Learning how to eat right is a good thing to do, whether you have been diagnosed with diabetes or consider yourself to be in good health. It just makes good sense to learn now how to eat properly, instead of waiting to be told that you have a major health problem which could have been avoided through the use of proper nutrition.
Playing catch up with your health is not a good game to play. If you begin now to incorporate good nutritional food into your health care regime, I believe that you will find yourself in the 9th inning, far ahead of the oppostion in terms of major health risk factors usually associated with poor diet choices. However, if you decide to wait until your last time up at the plate and have to face a real major league health problem, you will then have to work twice as hard to find your way back home, as you try to steal two or more bases at the same time. This can add additional stress to your life and as you already know, stress is a risk factor for many diseases.
Ongoing research is working to pinpoint the ideal way to eat, which will prevent or at least delay diabetes. While a few early reports have led to surprising and sometimes confusing conclusions, the overall best approach remains very clear. First, you must exercise to lose excess weight. Then, if your fasting plasma blood sugar gets too high - more than 110 millgrams per deciliter (mg/dl) - you and your health care team need to really fine-tune your diet. However, exactly how this is to be done is where some experts will disagree. "We just don't know as much about the quality of the diet for diabetes yet as we do about the quantity," says Christine A. Beebe, RD, CDE, the ADA's health care and education president.
What Do You Eat?
First of all, eat smart! "Being overweight is clearly your biggest modifiable risk factor," says Harvard researcher Caren G. Solomon, MD. "First and foremost, you need to control the amount of what you eat. But that doesn't mean you can just cut your calories down to 1,200 and eat anything you like," cautions Dr. Solomon.
Most of the experts in the field of diabetes recommend a low-calorie diet that is low in fat and is eaten in regular portions throughout the day. For many people, eating this way works to lower both blood sugar and weight.
