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Summary & Participants

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.

Medically Reviewed On: July 11, 2008

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.

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