How Long Does It Take to Reverse Diabetes?

Diabetes has often been called a progressive disease. When you hear the word progressive, that can discourage anyone and it can be easy to fall into the trap of believing that there’s nothing that you can do to stop the disease.

But this simply isn’t true. Yes, diabetes is a progressive disease – but only for those who don’t fight back. If you fight back against a diagnosis of diabetes, not only can you reverse the condition, but you can end up in better health that you’ve ever been in before.

When it comes to reversing the disease, there will be both immediate and long term actions that will make the difference. It all starts with control. You must control the disease or it will control you.

To topple the disease, you first have to gain control over your lifestyle. This will give you immediate help toward reversing the disease. Most people end up with diabetes because they’re overweight.

Obviously, you can’t change how much you weigh immediately because that’s a change that will have to take place over time – especially if you have a lot to lose. However, you can change what you eat now so that you’ll feel the benefits of a new eating plan immediately.

Your short term reversal benefit will be that you won’t need as much medicine if you’re already on pills for your diabetes. If you’re eating in such a way that it’s to control your glucose readings, you’ll be able to come off the medications faster.

You do this by eating only healthy foods. For faster results with reversing the disease, choose a low carb diet. That means that you’ll switch out the high carb items for low carb.

Use decadent treats only occasionally instead of several times a week. Stop drinking your calories in sugary drinks. Switch to water, unsweetened tea or other low calorie drinks.

Change your white flour foods for wheat flour. Make two thirds of the foods on your plate vegetables and fruits while the other portion is some type of protein. As you eat right, you’ll see immediate results in your blood sugar.

This can happen in a matter of hours or days. Reversing diabetes by taking off the weight will depend on how much you lose. Some people can reverse their diabetes diagnosis in a matter of weeks.

For others it takes several months or a year. What you’ll notice immediately though, when you change the way that you eat is that your A1c numbers are coming down. You can easily go from a reading of almost 9 to a normal A1c reading just by controlling the foods that you eat.

Since the A1c numbers are based on the average of your readings over a three month period, you can easily reverse your diagnosis in three months. However, you can immediately improve how sensitive your cells are to insulin in as little as 7-10 days.

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Fear of a Diabetes Diagnosis Often Leads to Poor Medical Choices

Sometimes, you can get a nagging suspicion that something isn’t quite right with your body’s health. Instead of going to the doctor, what some people do is ignore it. People ignore symptoms out of fear.

They imagine the worst possible outcome and they don’t want to think about it or get a diagnosis because they’re afraid that their worst fears will come true. Others don’t want to know what’s going on with their body because they’re accustomed to their lifestyle.

They know that a diagnosis might shake up their comfort zone. That’s what happens to a lot of people who have all the classic symptoms of diabetes. Some of these symptoms are excessive thirst, frequent urination and slow healing wounds.

Other not so common signs of diabetes are numbness and tingling – especially around the lips. A lot of people live in fear of being tested for diabetes – especially if they have a family history of it.

Maybe they’ve seen some pretty poor examples of how diabetes has been managed among the people they care about. It could be that a relative had the disease and continues to live exactly as he or she pleases without any changes.

That attitude can be passed down in a family and diabetes can be thought of as a family disease that one can’t do anything to change. This resistance to change not only keeps a lot of people from being properly diagnosed, but it also keeps people who are diagnosed from making the changes that they really do need to make.

It’s easier to eat what you’ve always eaten than to change your diet. It’s easier to sit on the sofa in front of the television than it is to exercise. It’s easier to cope with stress by overeating and battling anxiety than it is to take steps to eliminate stress.

So what ends up happening is some people decide that they’d rather not know if they have diabetes or not so that they can continue living just as they always have. But what they don’t realize is that they’re shaving many years from their lives.

They’re limiting the time that they have left and they’re also gambling with the consequences of diabetes that’s not properly managed. Diabetes is like any other condition.

If you do your best to take care of it, you can live a long, healthy and happy life. But on the flip side, if you do nothing to take care of it and you don’t make the necessary changes, you will end up paying the price.

You can end up losing sight in one or both eyes. This can lead to a loss of independence. You can end up losing a limb to the disease due to poor blood circulation.

Some people end up with more than one limb amputated. You can have a stroke or a heart attack or you can die much younger than you should have, due to the toll diabetes takes on the body.

While change can be hard, you deserve a beautiful life with the people that you care about. It’s easier to get tested and make changes than it is to suffer the consequences and wish that you had after it’s too late.

