5 Key Tips To Manage Your Blood Sugar Levels

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If you’re a diabetic, you know that keeping your blood sugar stable is important. You will also know that keeping your blood sugar levels stable can be challenging. Every day things, Such as what you eat and how active you are can throw off your balance end land you with dangerous highs and lows.Talk to your doctor for advice on setting activity goalsif you’re having trouble maintaining your blood sugar levels. He can also help you to make the best meal choices, and making sure that you are on the best medication for you.

Meanwhile, consider these 5 key tips to regulate your blood sugar.
1. Avoid Simple Carbs
Simple carbs are the things that you think of as sugars. They come from unhealthy sources like sweets, sodas, and a lot of store-bought baked goods. They also come from some healthy sources, especially fruit.
Simple carbs are easily accessed by the body, so they are released into the blood quickly and either burned or stored quickly. Simple sugars can result in a blood sugar “spike” that Will take it’s toll on your body and on your mood. Fruit is is good for diabetics, but try and avoid dried fruits. Grapes are high in sugar naturally but they are even more packed with sugar when they are dried as raisins.

2. Take Your Carbs Complex
Complex carbs come from places like whole grains. Because of their more complex structure they take more time for your body to break down. They do make your blood sugar go up, but it goes up gradually and doesn’t drop back down very quickly. Don’t forget that elevated blood sugar levels are a natural result of eating.

Complex carbs are a good way to get the energy that you need throughout the day and because they take more time for the body to use, they make you feel fuller for longer, so you won’t be tempted to snack between meals. Just because you’re eating complex carbs doesn’t mean you don’t have to pay attention to portion control.
Complex carbs are better for stable blood sugar than simple carbs are, but you still can’t have too many complex carbs. Your doctor should have given you a set number of carbs that you can have throughout the day or with each meal. If you are on a special diet, they will have prescribed carbs for you too. If you don’t know what this number is, ask your doctor how many carbs you should be getting and be sure to satisfy that requirement with complex carbs.
Don’t underestimate the fact that you should be taking in a fairly consistent level of carbohydrates every day. When you go on a carbohydrate binge, even if it is complex carbohydrates your system will convert them straight into sugar.

3. Stay Active
Activity is also important for keeping your blood sugar down. Staying active can also help you to achieve and maintain a healthy weight. That’s good for anyone, but it’s especially good for people with type 2 diabetes.
Be careful though. If you exercise too much it can use up your blood sugar resulting in low readings. If you plan on exercising, have some complex carbs one to three hours before you work out. Complex carbs provide energy more gradually than simple carbs, so complex carbs before a work out can give you energy and won’t run out too quickly. If you have a prescribed number of carbs that you can have, ask your doctor if you should have a few extra carbs before a work out too.

4. Keep Up Your Immune System
If you’re sick, your body may run a fever to fight it off. Keeping your body temperature high takes extra energy. It can also be difficult to eat food or keep it down, which can make it hard to get your body the carbs that it needs. This can result in dangerous lows.
You probably can’t avoid sickness entirely, but keeping your immune system healthy can be a good first step so wash your hands often, keep up a varied diet, and get the right amount of sleep.

5. Avoid Alcohol
Alcohol, especially in excess, can really mess with the diabetic body for a number of reasons. First, alcohol can also be broken down for energy, though it doesn’t get a lot of credit for that. Second, alcoholic drinks are loaded with carbs and sugars.
Alcohol made from fruits, like wine and other spirits, can pack in lots of sugar. Alcohol made from grains, like beer and other spirits are full of carbs. Craft beers are often sweetened with creative ingredients that can hide lots of sugars as well. It’s even worse because a lot of alcoholic drinks don’t have nutrition labels. It’s best to just avoid them, or at least not go too hard.
Keeping your blood sugar stable when you have diabetes can be difficult. If it’s really a challenge for you, you should talk to your doctor for advice. If you haven’t had too much trouble, follow these tips and you should be okay.

Other tips to bring your sugar levels down quickly are increase the amount of fiber that you eat. Water helps you should be drinking at least 4 pints of water every day to keep you hydrated. You may not know but when you are born your body constitutes 70% water and when you die for most people this level has reduced to 50%.

