If you listen to some health professionals or to the media, or worse still, to some members of the general public, you can scare the living daylights out of yourself. This however is completely unnessessary. Recently I heard Tom Hanks being interviewed about his recent diagnosis and he completely surprised the interviewer when he said '"knowing that I have diabetes allows me to do something about it. Do you know what your blood sugar levels are?"
And that is it in a nutshell, the biggest danger is to those who have diabetes but don't know that they have it. You do know and you can do something about it.
1. Being careful with what you eat, aviding white flour, sugarry foods, white rice and so on will lower your blood sugar levels by controlling what you eat.
2. Exercise will improve your insulin sensitivity thereby making what insulin you do produce work more efficiently and thereby reducing your blood sugar levels further.
3. Losing weight, if you lose enough of it, may unblock your clogged up islets in the pancreas and allow you to produce more insulin. Contrary to what has been thought before, some of your beta cells may not be acually dead but simply 'metabolically inhibited'. But, you have to lose a good amount of weight, on average 15% of your weight, though this is highly variable amongst invidivuals. Even people who have had diabetes for a few years still have a 50% chance of achieving this.
Don't rely on medication sorting everything out for you. Don't ignore it and don't think that losing a little bit of weight will solve everything. The NHS love to say, take these tablets, try to lose a little weight and try to do some exercise. This is not good enough. You have to be more determined than 'try a little'. Get a meter and see how various foods affect your BG levels, avoid those foods which cause your BG to rise and eat more of those that have little effect. Lose weight, be more active.
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