people starting this process because we already had an emergency fund started and we had recently reduced credit card payments to the point where we could actually start a debt snowball just by creating a budget. However, we were fully prepared to get extremely intense and we had worked ourselves up to quite a state before we actually sat down and realized that we just needed a proper budget.

We were prepared to cancel all forms of entertainment except for the Internet, sell one of the cars, turn off the cell phones, and seek additional employment to make this work. That’s how committed, intense, and fired up we got after reading what’s possible by following this plan and becoming debt-free.

We’re still having to make sacrifices and plenty of them, but fortunately we don’t have to go to quite the degree we thought we would. That makes the victory that much sweeter.