Controlling stress levels is also a good idea. High stress levels will affect your immunity eventually and affect the way you can naturally overcome disease.

When blood sugars are both low or high they are a threat to health. High blood sugars generally cause dehydration and fatigue. Good diabetic control can help reduce these risks.

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Mindful eating made simple.

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What is Mindful Eating?

Mindful eating is being aware of the food we are eating, being conscious of eating it and savoring the food. Most people have very busy lives. Because we are juggling so many things at once our default mode is multitasking. Multitasking is great because it allows us to do three or four things at once. For instance, we can have a business meeting at breakfast and that combines work and eating.

What is Wrong With Multitasking?

Whether you think this is a good or bad idea possibly depends on your gender. Men tend to think they can only do one thing at a time and women get frustrated with this attitude because they have to do several things at once.

Funnily enough, they are both correct from a psychological point of view our brains are enormous but our processing powers are not. Our brains have to assimilate thousands of images per second because we don’t see with our eyes but with our brain. That is just one of the senses, our brains also have to assimilate what we hear, touch and smell as well as taste. So there are too many distractions to make mindful eating a priority.

Bombarding the Brain

When you bring in the information that is going to our brains from five senses it is not surprising that we do a lot of things without noticing. When it comes to eating we tend to feel an urge to eat and go on to grab some food immediately.

Human beings can’t always tell whether they are thirsty or hungry. Often the urge to eat is really a desire to drink it is our body telling us we need to rehydrate ourselves. Even if we are hungry it’s possible for us to sit and notice the urge to eat and do nothing about eating.

How hungry are we really?

Think of hunger on a scale of 1 to 5. The mildest would be 1, it might be are tummy rumbling one hour after we have last eaten, are we really hungry, probably not, unless we just had a handful of raisins an hour ago. Try having a glass of water and see if you are hungry in an hour?
The scale of five would be absolutely starving. That is the sort of hunger we would feel if we had just done a days work without any food inside of us. Most of us don’t generally get that hungry often.

The ideal would be to eat on the scale of four which would indicate that we are truly hungry. Ideally, it will be 4 to 5 hours after we have last eaten and we are ready to eat and savor food – mindful eating at its best.

If we ate properly a full meal, we cannot possibly be hungry an hour later, so what is that rumbling in our tummy all about? Mindfulness allows you a time to think about it. It is possible for you to observe that feeling in your tummy and while you are doing it, you are creating space to make choices. Mindful eating is being aware of your hunger levels and not just shoving food in our mouths mindlessly.

Noticing the Texture Of Food

When was the last time you had time to notice what food tastes like on your tongue? we are encouraged to eat too much. This practice suits the food industry because it’s profitable.

Unfortunately, when we eat more, we tend to gain weight because we don’t realize when we are full because we are not listening to our bodies.

It’s not just the danger of getting fat that is the problem when we eat mindlessly. When we eat is that we are in a trance because we are concentrating on what someone else is saying, or watching television, or reading a book or any of the other myriad the tasks we may be doing when multitasking. It’s because we don’t have time to notice the taste and texture of our food.

When we don’t notice the taste and texture of the food we are missing out on a whole new world of sensations. We miss noticing the texture in food. The crunch and sound of biting into a crisp fresh apple are also associated with the explosion of natural sweeteners in our mouth.

