By Kaylee Poston-Ford
Imagine yourself sitting in the examination room when your doctor walks in with your blood labs, a very grim look on their face. They sit down and explain to you that your blood work came back showing that you are a diabetic. Your heart starts accelerating, you feel nauseous, tears well up in your eyes. You panic instantly, you think of all the bad things that will happen to you and your health.
The first thing you ask is “What can I do about it?” Diabetes has a huge impact on your health and anyone can get it. Having diabetes can be very dangerous and you have to take precautions for your health. But diabetes is not as bad and scary as you would imagine. Although type 1 diabetes can not be prevented, there are some precautions you can take to prevent type 2 diabetes.
Being a type 1 diabetic is one of the most challenging things for a person to have to go through. With type 1 diabetes, your glucose (blood sugar) is too high and your body can’t produce a hormone called insulin. This means your body attacks the cells in your pancreas that produce insulin meaning you can’t produce insulin at all. Everyone needs insulin. Unfortunately there is no way to prevent this from happening. If you have people in your family that have type 1 diabetes, you will have a higher chance of type 1 diabetes. Researchers are discovering ways type 1 diabetes may be triggered by environmental reasons. Believe it or not, according to the “American Diabetes Association”, type 1 diabetes may be caused by cold weather. It is scientifically proven that you are more likely to get type 1 diabetes. Crazy, I know. There is no cure to diabetes, but since their body can’t create insulin, scientists have found out a way for type 1 diabetics to give themselves an insulin shot everyday to replace what their body should be making.
In my personal experiences as a type 2 diabetic, I know how hard it can be with diabetes. A lot of people in my family have type 2 diabetes so I knew it was most likely to affect me. Finding out I had diabetes was definitely something that changed my life. Your body uses sugar (glucose) as a fuel for your body. Just like type 1 diabetes, having too low or high glucose could result in a trip to the hospital and could even be life threatening. With type 2 diabetes, your body can’t produce enough insulin to manage the sugar in your bloodstream. So most type 2 diabetics have to either take metformin (a pill), or an insulin shot on a daily basis to manage their glucose. Both type 1 and type 2 diabetics have to use a glucose meter before and after meals. Type 2 can be caused by lots of things, whether it’s poor eating, obesity, or it just runs in your family. But most of the time, there are plenty of ways to prevent prediabetes. such as eating less carbs and sugar, exercising more, losing weight, and just eating healthier.
It’s true having diabetes can be scary and dangerous, but if you learn to manage your glucose you can live a great life. Thanks to modern technology there are ways you can still eat some of the sweet treats you want without worrying about your glucose.
