Battling Diabetes

Our Poor Feet.

In yesterday’s post, I mentioned that you should be checking your feet daily. So many people, diabetic and non, fail to do this. We pause to hop into the shower or bath, scrub, but never really give our feet a good once over.

This is not a good thing! Our feet are essentially the workhorses of our bodies. If our heart and brain are the organs pulling tough duty, then our feet are the appendages getting double work. Each day our feet are pounded against the ground, often in ill-fitting shoes. Toes crushed together, shoe parts poking into the skin, and laces drawn too tightly.

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Losing Weight Is A Struggle

If you are a diabetic, you know how hard it is to lose even a pound. According to a doctor I spoke with several years ago at Moorehead Hospital in Eden, North Carolina, “Losing weight while taking insulin is a losing battle.” I wish I could remember his name, but he was the doctor evaluating my mother in the Emergency Room. Those words are not exactly his, but close enough. I wish I could find him again, this man set me on a path to regulating my mother’s diet the best I can in hopes of countering this disease.

This doctor told me that he believed diabetes could be cured by losing weight. That is how we came to the subject of how hard it is to lose weight while using insulin to control diabetes. This conversation came back to the forefront of my thoughts as I scanned recent news and found several articles speaking of women who had stopped using insulin altogether or skipped doses in an effort to lose weight.

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Many factors contribute to the onset of diabetes, including genetic predisposition and diet. But exercise can help reduce the odds of getting and the severity of this disease.

Diabetes comes in two types, Type I and Type II. In either case, the body has difficulty regulating the level of blood glucose. Glucose is the primary source of energy for the body’s activities.

One basic reason is the inability to produce the proper amount of insulin, a hormone that helps transport glucose to the cells. In Type I diabetes the body can’t produce adequate insulin, so the loss has to be made up from the outside, usually via injection. This is the more serious type and control of the condition requires obtaining medical advice.

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