I read Gary Scheiner’s book “Until There is a Cure: The Latest and Greatest in Diabetes Self Care” just before Christmas and the night I read the very last page, I started again at the first page again. I’ve never done that before. Ever!

This book is more of a follow up to his other book "Think like a Pancreas", which is a “everything you need to know about diabetes” book. "Until There is a Cure" is more of a “what things we can focus on” every day.

It had a number of nuggets of information that I wanted to read the book again and commit them to memory.

The Nuggets of Information, for me personally, were:

Post Meal Glucose Spikes

“The inclusion of Postprandial (post meal) glucose targets” and “As research continues to point out the link between post meal glucose spikes and the development of long term and short term complications, stronger emphasis is being placed on glucose stability.” I had not realized that post meal spikes were linked to complications! This made me pay more attention on tweaking my post meal spikes, which were dreadful, even if I pre-bolused.

Vitamin D Deficiency

“Given that many people with diabetes have a vitamin D deficiency…” What! The book told me that my vitamin D deficiency was actually something common in diabetes, not just indicating another problem that I needed to be solved. I was borderline D deficient at the time so that was useful information.

The Super Bolus

And gave me more information on a “super Bolus” which has been around for a long time but I just heard about the concept recently and didn't quite fully understand what was meant by it. But I was too distracted at the time by all the other information that was coming at me to focus on asking more.

Playing the Odds

And then the concept that perfect is an unattainable goal. That “Many of the decisions we make on a daily basis are simply to make the odds in our favor (page 117). This so ties in with a talk I heard at Thriveabetes called "Controlling the Controllables" and how we can't control if we get diabetes complications but we can certainly stack the odds in our favour.

This book taught me a lot! And most importantly it mentions peer support. See below: "Research presented at the American Diabetes Association's Scientific Sessions in 2012 showed that increase social networking was associated with SIGNIFICANTLY lower HbA1c levels..."

It's a very quick read and I found it well worth the time.