Let's face it, living with diabetes can be a challenge. Depending on your individual medical condition and treatment program, diabetes can present a number of lifestyle changes. You may be taking one or more medications to help control your blood glucose levels, and checking those levels several times a day.
Diabetes and excess weight often go hand in hand. More than 80 percent of people with type 2 diabetes are overweight, and at least 20 percent of overweight people have several metabolic problems - like diabetes and high cholesterol - at once.
You may have heard the phrase "the ABCs of diabetes." This refers to A1C (or average glucose), blood pressure and cholesterol — three key indicators to monitor and manage as part of your diabetes health plan.
Acupuncture is a healing practice in which special hair-thin needles are placed into specific points on the skin and then manipulated. The goal is to correct disruptions of what traditional Chinese medicine calls qi (pronounced “chee”), the flow of energy inside the body.
Nobody likes tests, and most of us would rather skip the office visits and blood draws. But keeping tabs on a few key markers is by far the most important thing you can do to manage your diabetes — and your risk for cardiovascular disease.
Unless you've been in outer space for the past 50 years, you know that smoking cigarettes is bad for you. Not bad in the cheesecake or double-fudge ice cream kind of way, but really bad, as in skydiving without a parachute.
Many people with diabetes find they also have conditions such as high cholesterol. They have an increased risk for atherosclerosis, which means hardening and clogging of the arteries, including those feeding the heart and brain.
Butch Young, 65, is careful to keep both his diabetes and his high blood pressure in check. That way, his health doesn’t get in the way of his travels. After retiring from a career in sales, he and his wife, Betty, sold their Texas home in 2003. They’ve been touring the United States and Canada ever since in a 36-foot-long fifth-wheel trailer.
The link between diabetes and heart disease is well documented. But in many cases a patient doesn’t learn he or she has diabetes until after surviving a heart attack. At 54, Jo Ann Jamison survived a second heart attack, and was then told she had diabetes.
Nancy Douglass doesn’t know which came first — the cardiac arrhythmia (abnormal heart rhythm) or the diabetes. Fifteen years ago, when she was in her 50s, she was diagnosed with both.
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