To Charity or Not to Charity
To Charity or Not to Charity
Justgiving.com, a charity page on Facebook - list
Charitable giving is a very personal decision - there is no right or wrong. We went back and forth about this thinking it would be a lot of work, for something that was already a lot of work. But, after finally sitting down and looking into it, with the wonders of the internet, setting up a charitable donations page actually takes a matter of minutes - set it up and tell people where it is. The challenge then was picking a charity!
After much consideration, we choose to raise funds towards curing diabetes. This is something Steve has been on the cusp of for a few years now with high blood sugar, being in the pre-diabetes zone regularly and sometimes even in the diabetes zone. Roy Taylor at Newcastle University has done some amazing work on a cure for diabetes and is, (at the time of this writing) working with diabetes.co.uk and the NHS to roll out a programme that can reset and bring blood sugar back into the normal range and is described in his book ‘Life without Diabetes.’ We’ve used his approach to bring Steve’s blood sugar back into the normal range. (This is not medical advice, we are not doctors - however, as mentioned, this programme is being rolled out through the NHS so, if interested, talk to your GP.)
In addition to Steve fighting this crappy disease off, my father has struggled with diabetes for 30 years and Steve’s mother also had it. This one is up close and personal.
It’s a lifestyle disease and we’ve found that many of the foods that are a normal part of the UK and US lifestyles cause increases in blood sugar. We’ll get Steve’s numbers down, slack off a bit and they rise right back up again. Eating ‘On Plan’ makes a big difference and so does a few hours of cycling.
As things have crept up again, this trip is a ‘reset’ for us, to try and eat On Plan for 34 days plus the 5-day Shakedown Pedal (discussed later) whilst cycling the 1200 miles to John O’Groats. On Plan for us is meat, fish, vegetables, dairy and some fruit, no sugars, as little processed foods as possible. There will be no attempt to reduce calories and, in fact, due to the daily mileage, calories will increase. We realise in some instances adhering to this will not be possible (which given this is a pretty whole foods approach is a sad state of affairs, isn’t it?), but we’re going to give it our best shot.
This trip is about putting in a foundation for having an active, physical lifestyle for the next 30+ years and there’s no point in doing all that pedalling to increase our fitness and sabotaging all that work with pies and fish n’ chips.
That said and circling back to the topic of this section, to charity or not, we decided to charity and set up a page for Diabetes UK through Justgiving:
Here are several sites where (at the time of this writing), a charitable giving page can be set up if that is something you wish to do:
Comments
Post a Comment