Okay, so as a person who had a similar experience to you, I’m going to give you a bit of a diabetic primer. I am type 2 with a relatively functioning pancreas. My bg is above 300 regularly when I behave badly but when I behave well, it is in normal ranges.

Losing weight helps a great deal, obviously, but find an exercise routine you can stick to. A few times a week of solid heart rate is good enough to keep me within healthy-ish ranges. I like to work out before I get home and run. For me, the goal is 4x a week with at least 2x a week.

Food, its all about finding the things that keep you happy and sane. If you’re used to eating a lot of high carb food as comfort food, you need to find things that keep you on track that are not going to kill you. For example, my brother was recently diagnosed. He used to drink a ton of soda. He still does, but now its all diet soda. I liked energy drinks a lot–now I drink a fair amount of this powdered beverage mix I found on Amazon that has almost no sugar in it but has caffeine and tastes sweet. And coffee and tea, obviously, dodge the sugar here or find an artificial sweetener that does it for you. Drinks, especially soda, are the worst thing you can do as a diabetic–liquid simple sugars hit your blood stream like a truck. If this is something you crave, find a substitute that does not have liquid simple carbs and live your best life. I wouldn’t worry too much about the affects of artificial sweeteners in the long term because diabetes will make you lose limbs and shit. That’s worse.

Food, again, gotta find the things that you can substitute easily. Grocery shopping well and meal prepping is very helpful. Having snacks in your house that are low carb and meals that are relatively easy to replace ordering a pizza are very important. That being said, even then if you order a pizza, it is not the end of the world, learn to accept that you will have days where you want what you want. It can’t be a lifestyle, though, you cannot live off of pizza. So, that being said, I have lots of jerky, nuts, cheese, deli meat in my house. I’ll do pork rinds on occasion. The point here is if you crave chips, salty nuts are pretty solid. If the nuts are too much sometimes, dried seaweed or (personal favorite of mine) natural peanut butter with salt on celery. Look for what you crave and why and try to find a reasonable substitute for that craving to scratch the itch. The peanut butter and celery for me is salt+crunch+very filling. Most households have easy carbs on hand to snack on–avoid this, the temptation is pretty hard to resist (the whole point of this is to detail that you’re a human and humans LIKE simple carbs). For snacks, Trader Joes has a lot of really “exotic” great ones–things like dried broccoli.

If cost is an issue, cheese blocks are relatively inexpensive for how much food you get. Things like sausage/chicken/bacon/ground beef/pork chops can be done cheaply and quickly. Slow cooked roasts can be found on sale, I get them for like $20 and they last me almost a week although to be fair I spend a lot more than 20$ on it. Yes, you can live off of hot dogs but I can realistically eat like 3 before the pack is never touched again lol. Groceries are expensive so I try to buy like bulk chicken and meal prep it because that means when its Wednesday night and I’m hungry I don’t say “it would be easy to order a pizza” I say god dammit there’s really good cajun spiced grilled chicken in the fridge.

Harder part: You’re used to eating rice or bread with your meal. Rice plates are like the most common dish in the world. Lentils are your friend here, if you crave the rice. Much more protein dense, like 5% the carbs.

Bread, I honestly can’t help you with, this is a weakness of mine, I like good bread. But its also really easy for me to avoid bad bread. Most burger places will make you a lettuce wrap (including in-n-out if you live near them). But there isn’t a substitute I’m willing to recommend. Just make it a treat instead of every day getting a foot long subway. You can lettuce wrap sandwiches but I find them pretty unsatisfying. I find burgers much better lettuce wrapped so that makes it easy.

Alcohol. Alcohol will inflame your pancreas and can really fuck you up. However, if you are going to drink, stick to distilled liquors (whiskey, vodka, gin etc). NO MIXED DRINKS, that shit is worse than a 2 liter of soda. Beer is drinking a loaf of bread, on occasion, have a beer. Do not drink a 12 pack–hard seltzers are a good substitute here, no sugar in them. No liqueurs–things like cointreau or baileys have a lot of sugar.

If you have more specific questions, happy to help. You can live like a normal human with diabetes. I also have to warn you that my doctors hate me and I go to the hospital every few years. I’m telling you what generally works for me until it doesn’t and doctors don’t like my approach because it doesn’t work long term–we all fall. But, frankly, I have had and not had health insurance quite a few times over the last decade and medicine is expensive so fuck America, I’m doing my best.