All Entries Tagged With: "Diabetes"
How to Cook for the Person with Diabetes
Cooking for the Family The support of a loving family is one of the most important elements of successfully controlling diabetes, especially in terms of food preparation. Whoever cooks for a family with a diabetic person should prepare meals as if everyone is a diabetic. This sounds harsher than it is; your family will end […]
How to Learn about Diabetes as a Parent
Parents’ primary jobs are to learn enough about the disease in order to care for their children, keep them safe, and teach them how to grow up to be good diabetes managers. How much knowledge is enough? That’s hard to say. It’s like asking how much education is enough. If you want to be a […]
How to Cook with Sugars and Sugar Substitutes for People with Diabetes
The latest American Diabetes Association nutritional guidelines allow sugars (table sugar, brown sugar, honey, and molasses, for example) as part of the total carbohydrate in a diabetes meal plan. Although sugars add sweetness and texture to foods, especially baked goods, they also add empty calories. You can reduce the sugars called for in many baking […]
How to Tell Your Child about Diabetes
You were probably floored when you found out that your child has diabetes. When you recovered from the shock, you may have experienced plenty of other emotions: anger, guilt, fear, and depression. These kinds of reactions are entirely normal. But as you work through your feelings (with or without professional psychological help), there are practical […]
How to Take Care of Your Foot When You Have Diabetes
Foot complications are common among diabetics, especially Type I. In addition to problems arising from peripheral neuropathy, there are other causes: There is a greater tendency toward blocked blood vessels, which decreases blood circulation to the extremities. Blood circulation is an important factor in wound healing. Signs of poor circulation include leg cramps, slow healing […]
How to Stay in the Military If You Have Diabetes
The military is a tough nut to crack. Although the actual rules about diabetics in the military have eased somewhat, you still may not enlist if you already have the disease. If you contract it while you are on active duty, things are not as clear. Military physicians will make a decision about keeping you […]
How to Prevent Kidney Problems When You Have Diabetes
Diabetic nephropathy, or disease of the kidneys, is caused by a mechanism similar to that of diabetic retinopathy: damage to blood vessels and nephrons as a result of long-term high blood glucose. Kidney damage is particularly serious because you cannot live without them, and for diabetics, damage to one kidney usually implies present or highly […]
How to Deal with Women Sexual Dysfunctions Caused by Diabetes
Menstruation Some diabetic women experience a rise in blood glucose two to four days before their menstrual period. This increase is due to elevated levels of estrogen and progesterone, probably because of an incompletely understood interaction between insulin and receptor sites on hormonal cells, which causes temporary additional insulin resistance. Some women, on the other […]
How to Deal with Men’s Sexual Dysfunctions Caused by Diabetes
Impotence Many men are more afraid of the possibility of impotence than they are of the side effects of diabetes. Impotence, defined as the inability to achieve or sustain an erection sufficient for sexual function, is a problem not just of diabetics but of all men. When a diabetic man suffers from impotence, the cause […]
How to Deal with Emotional Factors of Childhood Diabetes
Childhood diabetes has been described as feeling like a bomb that goes off in a family. In some respects this is an apt description because lives are forever altered and no one escapes the fallout. But unless the family was falling apart to begin with, the bomb analogy is too strong. Walls don’t cave in, […]
How to Deal with Diabetes with Intensive Therapy
Intensive diabetes therapy is an attempt to imitate the way a normal pancreas responds to the body’s need for insulin. It involves frequent blood glucose testing (four or five times a day) and consequent adjustment of insulin dose and meal plan depending on the results of the blood glucose test. In fact, the insulin dose […]
How to Deal with Adolescence with Diabetes
This is the time when children will begin to accept full responsibility for managing their diabetes. A young person with a driver’s license, a pack of college applications in a folder, and a tuxedo or prom dress should be responsible for all aspects of diabetes care—still with occasional parental supervision and the knowledge that if […]
How to Cope with Job Discrimination When You Have Diabetes
Legally, you cannot be discriminated against because you have diabetes. Legally, you cannot be discriminated against because of your gender or religion. But legal restrictions have about as much to do with the real world of discrimination as lemon meringue pie have to do with building the Empire State Building. Sooner or later, if it […]
How to Cope with Stress When You Have Diabetes
When you begin to feel stressed about your diabetes, think about how much of what you are feeling is necessary and how much is not. It is natural to experience stressful times, but diabetes is going to be with you for the rest of your life, so minimizing related stress and adopting a healthy, but […]
How to Deal with Diabetes and Depression
When anger, grief, and denial are directed inward, they can turn into energy-sapping depression. Not only is this not helpful, it can be debilitating. You need all the strength you can muster to make arrangements for your treatment and get control of your diabetes. True, it is depressing to be sick, but you are not […]
How to Deal with Diabetes during Pregnancy
Although pregnant women with diabetes are considered high risk, their survival rate and that of their infants is the same as nondia-betic women. There are, however, things about which diabetic women need to be especially careful during pregnancy. You guessed it—the most important is keeping tight blood glucose control. Deciding to become pregnant at any […]
How to Control Diabetes without Fear
Uncontrolled diabetes really is something to be scared of. It’s a serious, potentially fatal disease. If you don’t take care of yourself and learn to control the disease, some pretty awful things can happen. Driving a car is something to be really scared of. Driving a two-ton machine at seventy miles an hour—only a few […]
How to Control Diabetes with Physical Activity
Many people hate the word “exercise.” It conjures up images of sweat-soaked young women—with great figures, skin-tight leotards, and pert little ponytails—prancing around a mirrored room to loud music. Or it brings to mind muscle-bound studs lifting hundreds of pounds of weight—sweaty and grunting. You may think of neighbors you see pounding the pavement as […]
How to Choose Your Physical Activities for Diabetes
Do activities you like, or at least the ones you hate the least, while getting the most benefit from them. The best type of exercise for a diabetic is one that uses large amounts of energy over a relatively long period of time, what was described as moderate activity of intermediate duration: tennis, swimming, jogging, […]
How to Balance Carbohydrates with Diabetes
Carbohydrates, which are composed of a variety of sugar molecules, are known as sugars and starches and are the body’s major source of energy. In addition, carbohydrates build and repair body tissues and regulate most body functions. Without them, you would die. There are two major types: simple and complex. Simple carbohydrates are sugars such […]