No new specific diet or diabetes decrees over here. I gave that up a long time ago. The notion that I’m going to suddenly shed all my bad habits and “start over” being perfect is just a recipe for frustration. Instead, I like to think in general about how I’m going to approach life in the coming year. Enjoy. Joy. Less stress. Less unnecessary worry. More joy. I try to resolve to keep all that in mind.

According to a new Trend Watch review over at Medical News Today, 2008 will see consumers making “sensible choices and simple substitutions in lieu of the latest fad diet.” Hallelujah! Wouldn’t a Year of Actual Sanity be a nice change of pace?

You may remember my mention nearly a year ago of the Behavioral Diabetes Institute’s notion to create some diabetes etiquette cards that will help “others” understand what is and is not appropriate to say to us PWDs on the topic of our diabetes.

A Holiday Hello to you all! Today, a few additional forward-looking diabetes device designs that came my way this year, which I haven’t got around to posting yet.

Also, don’t forget to have a look at the 2007 Diabetes Year in Review here, just updated with new input from the Community — and add your two cents in the comments section.

Deck the halls… and all that.

Don’t miss the diabetes Holiday carols for that special PWD in your life.

See y’all back here for more regular programming on the 26th.

A quick public service announcement — because it’s 10:40pm on a Saturday night and I have nothing better to do. Just kidding (sort of

For book club this month, I am reading a wonderfully bittersweet novel about a self-absorbed and neurotic young writer. The kind of story where the narrator shares the blow-by-blow of his existence: “I took a short nap at five, and then into the bath by 5:30 for drinks on the veranda at 6pm…”

Along with the plethora of new health-related web tools and communities popping up like daisies at the moment are a ton of associated health-related widgets — those little “icons” anyone can post on their sites, which house small applications providing functionality and content. Widgets are neat. Widgets are cool. But are widgets just free advertising?

For the first time in several years, I am feeling the pain of weight gain. In the last few weeks I noticed my pants fitting a little tighter, my thighs looking a little wider, and a fair bit more huffing and puffing as I attempted to jog back up the steep hill that leads towards our house.

Happy Holidays, everyone! ‘Tis the season for cocktail parties, and roundups of the closing year, no? I was feeling a little overwhelmed about attempting “the roundup” this year, so I decided to ask you all to get involved. To me, it seems that if 2007 is remembered for anything, it will be as the birth year of Health 2.0, the rise of Social Media and its conjunction with health and healthcare offerings on the web. For diabetes in particular, product design took the spotlight for the first time, while a few drugs were spectacular failures.