Did You Know There Are 11 Different Types of Diabetes?

Whenever most people hear about diabetes, they assume there are just two forms of the disease. Type 1 is the kind you get as a child, while Type 2 develops over time. But there are actually eleven variations of diabetes.

Type 1 diabetes is a severe form of the disease that’s rooted in an autoimmune background. The body actually kills off the cells within the pancreas. In an autoimmune disease, the body’s immune system can often mistake healthy, necessary cells as a foreign invader and attacks them. When this happens in the pancreas, the body can’t make insulin. Anyone can have this form of diabetes.

Type 2 diabetes is what can develop when your cells are insulin resistant. In this type of diabetes, the body struggles to use the glucose properly. This can lead to high levels of glucose in the blood stream and damage to the organs. This form of diabetes can be reversed through diet and exercise.

LADA or Latent Autoimmune Diabetes of Adulthood is another form of diabetes. This form means that there will be higher than normal levels of autoantibodies in the pancreas.

People who have this type of diabetes usually have some kind of autoimmune disease. Doctors suspect this form of diabetes when the patient’s age and weight don’t fall into the same parameters as what’s considered to be normal Type 2 symptoms.

MODY means Maturity Onset Diabetes of the Young is a form of diabetes that has a stronger genetic component. This is due to one gene and if the parent has MODY, then the child has a high probability of getting it as well. It can be found in young people who have a healthy weight and can strike before the age of 25.

Double diabetes is when a person has a mixture of both type 1 and type 2 diabetes. When someone has type 1, it’s not related to being overweight. But someone with type 1 can develop type 2 diabetes if they become obese. This leads to insulin resistance and complicates the ability to use insulin.

Type 3 diabetes is caused by insulin resistance – but rather than dealing with the pancreas, this type is due to how insulin is affected in the brain. Studies have shown that this type of diabetes can lead to Alzheimer’s.

Steroid-induced diabetes is caused by steroid use when the person taking them already has a genetic propensity or other factors that give them a high risk level. Long term use of steroids – 3 months or longer – can cause diabetes.

Brittle diabetes is Type 1 diabetes that’s very difficult to control. This can be due to problems absorbing nutrients, trouble absorbing insulin, hormonal issues, medications that don’t work well together or problems with food leaving the stomach. Stress and depression can be factors of this type of diabetes.

Secondary diabetes is diabetes that occurs as a result of having a medical condition. Some of these other conditions that can cause secondary diabetes include polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS), pancreatic cancer, Cushing’s or other autoimmune diseases.

Diabetes insipidus isn’t as common as the other types of diabetes. This rare form of diabetes has nothing to do with high levels of blood sugar or insulin resistance. One of the hallmarks of this form is the frequent urination but this frequency is due to vasopressin.

Diabetes insipidus is when you have to urinate more than usual and complications erupt from this, which are the result of a particular antidiuretic hormone known as vasopressin, which is a hormone that’s found in the brain. When there’s not enough production of vasopressin, it’s harder for the body to hold onto water. This form of diabetes causes the kidneys to work harder than they should.

Juvenile diabetes is diabetes that young people have. It can be found in children and in young adults. It is a metabolic disease and has a hereditary component as well as an autoimmune component.

A 3-Step Plan to Getting Off Diabetes Medications for Good

Getting a diagnosis of diabetes can be a shock – especially if you don’t know much about the disease – or if you do know about it but what you know is pretty negative.

Being told that you have diabetes doesn’t mean that there’s nothing that you can do. Contrary to the popular belief that diabetes is permanent, you can not only stop the disease, but you can reverse your diagnosis of it as well.

However, it will take a strong mindset on your part and the willingness to keep focused on the end goal. You don’t live a certain lifestyle that causes diabetes to occur and then change it in a day.

It might take several days or weeks to get your glucose levels under control, but you can do it. You can lose weight and change your health for the better by following a 3-step plan, which will take you off the diabetes medication and keep you off of it for good.

Step 1 is engaging in nutritional awareness. Nutrition is the key to coming off of diabetes medication. When you’re taking medicine for the disease, the reason is because your cells can’t properly use the insulin that your body makes.

They’ve become resistant and part of the reason is because there’s too many fat cells. But altering the way that you eat can change all of that. You need a diet that’s based on whole grains, moderate intake of fruits, with vegetables and lean protein.

The best diet for you to not need your medication is a low carb diet. Some people choose to follow a vegetarian diet and that works well also. What you want to do is to choose a diet that leaves the starches and sugary foods behind. These can trigger a desire to overeat and they’re just not that healthy for you.

