If you have been diagnosed with diabetes or that you are in a pre-diabetic state, it is very disconcerting. Everything is new to you and you have heard frightening stories about diabetes. Well, those frightening stories are a fact for people who cannot afford medication or who do not take the condition seriously.
Organ failure, blindness and amputations are the traditional result of diabetes unless it is treated. The first step after being warned of the disease is to learn as much concerning it as possible.
What it can do to you; how you can recognize the symptoms and what you can do to avoid the natural consequences of being diabetic. The consequences that have befallen diabetics for thousands of years.
It takes more consideration, preparation and work to live with a disease than it does to live without one. That is logical, but your life alters when you are given the news and you have to decide whether to fight it or roll over.
‘Fighting it’ frequently involves no more than living sensibly, maybe for the first time in your life. It involves taking the time to eat sensibly and not grab a chocolate bar or junk food. It may even mean learning to cook sensibly, if you never bothered before.
It will mean re-evaluating your life and deciding whether you would like to carry on. However, if you choose to ‘carry on’, your old lifestyle will be closed to you, because that would mean certain death.
If you decide on ‘life’, then it involves a modification of lifestyle and that ‘new’ lifestyle is close to what you ought to have been living all your life, which is fairly ironic.
It will have taken you getting a life-threatening disease to do what you should have been doing anyway.
However, you will end up healthier than you were, which sounds ironic as well. In short, your illness, diabetes (mellitus) will force you to live a healthy life or die. This is the body’s ultimate course of action of getting its own way.
At the end of the day, people do not die of diabetes. It is similar to AIDS in that respect – people do not die of AIDS. They die in both cases of complications caused by or as a result of diabetes or AIDS.
Some of these complications are:
Heart disease and stroke: diabetics have more risk of heart disease and a stroke because their blood, if unregulated, is thicker (with the extra sugar/glucose) and does not penetrate into the smaller blood vessels.
Kidney disease is a major hazard, but one which can be avoided, like most other health issues.
Eyesight issues, like cataracts are very common in cases of untreated diabetes. Numerous diabetics used to go blind as a matter of course.
Amputations were fairly normal too, because the thicker blood cannot reach the extremities which tend to have narrower blood vessels, They die, causing gangrene.
All of these complications can be avoided by doing what your medical doctortells you, even though lifestyle changes are the hardest to implement
Owen Jones, the author of this piece, writes on a number of topics, and is now involved with how to cook for diabetics. If you would like to know more, please visit our website at Cookbooks For Diabetics.