Stephen Furst, the actor who portrayed the portly freshman Flounder in Animal House, was diagnosed with Type 2 diabetes at age 17 and promptly slipped into a period of denial that lasted 23 years.
"I didn't see any complications. The consequences were not horrific enough for me," says Furst, who wrote the book Confessions of a Couch Potato about his battle to lose weight.
Diabetics are unable to produce or use insulin, a hormone that converts food into energy. It is the sixth leading cause of death in the U.S. and is a stealthy disease with symptoms that may be easy to ignore. Yet the perils of doing so are great. "Many people can just fool themselves and say, 'I don't have it,'" says Marilyn Ritholz, a psychologist at the Joslin Diabetes Center at Harvard University.
Sufferers often fear stigmatization because the illness is closely linked with obesity, Ritholz says. Others are so afraid of the disease's myriad complications, including kidney disease, stroke, blindness, heart disease and circulatory problems, that they take no action, even though treatment could prevent many of these problems. Depression can cause diabetics to avoid making changes—they are known to be depressed at twice the rate of nondiabetics.
