50 LIFE EXPERIMENTS FOR TYPE 2 DIABETES

Nobody warned you about this part.

Not the numbers. Not the appointments. Not the list of things you're meant to do and the longer list of things you're meant to stop.

Nobody warned you that somewhere in the middle of all that careful management, the ordinary pleasure would quietly go out of your week.

It doesn't happen all at once. You don't catch it leaving. You look up on some Tuesday evening a year or two after the diagnosis and find there is nothing in it that's there for you.

There's no appointment for that. No test that finds it. Nothing anybody prescribes.

This is the book for it.

Fifty small things. None of them hard. Most of them free.

Drive five minutes after dinner, park somewhere with a view, turn the engine off, and sit there.

Turn the chair that faces your television so it faces the window instead.

Hang a feeder where you can see it from the chair you actually sit in, and keep a list of who turns up.

Write three questions on an index card the night before your appointment, and hold the card where you can see it.

Read the name badge of the person at the pharmacy counter you've stood in front of forty times.

Take the long way to the mailbox.

What this book will not do

It will not tell you what to eat. Not one page, not one paragraph. You've had enough of that from enough people.

It will not promise you a number on a lab report by Friday, and it won't dress up a small pleasure as medicine.

It will not ask you to be a better patient than you already are.

What's inside

Fifty experiments sorted by how much they ask of you - the ones you can do from your chair tonight, the ones that need your hands, the ones just outside your door, the ones that need one other person, and the ones that take a little more nerve than usual.

Each takes four minutes to read. Each tells you what it is, what it's like to do, how to start today, and what to change if the first version doesn't suit you.

And the people.

Barbara in Dayton, sixty-seven, four years a widow, who spent sixty-one dollars failing to outwit a squirrel she named Gerald - and who heard herself laugh out loud in her own kitchen one morning for the first time since the funeral.