Controlling Your Diabetes

One of the most important factors in controlling your diabetes is to ensure you are well informed. For this reason you should take advantage of every resource available to you to educate yourself about your health condition.

It is important that you stay in close contact with your medical practitioner to ensure that your current treatment program is still the most appropriate. In addition, you should have regular check-ups with your medical practitioner so that they can assess you for any physical or neurological deterioration in other areas that might occur because of your diabetes.

It should be obvious but, to avoid any doubt, the best way of controlling your diabetes is to test your glucose levels regularly–as instructed by your medical practitioner or diabetes clinic nurse–and to take the appropriate levels of medication.

Diet and exercise are also key factors in controlling your diabetes. Your medical practitioner will give you dietary guidelines and these should be adhered to initially. However, each person's body can and does react differently and it is best for diabetics to do their own dietary investigations. Now, I am not suggesting for one moment that you should abandon any medical advice you have been given. What I am suggesting is that you pay rigorous attention to your diet and self-monitoring activities to establish which foods cause the worst glucose-level peaks and troughs for your body.

There is a lot of conflicting advice regarding carbohydrates and fats, and the scientific community is divided on the subject. With only theories and no clear-cut evidence, it is difficult to know what advice to follow. By initially adhering to the dietary advice given by your medical practitioner, you have a baseline from which you can experiment–with caution. This type of experimentation should always be done with the approval of a suitably qualified medical practitioner.

There is no doubt that an element of self control is required to control diabetes, but the rewards are surely worth the price. If you are struggling to find suitable recipes to support your diabetic program a visit to Diabetic Recipes may supply some new ideas.

Alcohol can aggravate diabetes and it is best if you avoid it, or at least restrict it to small amounts with meals. Some of the oral medications offered to control type 2 diabetes react very adversely to alcohol consumption, which is another reason to avoid alcoholic beverages.

High stress levels will aggravate diabetes and by introducing relaxation methods into your everyday routine you can better control your health condition. In simple terms, stress increases the level of many hormones in the body–including adrenaline. Adrenaline prepares the body for fight or flight and part of these preparations is to release glucose stores from the liver and muscles to be used as immediate energy. What the body has no way of understanding is that modern day stress levels are not usually induced by a physical threat and the release of high levels of glucose is in fact not required. High stress levels can play havoc with glucose levels and make it almost impossible to control diabetes. It is therefore essential that you learn how to relax and reduce stress in their life.