Mindful Eating Means Better Choices

If you don’t believe me, put a piece, just a small square of your favorite chocolate in your mouth. Sit in front of a clock or a watch with a second-hand. Challenge yourself to spend two minutes eating that square of chocolate.
I can almost guarantee without a shadow of a doubt that the first time you try this you will not succeed. Mindful eating is quite literally an acquired taste. You need to be conscious of the taste, texture, and smell of the food.
All of those sensations increase the pleasure of eating. Sometimes we are so out of touch with tasting food that we require stronger tastes to notice what we are eating. These stronger tastes are usually supplied by sugar, salt, and fat.
We know that if we eat an excess of sugar and fat they will make us fat. Those three things are three things that everyone should consume less of, to be truly healthy. Mindfulness is about being aware of what’s going on in our body it also is our connection to our bodies.
When we eat more slowly and savor our food our bodies have time to send the information to the brain that we’ve had enough to eat. It takes at least 10 minutes for that information to fully get the brain, that is part of the reason why we were always told as children to chew well.
If we slow down our eating it gives the body more time to realize that it has had enough. Believe it or not, we will naturally eat less.
Exercising that element of control naturally is easy when we mindfully. The benefits of this are exponential – we feel better in ourselves because we have exercised an element of control in our life.
How many of us get depressed at the end of the day because we haven’t connected with the physical sensations in our body. We may not know why that has made us feel depressed. The chances are we just feel inadequate and not good enough.
Many of you as you are reading this and thinking at the back of the mind why did I eat so much, this morning, for lunch, or for dinner yesterday? Being aware of whether you are truly hungry gives you the choice whether to satisfy it or not.

Life is about choices

Choosing what we will eat and when is just another of those choices because we do have a choice. Do we choose to eat what makes us feel good, i.e. fat sugar and salt? That may make us feel great in the short term but in the long term, it makes us feel that an out-of-control. Mindful eating benefits us both mentally and physically.

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Can you cure type 2 diabetes?

My guess is that every diabetic has asked their diabetic nurse whether or not type II diabetes is curable and or they have typed into Google “Can you cure type 2 diabetes?” If you asked that question even five years ago the chances are you would have been told that diabetes is a lifelong condition that has to be regulated by medication and/or insulin.

Today, the picture is very different, we know that type II diabetes is curable and evidence is emerging that type I diabetes can also be reversed. I am not an expert on type I diabetes, but I do know how to cure type 2 diabetes. Six years ago my husband, Leo, decided he had had enough of being a diabetic. He was on the maximum daily dosage of metformin and the next step getting full-blown type I diabetes and having to inject insulin into his body every day was only a step away.

I think, to be honest, it was fear that made him take that step. I had always said that a cure was possible if you changed not only his diet but his lifestyle. I think to make that change was too hard when he was on the minimum dosage of metformin. It’s such an easy step isn’t it to just take one tablet a day. It doesn’t sound at all life-threatening.

Unfortunately, newly diagnosed diabetics didn’t always have the full facts, six years ago. He was told that diabetes wouldn’t kill him and that fact is very true. Sadly he wasn’t told that the complications of diabetes always shorten your life, often by as much as 10 years and that they are very capable of killing you!

How Can you cure type 2 diabetes?

Leo stopped taking his diabetic medication six years ago. The cure was immediate in the sense that his medication was reduced from four Metformin a day to 3 Metformin a day in one month. It took less than six months to become medication free.

Of course, that’s not just being free of taking medication every day but it is also freedom from worry. Little things like travel insurance are cheaper because you are not diabetic.You don’t have to worry or fret that you can’t leave the house without your medication. As we age it is so easy to walk out of the door and forget even the important things.

The greatest freedom is the fact that you lose all the paraphernalia of diabetes. Sometimes all the gubbins of diabetes is overwhelming. There are the diabetic strips – lovely when you go out to a restaurant and then have to take out a piece of machinery and prick your finger to see what your sugar reading is.

Everything seems so much easier and possible when all of that worry and stress simply melts away. To be fair, there is never any guarantee that you will be diabetes free forever. Leo knows that as he ages he may slow down and become diabetic again.

That doesn’t seem really important at least now he has had six worry free years. That is also six years when his body has not been ravaged by the complications of diabetes. It is given his body a chance to be normal.

Whatever happens, in the future will be but he has to be healthier in the long term as a result of making that change.

How Can you cure type 2 diabetes?

I think as an outsider looking into the diabetic world the first and most important step is the shift in your brain. As Albert Einstein once said the definition of insanity is repeating the same action over and over again and expecting a different outcome.
You did not become diabetic overnight and you can change it virtually overnight. To do so, you have to change your approach to the way you eat. This change is permanent.
Small changes make a difference to your sugar levels. Add all of these small changes together and they make a tidal wave of change. However, you do not have to implement them all overnight. Although they will become a time if you want to break the cycle of diabetic medicine that you will have to make all of the changes.
In my experience to change permanently, you have to change a habit. If you change something for 30 days it has become a habit and that change can be permanent.
To cure type II diabetes, you need to reduce the levels of carbohydrate you eat. You may be surprised that to do this you do not have to cut out carbohydrates – in fact that’s not a good idea everybody needs carbohydrates for energy.

