I was approaching my 37th birthday, and slowly killing myself. I weighed almost 400lbs and was a "Bad Diabetic," as my elderly mother declares, as if there were any other kind. When I was diagnosed in 1988, Diabetes education was all but absent from medicine and Diabetes was not the national epidemic it is today. I did little to address the disease and eventually was taking more than the maximum doses of oral anti-diabetic medication and insulin injections, and my blood sugar levels were still abysmal. I was suffering from the effects of uncontrolled Diabetes. After a revelation in 2003, I...