Six Steps to Optimal Control of Your Diabetes

Six Steps to Optimal Control of Your Diabetes

 Many adults suffer from diabetes due to an increase in sugar in the body and for this I have brought you six steps to control such a disease of your own.   

 Purging starch from your diet:

 will show you how to reduce the glycemic load of your diet to a fraction of
what it was by controlling the amount of starch you eat. that comes from grain, potatoes, rice, or corn.

It’s Not the Sugar:

Notice that sugar and candy are not on that list. That’s because sugar is usually not a problem unless it’s combined with starch. You might be thinking, “If I’m trying to avoid starch because it turns to sugar, why is it OK to eat sugar?” Here’s why sugar and candy are not your enemies and can actually be your friends.

 The glycemic loads of sugar and candy are lower than those of starches because typical serving sizes are smaller. It usually  doesn’t take much sugar or candy to satisfy most people’s urgefor something sweet. You don’t need a pile of sugar the size of a potato to sweeten your coffee. The reason serving sizes in table sugar and candy are smaller is that you taste all of the glucose in them.
 Indeed, too much sweetness can be sickening. That’s not true of bread, potatoes, or rice. The sugar molecules in starch are bonded to one another, which makes them unavailable to interact with your taste buds. You taste only about 2 percent of the sugar
in starch. However, as soon as it hits your intestinal tract, it turns to pure sugar. As far as your blood glucose level is concerned, eating a baked potato is like eating a similar-size pile of sugar.

How Much Starch Can You Get Away With?

Although recognizing starch is easy, avoiding it can be logistically challenging. We’re inundated by it. Dietary tradition dictates that a fl our product, a potato, rice, or pasta be served with virtually every meal. Sometimes there’s little else to eat. The reality is that some starch is probably going to pass your lips. Make no mistake, the most effective way to avoid the harm starch causes is to not eat it in the fi rst place. However, if you have to eat some starch,
even though you realize it causes nothing but trouble, it’s helpful to know how much you can get away with.

• Inhibiting starch absorption:

 will help you blunt the bloodsugar-raising effects of whatever starch is left in your diet by using strategies that block its passage into your bloodstream. t’s easy to pass up bread, potatoes, and rice when they’re side dishes, but occasionally starch is the main dish. There are
probably going to be times when you can’t avoid it. If you have to eat some starch, even though you know you shouldn’t, there are some things you can do to lessen its blood-sugar-raising
effects.

 A concept that has fascinated weight-loss dieters for years is the notion of a “starch blocker,” a supplement that would keep starch from entering the bloodstream. Then you could fi ll up on
your favorite starches and still lose weight. If that sounds too good to be true, it is. No one has yet found a way to block starch from going into your system. The capacity of your digestive tract to extract every available calorie from your food is formidable. Keep in mind that for millions of years, survival of our species depended on the ability of our digestive tract to glean nutrition from whatever passed through it. The intestine evolved to be a powerful extractor of nutrients. Moreover, starch is the easiest of foods to digest. Your intestine is twenty-six feet long, but the fi rst foot or  122 Six Steps to Optimal Control of Your Diabetes two can absorb most of the starch you eat. If something is interfering with the absorption of starch, your digestive tract has plenty of time, copious amounts of enzymes, and a lot more intestine tofi nish the job.

• Sensitizing your muscles to insulin:

 will show you how to relieve insulin resistance in your muscles, so your body can 
Six Steps to Optimal Control of Your Diabetes 109 better handle whatever glucose enters your bloodstream.

f you reduce the starch in your diet and do what you can to slow the absorption of whatever starch is left, your blood sugar levels will undoubtedly fall. However, even if your blood sugar comes down to normal, if you have type 2 diabetes or prediabetes, you have to realize that your body chemistry is still not normal. Your body is insensitive to insulin. It has to produce
more insulin than normal to handle even good carbohydrates like fruit and vegetables. In addition, by the time you get type 2 diabetes, you’ve permanently lost about half of your insulin-producing beta cells. The remaining ones have to work overtime to make up
for the ones that have been lost.

