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Once diagnosed with diabetes, it’s time to start taking the necessary steps to get your health under control and improve your quality of life.
It’s essential to take charge of the situation by learning as much as you can about the disease and its management. Setting yourself achievable goals, adopting a diabetes diet, and exercising more are just three small steps on the path to improving your overall health.
Tackling diabetes head-on can be stressful, emotional and overwhelming. Taking charge of your diagnosis early and tackling your situation head-on is a proactive way to get on top of this chronic condition.3
How to handle your diagnosis depends on what stage of diabetes you’re at. Pre-diabetes can largely be managed through lifestyle changes such as diet and exercise.5 If you have type 2 diabetes, a progressive disease, you may find your treatment plans change over time as you progress to treatments such as glucagon-like peptide-1 receptor agonists (GLP-1 RAs) or insulin treatment. 1
Managing diabetes in the workplace:
Can diabetes be controlled with diet and exercise? In most cases, yes, managing diabetes with diet and exercise is possible. Lifestyle changes are the first steps to improve your overall health and boost your quality of life when suffering from type 1 or type 2 diabetes. 1
Stress levels increase
Everybody suffers stress and anxiety, but if you’re living with diabetes, these emotions can be heightened and harder to manage. Brace yourself to be hit with a lot of heavy information all in one go. 7
Practising mindfulness, educating yourself on the illness and slowing down your pace of life are all ways to help keep diabetes stress levels at bay. This will also help you onboard and process new information. Learn more about managing diabetes and stress here
Dietary changes
Expect to be told to reduce your fat intake, eat leaner meats, watch your portion size and think carefully about the type of carbohydrates you are putting in your body. 6
A diet can be tough to stick to, but there’s lots of inspiring diabetic meal planners and tasty diabetes recipes that will help you control diabetes with diet. Learn more about diabetes diet here.
Increase in physical activity
If you weren’t active before being diagnosed with diabetes, the first change you’ll likely notice is having to carve out time to work out. We’re not talking about giving up three days a week to train for a marathon but giving up even an hour of your time to exercise may seem like hard work at first.6 Get started with exercise here.
Recognising symptoms of hypos
Being diagnosed with type 1 or type 2 diabetes means you’re always on the lookout for symptoms.
People with diabetes may experience low blood sugar, which is also called hypoglycaemia or a “hypo”. Some of the common symptoms of hypos include confusion, intense hunger, feeling sick, clumsiness, blurred vision and slurred speech. You may find you experience one or more of these when your blood sugar levels are low.8 You can learn more about hypos here.
Weight loss
Possibly one of the most welcome lifestyle changes to come from a type 2 diabetes diagnosis is weight loss. A diabetic diet plus increased exercise will set you on the path to losing weight. Weight loss should be done gradually until a healthy body mass index (BMI) is achieved.1
