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Participants
, Kira Almeida MS, RD, CD, Mary M. Austin RD, MA, CD, Ben Gerber MD, MPH
Summary
What are the most important steps to take in keeping your diabetes under control? Hear a leading diabetes educator describe the seven key behaviors needed to best manage the disease.
Webcast Transcript
ANNOUNCER: Leading a high-quality, healthy life is very possible for people with diabetes. It often depends on successful, self-management of the disease. Professional diabetes educators can help. Toward that end, a professional organization has put together a list of seven important self-care behaviors.
MARY M. AUSTIN:
1. Healthy
Eating
For people with diabetes, mealtime seems to be
the most difficult for them to manage with their disease. They're
concerned about if they're eating the right food: Is this a good
food for people with diabetes or a bad food for people with diabetes?
And basically all foods, but primarily carbohydrates, are the
foods that become glucose.
So when we're planning
healthy meals, we look for a balance of carbohydrates within each meal,
but overall balance of all nutrients within the diet. And it's
also important people with diabetes try to space their meals fairly evenly
so that they're not consuming too much food at one time and then
going for long periods of time without food.
2. Being
Active
For a person with diabetes, especially a person
who has type 2 diabetes who may have developed diabetes later in life and
has a fairly inactive or sedentary lifestyle, part of the problem is that
the inactivity has caused them to be insulin resistant. They're
unable to use all the food that they're eating, because of this
insulin resistance problem. Physical activity actually helps reverse some
of this insulin resistance and people who have diabetes who are physically
active utilize the food that they eat much better.
Aerobic exercise helps in actually burning calories, and anaerobic exercise helps in building muscle. For people with diabetes, and as you get older, you lose muscle mass, but muscle mass is the physically, metabolically, active portion of your body composition and it's what requires calories. So if you can maintain good muscle mass and have a combination of aerobic exercise to burn calories and maintain weight and anaerobic exercise to build muscle, you have a better chance of, number one, skeletal strength; you have more flexibility and it helps use up some calories. So a combination of both anaerobic and aerobic would be ideal for people with diabetes.
3. Monitoring
Diabetes
is a 24-7 disease and patients need to make adjustments in what they do
during the day, depending on what their blood glucoses are. If
they're not monitoring their blood glucose, they have no idea what
the effect of the meal they just ate may have on their blood glucose or
how the medication they're taking is working to control their
blood glucose. And some people will also find that, under times of stress,
by monitoring their blood glucose, they can better manage and make
corrections in their regimen.
4. Taking
Medication
Diabetes is managed by a number of
different options. One is physical activity and a proper diet, but
medication is part of the therapy for a large portion of people with
diabetes. If the patient does not take the medication, then their blood
glucose will rise. And if they don't take the medications
properly, and by "properly," I mean on time and consistently, that also
can cause blood glucose to rise and the therapy is basically useless. So
medication is a very, very integral part of making sure that the patient
stays on their self-management regimen.
5. Problem
Solving
The most critical problem-solving for most
people with diabetes is how to deal with hypoglycemia.
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