Step #2 is to get moving! Exercise is another key to reversing your diabetes to the point where you no longer need to take medication. You’ll want to engage in aerobics exercise along with some type of strength or resistance training.

If it’s been awhile since you exercised, you can start out with brisk walking. But you’ll want to exercise for at least 20 minutes to half an hour every day. Get a pedometer, join an exercise group, or find buddy support system to help you stay motivated to work toward your goal. Every pound that you lose is helping you reserves diabetes and exercise can do that for you.

Step #3 is to get stress under control. Besides nutrition and exercise, keeping the stress you have to deal with to a minimum is also one of the key factors to getting off diabetes medication.

There are two types of stress that can affect someone with diabetes. Those are mental and physical stress. When you’re under stress, it can be harder to have the mindset that you want to control or reverse the diabetes.

When you’re under stress, it can trigger a hormone release. These stress hormones then raise the glucose levels higher than what they normally are. Keep the stress in your life as low as possible.

Healthy Compartmentalization and the Pomodoro Technique

Often when we hear the word ‘compartmentalization’ it is used in a cautionary capacity. That is to say that we’re generally led to believe that compartmentalizing is bad and that we shouldn’t repress any of our feelings.

But just as ‘guns’ aren’t evil so much as the people using them, compartmentalization is actually just a tool that can have psychological benefit when used correctly.

For example? The pomodoro technique and stress management. What am I talking about? Read on and let me explain…

The Benefits of Compartmentalization

No matter how hard you work to improve your lifestyle, you will find that there are always going to be some sources of stress remaining. This is simply a fact of life and there will always be deadlines, concerns and incomplete work.

The key to being able to relax and enjoy a healthy and normal lifestyle then, is knowing how to sometimes to switch off from those worries so that you can actually relax and recover. In other words, you need to learn to leave your work behind you when you log off and head home – otherwise you’ll constantly be stressed, you won’t be able to focus on time with your family and you won’t be able to sleep.

What is the Pomodoro Technique?

Likewise, you can also use this compartmentalization during your working day to be more productive. Case in point: the Pomodoro technique.

Essentially this technique is a tool used to improve productivity, by breaking your working hours up into smaller segments. Here you take a timer and set it for a period of time – normally around 25 minutes – and you work solidly in that time. When it goes off, you then give yourself ten minutes to recover, before going back to work.

This then should allow you to focus with absolute clarity on what you’re doing because you know that you will be getting a short break in 10 minutes. Likewise, it means you should be able to relax completely in those ten minutes without guilt. This then recharges you ready to be more productive following those ten minutes.

But the success of this process all depends on your ability to compartmentalize. The secret to success is to work solidly when you’re working and to switch off completely when you’re relaxing. There’s no point in ‘half working’ or procrastinating – you may as well just be getting some proper relaxation time.

Walk or sit, don’t wobble.

Three Common Causes of Stress in Your Life and How to Deal With Them

One way to tackle stress is to improve your health, your energy levels and your mood. By doing these things, you can help yourself to become more resilient and hardy to stress and you can avoid letting the smaller things bog you down.

But that’s a fairly abstract way to combat anxiety that doesn’t always have an immediate effect.

The other route to take then is to look at the specific causes of stress in your life – the stressors – and to remove them. Some of these will be big and some of them will be small, but all of them contribute to raising blood pressure and making us feel a little less calm and relaxed.

The problem is, many of us can’t put our fingers on exactly what it is that is causing us stress and even when we do, it’s not always obvious how we can deal with the problems.
Read on then and we will look at some of the most common causes of stress and at what you can do to deal with them once and for all…

The Commute

Did you know that the only ‘universal fear’ is things heading towards you? Thus, walking to work and having hundreds of people moving the other way down the street is pretty much a recipe for stress – especially if you’re running late or if you have a long way to travel.
One solution then is to avoid the rush hour. You can do this by speaking with your employer and asking them to give you more flexible working hours: perhaps you could work 8am-4pm for instance instead of 9am-5pm? Alternatively, look at other ways of getting in, like cycling. Or just arrive a little early!

‘Open Loops’

Many of us have lots of niggling jobs and stresses in the back of our minds that contribute to our stress. For instance, you might need to call your relative. Or maybe you have a bill to pay. These are what are known as ‘open loops’ and they can drain us of energy, focus and positivity. The solution is to deal with each of them as soon as possible rather than letting them drag on.