 To keep what beta cells you have left from burning out, you need to reduce the strain on them as much as you can. The best way to do that is to reduce your body’s demands for insulin not
only by reducing the starch in your diet but also by increasing your body’s sensitivity to the insulin you make.

 Relieving insulin resistance not only makes your diabetes easier to control, it also promotes weight loss and helps keep your beta cells from burning out. In addition, it improves other conditions caused by insulin resistance, including high blood triglyceride, imbalances between good and bad cholesterol, polycystic ovary syndrome, and bothersome highs and lows of blood sugar.

• Getting your liver to cooperate:

 will help you improve the way your liver handles glucose, which will lower your blood sugar and further reduce your body’s requirements for insulin .

Acouple of weeks after I discovered that I had diabetes, my fasting blood sugar had come down to around  160—much better than 380, where it started, but still not normal. If I had given my low-carbohydrate diet and exercise program more time to work, my blood sugar probably would have come down further, but I started taking medication anyway.

You might ask why, if type 2 diabetes is so dependent on lifestyle, I didn’t try to control it with diet and exercise alone. Why was I so quick to take medication?

 It’s true that the combination of too much starch and not enough exercise brings on diabetes, and you can improve it a lot by eating right and restoring your body’s sensitivity to insulin with
exercise. However, even if you get your blood sugar back down to normal, your body’s capacity to deal with carbohydrates is never the same. Your beta cells never regain their normal ability to produce insulin.

 Diabetes doesn’t start the day your blood sugar goes up. For years beforehand, your body has diffi culty handling foods that break down to glucose. During this “prediabetic” phase, your beta cells make plenty of insulin, but because your muscles lose sensitivity to it, you have to make as much as fi ve or six times the normal amount of insulin to handle the carbohydrates in your diet. Consequently, your beta cells virtually wear out from overwork. By the time your fasting blood sugar rises, your body has lost about half of its normal capacity to produce insulin. Even if you correct the problems that brought on your diabetes, you can’t bring all of
those lost beta cells back.

The reason I was happy to take medication was not just that it could lower my blood sugar—I probably could have brought my levels down further without pills—but because it would relieve some of the burden on my beta cells and keep them from burning out. I realized that the ability of my beta cells to make insulin would never return to normal, but I knew that reducing demands on them would forestall further damage and maybe even restore some of their function.

• Making up any insulin defi cit with insulin:

 will help you determine when and how to add insulin to lower your blood sugar to normal and further reduce the strain on your insulin-making cells .
More so with diabetes than any other common, serious medical condition, how well you do is up to you. You need a doctor to get you started and give you advice on medications, but how successful you are at controlling it depends mainly on your actions—how closely you monitor your blood sugar, how carefully you avoid starch, how much attention you pay to exercise, and how willing you are to take medications if needed.

 Moreover, it’s openly acknowledged by medical organizations that when it comes to adult-onset diabetes, just consulting a doctor doesn’t guarantee the best treatment. Doctors vary widely in
how seriously they take type 2 diabetes. Some are satisfi ed just to keep their patients from experiencing bothersome symptoms caused by high blood sugar, such as frequent urination or dehydration. Indeed, most people with diabetes feel fi ne with fasting blood sugar levels between 150 and 200—low enough to avoid dehydration but nevertheless high enough to cause long-term complications such as damage to eyes, kidneys, and blood vessels.

• Optimizing your cholesterol and blood pressure:

 will show you how to keep your diabetes from damaging your blood vessels by lowering your blood cholesterol and blood pressure. I’ve always had a normal blood cholesterol level—normal
before I developed diabetes, and normal afterward. However, according to national guidelines, I need to take cholesterollowering medication. Why would a person with a normal blood
cholesterol level have to take medication to lower it further? Well, it turns out that if you have diabetes, “normal” isn’t good enough.

You need to keep your blood cholesterol level lower than normal.
The same is true of your blood pressure. 

Tags: HEALTH