Diabetic Education Can Save You From Complications

Diabetic education may save your feet from sores, your emotions from depression, your organs from complications, and your wallet from the high cost of medical care. Those are some powerful reasons to find out all you can about this condition of type 2 diabetes.

Diabetic Education and Insulin Resistance

First, why are you a type 2 diabetic? There are genetic problems as well as life choices that got you here. One you can do nothing about, but the other you can. If you understand insulin resistance you will know what to do.

A healthy pancreas has beta cells in little islands running through it, and these respond to signals that tell them to send out insulin when you eat or when your liver releases its stores for exercising or during stress.

Fat stored around your organs is supposed to help regulate the reaction of insulin and sugar, but if there are too many fat stores, they slow down your body's ability to use insulin. That is the simplest picture of insulin resistance.

As your beta cells pump out more insulin to overcome the resistance, they weaken, are slower to respond, and may eventually die. Fewer beta cells equals less insulin equals harder to control blood sugar.

Changing How Often You Eat

Our modern life encourages eating light and then having a nice big meal once a day. That means you are putting stress on your pancreas to take care of a day's worth of calories all at once.

But if you spread those calories out through the day your beta cells don't have to work so hard, and for many of us that evens out blood sugar without having to use medications. As a borderline or prediabetic, you ought to be given this kind of diet first thing, so you can begin changing right away.

Changing Your Carbohydrates

Type 2 diabetics don't have to be told that sugar is now our enemy. But carbohydrates, like the flour in baked goods, bread, cereal and even sugar-free desserts, act just like sugar. Knowing that gives us the power to control our blood sugar without medications at all if we choose.

High glycemic foods are the carbohydrate bomb that blows a diabetic diet apart, and choosing to eat more from the lower glycemic carbs will affect the amount of insulin your body needs for the same number of calories. That might be all it takes for diabetic cures for many type 2's.

Changing Your Mind About Exercise

Two popular pictures, one of exercising for hours and hours, and the other of buying expensive equipment for quick results, can discourage those of us who don't really exercise at all.The best news in diabetic education is that doing something, anything at all, for two minutes every hour is going to help. Of course, the more you do the better. A little walking once a day or a few times a day, added to some strength training to build muscles, might be enough to end insulin resistance.

Strength training is the way to build muscles, and the more muscles you have the more weight you can lose with less effort. Also, muscle-building raises metabolism. Strength training usually involves working with weights of some kind, doing arm and leg raises, extensions, and things like that.

Full water bottles work for weights, and putting weighted bands around your ankles and wrists does too. eHow has exercise videos you can follow on your computer. They're short and easy. The only question is - are you willing to change?

Diabetic Education - Be Your Own Expert

Using your glucose monitor for blood testing, going to your ophthalmologist and foot doctor ever year, visiting your diabetes doctor every three months and doing the tests he recommends to watch your kidney and liver function, these are things a type 2 diabetic must continue to do.

Even after you enter the winner's circle of diabetic cures, those who have type 2 under control with diet and exercise, you must keep monitoring it with blood sugar checks. This beast can wake up without your knowledge if you don't.

Diabetic education can change your mind about diabetic eating and exercise, because they hold out hope for diabetic cures for those willing to change. Hope is there if you want it.

Martha Zimmer invites you to visit her website and learn more about type 2 diabetes, its complications and how you can deal with them, as well as great tips for eating healthy that will make living with diabetes less painful.

Go to http://www.a-diabetic-life.com/ and find out what you can do to avoid many of the pitfalls of this life-changing condition, like paying for cures that don't work and spending money for things you could have gotten free. Martha has made the mistakes and done the research so you don't have to.