Diabetes Lifestyle: Diets and Exercise
Diabetes lifestyle involves a lot more than just taking drugs regularly. It’s also about learning additional diabetes information (diabetes education) and leading a healthy lifestyle. Eating the right diabetic foods, getting enough exercise and keeping track of one’s weight can help keep blood sugar levels under control and prevent possible complications.
Diabetes Diet: Eating a healthy diet is crucial for keeping blood sugar levels under control and avoiding unpleasant symptoms of diabetes. People with a lot of excessive weight need to lose some of it and consider the following strategies:
• Make sure your diet is well-balanced and contains a lot of fiber (from fruit and vegetables) and very little concentrated sweets and saturated fats.
• Observe a special diabetes diet that includes the same number of calories as this will help the doctor prescribe the correct dose of insulin. It’s very important to eat the same number of calories when patients have insulin injections; otherwise an insulin reaction may occur.
• Eating a healthy diet and excluding foods that are high in saturated fats will keep the blood sugar levels down, thus preventing the patient from possible complications.
Diabetes Exercise: For people at risk of getting diabetes, exercise may help prevent it, while for those suffering from the disorder, it may help keep down the risk of developing complications, such as kidney failure, blindness, leg ulcers, stroke and heart disease.
• 20 minutes of moderate exercise every day has proved to have a positive effect. Even if you think 10 or 15 minutes you can dedicate to regular exercise is not enough, remember that some of it is definitely better than none.
• If you already have some complications, diabetes exercise (or certain kinds of it) may not be recommended to you. To learn more about it, you should talk to your doctor and find out what you can do to deal with the complications that have occurred.
Drinking alcohol: If you have diabetes or are at risk of developing it, drinking too much alcohol is not the best option. It’s recommended to have seven drinks per week or less, if possible. Although for different people the effects of alcohol are different, in most cases it causes higher blood sugar levels along with a number of unpleasant complications, such as neuritis (inflammation of a nerve often accompanied by pain and loss of function in the affected part). The use of alcohol can also lead to the increase of the amounts of triglycerides in the blood, thus worsening the condition.
Smoking: For people with diabetes, smoking is absolutely unacceptable as it greatly increases the risk of developing diabetes complications. In addition to that, smoking destroys the cells of the blood vessels and leads to stroke, heart disease and poor blood circulation.
Self-monitoring: People with high blood sugar levels need to keep their condition under constant control. Regular blood sugar checks are necessary, especially before meals and when going to bed.
• It’s recommended to keep a special log where the doses of insulin will be recorded, along with meal times, the food consumed, the kind of exercise the patient has done and for how long. Anything contributing to the increase of the blood sugar levels should be recorded and later analyzed.
• Testing blood sugar levels is as easy as ever, so you should always have this type of information as it can prevent you from developing complications. Besides, the results of these measurements will be very helpful for your doctor as they will let him or her understand how you respond to the medication and whether anything should be changed in your diabetes lifestyle.
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