Randy Jackson on conquering diabetes

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Maybe if I knew what was going on inside my body I would have acted faster, but diabetes creeps up on you. Like I said, I had two of the most obvious risk factors — being way overweight and having a family history of the disease — but I never really felt sick until that fatal week. Unless you’re really in tune with your body, it’s hard to know that your blood sugar is in the danger zone. A lot of people never figure it out until they, like me, end up in the emergency room. Statistics show that right now about one-third of the approximately 21 million Americans who have diabetes aren’t even aware of it. That’s a lot of “sugar” going undiagnosed.

Most people know me as a man on a mission to find the next American Idol. But after going through my own health scare, then dropping all those extra pounds, I’ve become a man on a mission to get Americans to improve their eating habits and get regular exercise. I established the Randy Jackson Childhood Obesity Foundation and signed on as a spokesman for the American Heart Association’s Heart of Diabetes campaign, a drive to help people with type 2 diabetes manage the disease and understand its connection to cardiovascular disease (check it out: www.iknowdiabetes.org).

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If you can believe it, of the 21 million Americans who have diabetes, an estimated two-thirds of them will die of heart attack or stroke. Isn’t that amazing? What’s even more amazing is that more people probably know who Kelly Clarkson is than realize that diabetes is connected to cardiovascular disease and stroke. Having high blood sugar is destructive to the body in many ways, and one of those ways is that it causes fatty deposits to build up on the insides of the blood vessels. Those clogged vessels can then block the flow of blood to the heart, causing a heart attack, or to the brain, causing a stroke. Either way, it’s a bad and potentially life-threatening deal.

What I want to do is help people who, like me, already have diabetes and also help people who are on the road to the disease or other weight-related diseases and health problems. If you are substantially overweight, there’s a good chance that you are traveling in that direction. Yet by losing weight, eating more healthfully, and moving your body more, you can reverse course.

I want to spread the word that change, permanent change, is possible. I’m a new me, and I want you to be a new you. Even if you’ve had the same bad habits for ten, twenty, thirty years — I definitely did — you can get used to a healthier lifestyle. Old dawgs can learn new tricks. And you’re talking to a dawg who tried everything in the past. Diets, liquid fasts, weight-loss medications, you name it, and none of them ever worked for long. But when I wound up in the hospital, I had to face up to why all those methods failed. Not to be overly dramatic, but it had really come down to a matter of life and death (or at least a life threatened by blindness, amputation, and the complications I mentioned earlier, heart disease and stroke). I had to figure out what would work for me, and ultimately I did. Now I want to tell you about it.

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