Passing Through: Recovery from Diabetes and Food Addiction (Paperback or Softback)

At twenty-one, a nurse told him he was diabetic, said lose some weight and stop eating sugar, then walked out of the room. He did nothing about it for eighteen years.

By thirty-seven, Carl Moore weighed close to four hundred pounds. He was taking more than the maximum dose of oral diabetes medication and injecting insulin daily, and his blood sugar was still out of control. Working in healthcare, he knew exactly where the road was leading: retinopathy, neuropathy, amputation, kidney failure, a slow shutdown of the body one organ at a time.

Then something shifted. Not a miracle, not a pill, not a program he bought. A decision, made alone in a kitchen, to stop killing himself with a fork.

Passing Through is the story of what came next. Carl walked. All the way to the mailbox that first night. At first that was all, twenty pounds gone from nothing but moving his body and staying out of the Chinese buffet. He learned to weigh a craving against its cost, to keep the Cheetos out of the house, to nibble one square of chocolate instead of swallowing down a whole bar in ninety seconds. He walked off more than a hundred and twenty-five pounds and started shedding medication in the process. In time, his blood sugar went to normal, then better than normal.

This is not a diet book. Nobody is selling you a plan here. This memoir is one man's honest, funny, unflinching account of food addiction and the long climb back, told by a writer who can make you laugh on one page and stop cold on the next. The kind of story you finish and hand to someone you love.

What Carl found really is not all that rare; this is what happens to most overweight Type 2 diabetics who make the same changes he made. That is the hope underneath the whole book. The disease that is killing you can be fought with a fork and a pair of walking shoes, and the fight can be won.

If you or someone you love has heard the word diabetic and felt the floor drop, this book was written for you.

More than a memoir, this is something you can use. Carl does not preach and he does not sell. He walks you through what actually worked. Walking before the gym. Keeping the trigger foods out of the house so the kitchen stops ambushing you at midnight. Weighing every craving against what it will cost you later. Giving yourself one honest day a week to eat what you want, so the plan survives contact with real life. Knowing your own numbers and owning them, because your health is your job and nobody else's.

"I gasped, I cried, I laughed out loud. I could not stop turning the pages." Cathy Smith Bowers, Poet Laureate of North Carolina

"His honest account is phenomenal. He literally saves his own life by changing what he eats. Dramatic improvements in health are possible with better nutrition and more activity. Inspiring and motivating." Amy Pope, MS, RD, LD, CDE

Carl Eugene Moore holds a Doctorate in Healthcare Administration, MBAs in Accounting & Finance and Healthcare Management, and an MFA in Creative Writing. He wrote the book he needed at twenty-one and never got, the honest and hopeful account no one handed him in that exam room.

Carl Eugene Moore holds an MBA in Accounting & Finance, an MBA in Health Care Management, an MFA in Creative Writing, and is currently doing his doctoral work in Health Administration with a focus on Informatics and Health Care Quality. He has poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and photography published and is currently the nonfiction editor at Referential Magazine and a feature editor for an academic journal. He teaches graduate and undergraduate courses in Health and Medical Informatics and English.