If there are two truths about diabetes control, they are the following:
This Well-being article is about how to deal with those inevitable lapses:
A lapse is a slip — a onetime detour from your regular eating or exercise routine. Maybe you slipped and had a whole slice of cheesecake for dessert when you normally would have just a bite. Or maybe you forfeited your walking routine in favor of sleeping in one Saturday morning.
Aside from causing you some misplaced guilt, a lapse won’t hurt. It won’t necessarily undo your diabetes control efforts. However, a lapse that isn’t nipped in the bud can snowball into a series of lapses and unravel all the hard work you’ve put into establishing new, healthier habits.
Relapse occurs in the wake of many lapses. It means a person reverts to the old behavior patterns. The person may go back to eating a rich dessert after dinner every evening. Or sleep in every Saturday and scrap his or her walking program altogether.
Do lapses always lead to relapse? Not necessarily. Rather than let yourself fall victim, you can create a contingency plan to prevent it from happening in the first place, and a second plan to help you cope when you think you’re heading into relapse.
The first step in preventing a lapse and increasing your risk for relapse is to anticipate that this might happen and be prepared. Identify those high-risk situations where you find it hard to keep from sliding back into your old habits. Do you reach for the cookie jar when you’re stressed or upset instead of heading out the door for a walk? Do you find yourself munching mindlessly on high-fat appetizers when you’re out with friends instead of reaching for the vegetable tray? Do you sit in your favorite chair and hide behind the latest magazine instead of going to aerobics class?
List some situations in which you found it difficult to maintain your new habits. Next, create a list of at least three coping strategies to deal with those situations. The more strategies you have, the easier it will be for you to stay on track.
| Risky Situations | How I Can Cope | |
|---|---|---|
| When I get home from work and am tired | 1. | Take a short nap |
| 2. | Relax with a cup of tea | |
| 3. | Take the dog for a little walk | |
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As you read in previous Well-being articles, not all urges to eat stem from hunger. And not all urges to miss your exercise, just today, stem from tiredness. Giving into an urge to eat when you’re not really hungry, or an urge to rest when you’re not really tired, is a lapse.
By now, you’ve probably created strategies to deal with these urges. Maybe you’ve found out that if you ride out the urge, it usually fades away pretty quickly.
But if you’ve found that this strategy doesn’t work for you, or you still get strong urges to eat or miss exercise that don’t go away, create a list of activities you can do instead. For eating urges, create a distraction. Choose activities that you can’t do while eating, like washing your car or brushing your teeth. On the lines below, write down your alternatives to urges to eat. For urges to miss exercise, choose a different activity. Or try a different location for working out. Write down these alternatives as well. You can also write all these alternatives on index cards and keep them with you to look at when an urge is particularly pesky.
| Alternatives to Eating |
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Does any of this sound familiar?
On your way home from a long, hectic, and stressful day of work, you swing by the drive-thru restaurant to get a diet soda. Once you see the menu, you decide to get “a little something” to tide you over until dinner, so you order some fries. Then, feeling guilty about the fries but figuring that you’ve blown your meal plan for the day anyway, you decide to get some chicken nuggets, too. The next thing you know, you have just eaten all the fries and chicken nuggets and feel miserable, guilty, and disappointed in yourself.
Is there anything you can do to create a different outcome and avoid a lapse like this, for eating or exercise? Yes, indeed! Think back on all the strategies you’ve read in previous Well-being articles. You’ll remember that you have many helpful and healthful options.
Visualize yourself in a positive light. As you read earlier, visualization can be a powerful tool to help you over rough spots. Visualize purchasing the diet soda and forgoing the fries and chicken nuggets. Visualize yourself completing a 5 K race or swimming those extra laps.
Analyze the costs and benefits of a lapse. For instance, weigh the costs and benefits of purchasing and eating the fries and chicken nuggets. Is the cost of eating those fries and nuggets worth it to you? What about missing your exercise? You’ve been doing so well — what is the cost of missing exercise to your glucose levels, your weight management goals, your quality of life?
Let go of the guilt. As for feeling miserable and guilty, let it go. Nothing positive comes from beating yourself up. If anything, it makes it much harder to get back on track.
Maneuver through it. Get back on track. Your Well-being articles have offered several strategies to consider when you do experience a lapse, or are about to:
Learn from it. View a lapse as a learning opportunity, a chance to discover different, perhaps better, coping strategies to use in the future.