You have to change the types of carbohydrate that you eat.To do this, you have to bear in mind that everybody has a different body with different experiences. You have to do test for yourself how you react to different forms of carbohydrate.
For instance, most medical advice advises you to eat brown rice as opposed to white rice. The one thing that drove Leo sugar levels through the roof was rice in any form. Brown rice was the worst sugar spike of all, it was worse than Basmati rice, white rice, wild rice et cetera.
You have to work out which carbohydrates are better for you personally. Another decision you have to make is whether you want to have a tiny amount of your favourite type of carbohydrate or a portion size of an alternative.
He found that bulgur wheat did not create a huge sugar spike. He decided that although he didn’t like it as much as brown rice he preferred to eat a normal portion of bulgur wheat which filled him up, rather than a spoonful of rice which left him hungry.These choices are personal. First of all work out which foods drive your sugar levels through the roof the chances are they will be processed food, sugar or cakes. Find alternatives to these foods.
You may not find these alternatives overnight but don’t give up finding an alternative to to chocolate biscuits in the afternoon. It might be a fresh mango or a fruit salad.
Whatever food choices you make refine the carbohydrates that you eat and reduce your overall carbohydrate intake and you will cure your diabetes

Is fasting good for diabetes type 2?

Fasting and Lar0n mice?

You may wonder why I’m talking about fasting and Laron mice when the question is “Is fasting good for diabetes type 2?” To understand the answer to this, it is necessary to understand why Laron mice are different from any other common garden mouse. Medical research has been looking at the effect of fasting on mice since the 40s and even in that decade scientists knew that fasted mice lived longer than the control group. You may think there’s nothing surprising there religious fasters tend to be long-lived, and in that you may be right, but the interesting thing is that mice who had their calories severely restricted were often physically stunted. However, mice who were deprived of food, in other words, fasted tended to live twice as long as normal mice. These mice became known as Laron mice and they lived for over four years and you probably don’t know the life expectancy of a mouse, but it’s about two years so in human terms it would be the equivalent dying at the age of 1 75 or so.

What is interesting about these mice above and beyond the fact that they live longer is the fact that they don’t tend to die of a disease. They just die of old age there is no other discernible cause. These mice have been genetically engineered so their bodies can’t use a specific hormone called IGF-1. This is a growth promoting hormone which keeps yourself on the go all the time. Although we all need it as we grow we need less of it as we age. In fact, if we stop growing this hormone tends to accelerate disease. To imagine this, it’s like driving a car flat-out with your foot down right to the floor for weeks with no break. You don’t have regular checkups in the garage and you don’t take time out to change parts. Any vehicle and our bodies are only that would break down eventually.

Prof Volter discovered similar disorders in humans in Ecuador. These people are not the only people to suffer from Laron syndrome in the world to suffer from this, but all of them are of Jewish descent. They grow to a height of about 3 foot six if they do not have the growth hormone IGF-1. injections before puberty. Not everybody in the community has this defect. To investigate what happens as a cellular level in response to IGF-1, the researchers washed cells taken from both the Laron subjects and the rest of the tribe without mutation, with Laron serum.

The cells which were washed in Laron serum had fewer DNA breaks, this would strongly suggest when theIGF-1 was absent there is a protection against oxidation in the cells and it is this oxidation that causes degeneration and disease. The protection disappeared when IGF1 was artificially added to the Laron serum.

Unfortunately, this does not mean that anyone with an IGF-1. deficiency lives to a spectacularly old age. Alcoholism is high in the tribe and also accidents. Those that do live into their 80s perhaps have learned to enjoy life more. They can smoke and eat a high calorie diet and get super obese and still be immune from diabetes and cancer. It will take more time for those people to be persuaded by education to take on a healthy lifestyle and be able to see how long they can actually live for.

