It depends on which John you ask. Today’s John, or the John from 20 years in the future.
Yes, balance it out, make the amount of effort it takes to manage your diabetes sustainable for the long term. Do not dwell on it or obsess over any single day. Learn from mistakes and move forward.
But realize that with all the studies that have been done on better control equating to less side-effects, this is really a question for your future self.
Luck is created with experience and practice. We create the circumstances to be “lucky”.
The more times you do this, the “luckier” you will get.
Eventually you will piece it together - you are not actually “lucky” at all, you are damn good at it.
Thanks Eric. I made an edit to flesh out my “is it worth it?” question.
Interesting point about now vs 20yrs. Perhaps i slightly misunderstood your philosophical position, but shouldn’t we all act now on things that might happen in the future? Rather than acting in the future, by which time it’s too late? In fact, isn’t burying our head in the sand and not caring about the future consequences of today’s actions one of homo-sapiens’ biggest miscalculations? C.f. smoking, pension saving, aerobic fitness, etc. Maybe i misconstrued your point.
Yes, what I meant is - will the John from 20 years in the future look back and think, “I regret that I did not spend more time on it, would have been worth it.”
The decision needs to involve the opinion of future John, because he is the one that will have to deal with the consequences of today.
Just like saving for retirement. As much as we would like to spend all our money on fun stuff now, our future selves will say “I should have saved more money for my retirement!”
Great job making those changes. It is clear you put in the effort to have these great improvements. Thanks so much for keeping us posted, too.
You ask whether the extra effort is worth it and Eric gave a great response which quite frankly did not occur to me! I like the idea of thinking of oneself’s future XXXX!
My thought and from my own experience is that the extra effort is not actually wasted on one’s TODAY self either. I think by putting in the extra effort, TiR (Time in Range) and SD (Standard Deviation) greatly improves, and this improvement actually improves one’s overall, day-to-day well being and quality of life, without the huge BG swings to zap ones energy and corresponding lousy feeling. My suggestion is that you could try for a time to put in the extra effort and see how it goes. With the extra effort, and hopefully corresponding BG improvement, do you feel better each day? Is the extra effort sustainable? It doesn’t hurt to give it a try.