Money

Money is a huge stress for many of us and can cause many a sleepless night.

The solution? Creating a budget. Budgets show us how much we’re losing and where and allow us to formulate a plan to get back on top. What you will often find is that simply cancelling some of your recurring bills and changing your lifestyle a little can make a big difference and help you to get back in the black.

Stress-Free Stress Management Checklist

Looking to improve your stress levels? Ironically, this can end up being stressful in itself! Knowing you have a problem with stress is of course the first step towards getting better but it also means you now know you have a problem… and it means you have a long road stretched out in front of you to ‘recovery’.
If only there were a stress-free way to manage stress… like a checklist for instance!

Do You Have a Stress Addiction?

The first point of order is to consider the possibility that you may have a stress addiction. Unlikely though it may sound, stress addictions are common as we find ourselves unable to pull away from work and other high intensity activities.

* If you ‘thrive under pressure’ and if you can never take time off, you may well have a stress addiction.
* If you feel bored and fidgety when you’re unwinding, you may have a stress addiction
* If your friends and family complain that they never get to see you, this is a sign of a stress addiction
* If you feel constantly ‘wired’ then you may have a stress addiction.
The first step to overcoming stress then is to recognize that you may feel it’s difficult to change these habits: but you must in order to gain freedom from stress.

Identifying Your Stressors

A good place to start when tackling stress is to look at your stressors. Stressors are things that cause stress and these can include things like work and debt. At the same time though, they can also include slightly smaller things in many cases. Common stressors include…

– Impending deadlines
– Calls you need to make and don’t have time for
– Angry bosses
– Awkward colleagues
– Friends or partners who are angry with you
– Arguments
– The commute to work
– Untidy homes
– Health problems
– Inability to pay bills/debt

What you’ll notice is that some of these things are rather small and easy while others are big and abstract. A good place to start is by dealing with the smaller problems that you can tackle more easily. You might also be able to break down bigger problems into smaller issues.

For instance ‘work’ can actually mean:

– Awkward colleagues
– Bad bosses
– Uncomfortable working environments
– Unpleasant commute
– Painful working hours
– Large workloads
– Impending deadlines

So even if you can’t change your job, you may be able to deal with some of these specifics. Where will you start?

Good Habits

A lot of these problems wouldn’t occur if you were to use good stress/time management habits. Here are some good examples:

* Little and often – instead of letting your dishes pile up, try tackling them sooner so that they never build up to that level.
* The pomodoro technique – are you prone to procrastination? Get around this tendency by using the pomorodo technique: segregating your working hours into periods of work and rest using a timer.
* The 80/20 law – if you’re self-employed, you might find that 80% of your work comes from 20% of your clients. Cut the rest.
* Close open loops – don’t let things continue to stress you out over the long term. If you have a call to make, make it sooner and ‘close the loop’.

Lifestyle Changes

You should also apply these lifestyle changes to make stress easier to cope with:

1. Make sure you sleep well by going to bed at a similar time every day, by having 30 minutes to calm down with a book and by relaxing into bed
2. Make sure you give yourself breaks and holidays occasionally! No one should work 365 days a year!
3. Exercise – exercise improves stress and energy in numerous ways.
4. Eat healthily
5. Wake up with a daylight lamp, not a blaring alarm!

Dealing With Acute Stress

Finally, try to learn to deal with acute stress. Some things that can help here include:
* Breathing more slowly which will activate the parasympathetic nervous system
* Learning mindfulness and cognitive behavioral therapy
* Reminding yourself of why you shouldn’t be stressed
* Removing yourself from the situation

There you have it: you now have all the tools and know-how to begin your move towards a stress-free life!

One Day to Combat Stress

Feeling as though life is getting on top of you? Don’t worry! That’s quite a normal way to feel and according to the statistics, actually a great proportion of us have these feelings a lot of the time.

However, the good news is that you can overcome this stress if you’re willing to just take a break. The problem that many people don’t realize, is that they’re often actually addicted to stress. They don’t like being stressed but at the same time, they can’t help it.

You know that you’re addicted to stress if you find yourself constantly staying late at work, constantly taking on more jobs and feeling awkward or bored when you try relaxing. Sound familiar? If only you would take a break and make it a real break, then you could probably overcome that stress.
Why? Because you could use that one day to put your life in order and to close all your ‘open loops’.

