Five tips for living with diabetes

While diabetes is a chronic, progressive disease, it is also very treatable, which means you can integrate your diabetes care into your regular life style and make it work for you.

It is important to keep in mind three components:  diet, exercise, and diabetes medications.

I get many questions about diabetes management and patients often ask if they could control their diabetes solely with diet or exercise, and the answer is, not likely, since it is truly the combination of diet, exercise and medications that will have the best result.

The good news is that small changes in your lifestyle will produce profound effects in your body that can be easily measured by the way you feel. Adopting better eating habits and increasing muscle mass with exercise will make your body more responsive to medications and therefore you might need less of them over time.

Remember that your body is an incredible machine that, when fine-tuned, will work for you and improve your day-to-day life.  So where can you start?

Finally, I would like to assure you that when you take ownership of your health you are ahead of the game, regardless of diabetes.

Additional Resources

For those diagnosed with type 2 diabetes, Baylor is recruiting volunteers for the GRADE study funded by the National Institutes of Health that will compare the long-term benefits and risk of four widely used diabetes drugs in combination with metformin, the most common first-line medication for treating type 2 diabetes. See more information on the website.

 -By Erica V Gonzalez, M.D.