What are some of the steps to take to keep your body working as designed and avoid the complications that higher than normal blood sugar levels can cause in the form of Diabetes? Well, some of the steps are easy and no-brainers to do, but changing a lifetime of habits to do them is a whole-nother-story.
The first thing is to stop being a glutton and using that excuse of , “but I’ve always had a sweet tooth,” and “but if I don’t have another piece now, there won’t be any left for later.” Real hard for me and not change I wanted to make, but knew I needed to before the gun of diabetes was staring me in the face. Slowing down the glucose intake to even out glucose levels is tough. Food is bound up in many feelings and emotions, and they don’t call it comfort food for nothing. Holidays almost always are celebrated around food, usually too much food and in my case usually too much sweet food, especially at Christmas time. So the first (hard for me) change was eating better or cleaner.
What eating cleaner means is reading labels to determine what is really in a food, and not just believing the advertising that brought you to the store in the first place. Eating more natural, non-processed foods, such as fresh fruit, fresh vegetables (I know, it’s almost like swearing), instead of processed foods that have preservatives and are sweetened with high-fructose corn syrup to make it taste better. The natural foods are higher in fiber and lower in sugar and will help keep normal blood sugar levels, with fewer sugar swings and crashes. Reading labels can be very eye-opening. If the first or second ingredient is high-fructose corn syrup or another form of sugar, no matter what the advertising on the label says, it’s not going to be that good for you. It an be difficult finding good fruit year round and changing your tastes from old habits to new better habits can be a hard row to hoe, but worth it if you can stick it out. Your body will like it better and your belt will feel less strained in doing its job of holding your pants up.
Normal blood sugar levels can also be improved by another dirty word exercise. How our society has changed from a society of physical labor, which burned off all of those calories we ingested, to a society of sedentary occupations and sedentary entertainment, where the entertainment is passive and not active. So exercise was in order and no more lounging in the living-room in the evening, but a plan for getting moving and not sitting. No more driving to the convenience store for a snack, but walk there, or better yet walk someplace else and skip the snack altogether.