Low Level Stress

While most of us have a few ‘big sources’ of stress, we should be able to cope with these if we could just focus on them. For instance, many of us are stressed by work or by our relationships – but this is still just ‘one source’ of stress and as such should not be crippling.

The problem is that we often have so many other additional sources of stress along with those big ones. For instance, many of us will have calls we need to make, people we need to e-mail and tidying to do. Often we have bills that need paying, admin that needs doing, clothes we need to buy for upcoming events…

The point is, most of us have a huge list of things we need to be doing and this is what makes it so hard for us to cope with the bigger things. This is what makes it feel like we’re filled to brim and like we just can’t manage with everything that’s going on.

These smaller things don’t get done either because we’re tired, because we’re stressed and because our spare time is taken up with those few ‘big’ things.

And this is where the ‘one day’ comes in. Take one day off of work, on your own, and dedicate it to getting everything else straight. That means tidying the house, it means catching up on correspondence, it means sorting out admin – it means doing all those small things that are causing you stress.

Do this, and suddenly life becomes much easier!

How to Get to Sleep When You’re Very Stressed

If you’ve ever been very stressed, then you’ll know that this can make it very difficult to get to sleep. Common when we’re stressed is to lie awake listening to our hearts thudding in our chest and getting even more stressed that we’re not able to drift off and thus re-energize for the days ahead.

This is what makes the situation so bad: we know that the less we sleep, the worse the stress is going to seem tomorrow. Ironically, we’ll experience more of the very same stress that is keeping us awake!
So what can you do to overcome that stress and just drift off?

The Right Frame of Mind

The key thing to remember here is that you can’t ‘force’ yourself to overcome stress and you can’t ‘force’ yourself to relax. The whole idea of forcing yourself to relax is actually contradictory.
This is where many people fall down: in trying to make ourselves fall asleep we will often start tossing and turning and even getting frustrated and angry that we aren’t sleeping. This only increases our stress more, increases our heartrate more and continues the vicious cycle. If you have ever looked at your alarm clock at 4am in the morning and felt like you’re the only person awake, then you’ll know this well.

So how do you break this cycle? The solution is to stop forcing yourself to sleep and to instead just let it happen naturally. Specifically, this means you should remove the pressure of ‘having’ to fall to sleep. In fact, remove the objective completely.

So when you go to bed, you’re not going to bed in order to sleep any more. Instead, recognize that simply relaxing and resting can actually be very good for you too and allow yourself to do this. Focus on how nice it is to just lie back and not need to do anything and remember that even if you only do that, you’ll still be relaxing and rejuvenating to some degree.

The irony is that as soon as you start enjoying being in bed and as soon as you take away the ‘need’ to fall asleep, you will almost always drift off right away. And not only will this improve your ability to get to sleep but it will also enhance your quality of sleep as you’ll be much more restful.

Fear Setting for Stress Reduction

Fear setting is an amazing tool that can be used to get over almost any kind of fear or doubt in your mind. Most often it is prescribed by self-help gurus and productivity experts who recommend it as a means to get over fears of taking chances.
For instance, if you are someone who is thinking about branching out and starting their own business, you might find that fears of failure are holding you back. This is where fear setting would normally come in, to help you overcome those doubts and take a real chance on your future and on your dreams.

But fear setting has other uses too. Specifically, it can be a highly powerful tool for overcoming doubts and fears that might be causing you stress. If you’re afraid of losing your job, of your relationship ending, or of your credit score becoming so bad that you can’t get a loan… this can cause you underlying chronic stress.
The solution? Fear setting, in order to remove those doubts and focus on what matters.

How to Use Fear Setting

The idea behind fear setting is that you are going to write down all the things you find are making you feel stressed. Then, you will look at them and assess on a case-by-case basis, whether they’re really worth stressing about. Are they actually likely to cause you problems, or are you worrying for nothing?

For instance, if you look at what it is you’re stressed about in your relationship, then you’ll probably find there are some underlying fears there: the big one normally being that your partner will leave you. If you’re stressed about work, then it often boils down to a fear that you might lose your job.

Write down these fears then and then rate them each on a scale of 1-10 for their likeliness. And think about each point. How likely are you really to lose your job? Bearing in mind it’s actually illegal to fire someone without a good reason? Would your partner of 5 years really leave you over one argument?
Likewise, come up with a contingency plan for each fear. What would you do if you lost your job? Worst case scenario it might mean moving back in with your parents, but probably you’d find something else faster than that.

The moral of the story? Most of our fears are inflated in our minds. Once we learn this, they become much more manageable!