The Ultimate List of 20 Ways to Stay Healthy with Diabetes
Introduction
If you’re living with diabetes, staying healthy is more than just managing your blood sugar levels. It’s also about taking care of your entire body and mind. To make it easier for you, we’ve put together a list of 20 of the best ways to stay healthy despite having diabetes.
1. Eat Healthy
Your diet plays a big role in managing diabetes, so it’s essential to make healthy choices. Include fresh fruits and vegetables and limit processed foods, sugary and fried items.
2. Exercise Regularly
Regular exercise helps reduce insulin resistance so include physical activity in your daily routine, even if it’s just a walk.
3. Monitor Your Blood Sugar
Frequently check your blood sugar levels and make adjustments to your diet, medication or insulin therapy accordingly.
4. Don’t Skip Meals
Eating regular meals helps manage blood sugar levels and prevents overeating.
5. Reduce Alcohol Consumption
Drinking tends to raise blood sugar, so you must moderate it and if possible, avoid it.
6. Get Enough Sleep
Good sleep is vital to manage stress which high stress levels make harder to manage diabetes.
7. Invest in a Continuous Glucose Monitoring (CGM) Device
A CGM can help you see and react to changes in your blood sugar level and take action accordingly.
8. Drink Plenty of Water
Consuming water in adequate quantity helps in improving circulation by reducing excessive glucose from the body.
9. Reduce Your Carb Intake
Consuming carb in a moderate amount and choosing the low glycemic index carbs help in managing blood sugar levels better.
10. Include Fiber in Your Diet
Fiber intake slows down carbohydrate conversion to glucose so include fibrous meals to your diet.
11. Quit Smoking
Smoking increases the risk of developing diabetes and along with other life-threatening conditions, like heart disease and cancer. Better to quit them all!
12. Control the Stress
Stress hormones impact insulin production, making blood sugar a lot harder to manage.
13. Empty your bladder often
Urination frequently helps in getting rid of much of the glucose in your blood leaving behind blood pressure and renal health issues.
14. Annual Checkups
Annual checkup allows maintaining and monitoring the diabetic symptoms, and getting blood and related tests done better.
15. Supplement Your Diet with Vitamin D
Adequately managing the Vitamin D intake maintains blood sugar levels according to a few research studies.
16. Mind Your Foot Health
Maintaining foot hygiene and proper footwear helps to avoid infection or wounds that cause or aggravate existing complications.
17. Get Professional Diabetic Support
Professional guidance helps reduce diabetes anxiety, medications seeking, diabetes care management hassles and indulge in better living.
18. Turn off electronics
Spending enough time away from digital screens can help promote sleep quality and better vision in some diabetic-related conditions.
19. Be Slow and Steady
Quick high or low levels of glucose could be worse so make gradual adjustments instead of quick tweaks.
20. Work with physician assistance
Take opinions from your healthcare expert about your diabetes self-care management based on your blood-glucose reports, vital statistics, food habits, preferences, lifestyle choices et cetera.
Conclusion
With a mix of mental, physical, and diabetic- related routine and effort, diabetes can be controlled. Explore each through practical measures and see weight gain, perfect glucose level markers, and an energetic diet plan emerge, making living with diabetes a little more modern, positive and friendlier to adopt. There are restrictions to live with, but diabetes isn’t a death sentence; it’s still very manageable.
I was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes when I was 9 years old. Since then, I have been very careful about my diet and exercise. I try to eat healthy and exercise regularly. I also monitor my blood sugar levels carefully. I have found that this helps me to stay healthy and avoid complications.