There is evidence that periodic fasting seriously makes a difference to both health and Longevity. Fasting also seems to flick a switch on a number of repair genes. This is likely to be because when you embark on a fast your body goes into immediate shock. Your brain sends out frantic signals to say that you are hungry and if you ignore these signals what can the brain do? The body immediately goes into starvation mode, thinking it has to deal with long-term starvation. In the past but we were hunters and gatherers this situation would have happened quite normally and very frequently. The body doesn’t have to do this normally today because there is plenty of food for everyone.

What is interesting is when the body is in repair mode it may occur because body have to decide what is the best way to expend energy. Under normal circumstances we have enough to eat, the body is only interested, in growth, sex and reproducing. When you fast the boy starts a process of autophagy, this means literally “self-eat “. The body breaks down the old cells and replaces them with new ones. This happens frequently naturally no sign your body is older than seven years. However, it is known that certain types of cancer are caused by the failure of the body to regenerate new cells. When a cell is past its sell by date, it is more likely to mutate naturally and cause cancer.

Is fasting good for diabetes type 2?

So, in conclusion, fasting is good for most overweight diabetics. That doesn’t mean that embarking on a five-day fast. No fat should be undertaken without medical supervision and tomorrow we will investigate the safe way to fast for diabetics as a way of curing diabetes

Bibliography
Defective Growth Gene in Rare Dwarfism Disorder Stunts Cancer and Diabetes

Growth Hormone Receptor Deficiency Is Associated with a Major Reduction in Pro-Aging Signaling, Cancer, and Diabetes in Humans

Diabetic Romantic Thai Dinner Recipes

Yesterday we examined the preparation of fish and seafood to prepare a diabetic romantic Thai dinner recipe.Thai fish dinners are great for diabetics because they focus on fresh healthy food simply prepared. I am going to give you two starters a soup and barbecued fish.

Thai fish broth with greens

Serves 2

100g brown rice noodles
500ml chicken or fish stock
1 tbsp Thai red curry paste
4 dried or fresh kaffir lime leaves
1 tbsp fish sauce
200g skinless white fish, such as sea bass or squid
100g raw king prawns
2 pak choi leaves separated
Large handful coriander leaves

Method

Cook the noodles according to the packet instructions. Refresh in cold water and drain well. Boil the stock in a large saucepan and stir in the curry paste, lime leaves, fish sauce and 250ml cold water. Once it comes to the boil turn the heat down and simmer gently for five minutes. Cube the fish into inch cubes and add to the pan. Return to a simmer, then cook for 2 mins uncovered. Stir in the noodles, prawns and pak choi, and simmer for 2-3 mins or until the fish and prawns are just cooked. Serve in bowls scattered with the coriander.

Pla Plo

This has to be the greatest barbecued fish on the planet, you can do it with any white fish such as schnapper, or even small sardines. In Thailand the meal is traditionally dipped in rock salt to stop it from sticking

Fish with Mango Sambal – Serve with Kale or spinach or pak choi

Serves 2

2 white fish steaks such as schnapper or basa.
Marinade
5 Tables[pooms Thai oyster sauce,
4 cloves garlic, minced
2 teaspoons of grated fresh ginger
1 fresh red chili, finely chopped (or more if you prefer it very hot)
Sambal

1 ripe mango
1 Tablespoons of fish sauce
1 red chili, finely chopped or half a teaspoon of chili flakes
Juice and zest of 1/2 lime juice
2 cloves garlic, very finely chopped
a handful of cherry tomatoes finely diced
1/2 red onion finely chopped
Large handful of fresh coriander

Method

Stir the marinade ingredients together in a bowl and pour over the fish steaks leave at room temperature for at least twenty minutes, but I prefer to do them a few hours before. Dice the mango and all the chopped sambal ingredients. if it’s not sweet enough add a pinch of stevia add more heat if you prefer.

Place the fish on the grill pan and baste with a little of the marinade.Grill the fish until it is lightly browned on the outside and the flesh turns opaque and separates easily. Try to turn the fish only once so that it does not break and then baste with the marinade. Do not overcook or the fish will dry out. Serve with the salsa and some pok choi, or steamed spinach or kale.