In six months, Iris Celades wants to be done with daily insulin injections. She's dropped 28 pounds over the past four months through daily exercise and eating better.

"I still have 30 more to go," she said.

Celades, 50, also has seen her cholesterol fall from 246 to 146.

"It's not diabetes that will kill you," she said. "It's laziness."

Years of inactivity and unhealthy eating finally caught up to Celades in 2004 when she lost her job and became overwhelmed by the stress of caring for her mother, who lives with her and has Alzheimer's disease.

"It was a lot of turmoil, a lot of stress and I didn't have medical insurance," she said.

She found help at the Kalihi-Palama Health Center, where family nurse practitioner Anne Leake now calls Celades one of the center's diabetic success stories.

Celades loves the healthcare workers and the support that she's gotten at the center.

"But they're not going to exercise for you," she said.

Celades, who is of Hawaiian, Japanese and Filipino descent, has seen her father, uncle, aunties and cousins die of diabetes and made a decision to get healthy for perhaps the first time in her life.

"The way Hawai'i people eat — too much rice, too much salt — anybody can get diabetes," she said. "I didn't want to be an amputee or get a stroke."

So she has turned her daily care of her mother into a benefit by riding an exercise bike at home for hours on end.

Instead of a breakfast of bacon, eggs and rice, she now starts her day with a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, or perhaps a small pancake or turkey bacon and water, orange juice or 1 percent milk.

"I don't eat eggs anymore," she said.

And instead of huge meals a couple of times per day, Celades now snacks every few hours on fresh fruits or yogurt in between low-carb, low-fat meals.

"I had to change my lifestyle," she said, "because dieting didn't work."