High blood sugar or diabetes can cause many health problems and if left untreated can affect the body’s key organs – the heart, kidneys, liver – which can be fatal. Dr Harish Kumar, Clinical Professor and Head, Center for Endocrinology and Diabetes, Amrita Hospital, Kochi, shares, “The first thing you need to remember about controlling diabetes is that you need to maintain your lifestyle properly. So a healthy lifestyle is a Healthy Lifestyle style now has three components – the first component is diet, the second is exercise, and the third is stress management.”
Manage Your Diabetes: Control 3 Aspects of Life
Dr. Kumar says how these three aspects of lifestyle can be regulated to control diabetes
Adjust your diet
1) A relatively low-calorie diet prescribed by your doctor or dietician is recommended for diabetes.
2) Ensure that there are more fruits and vegetables in your diet. There are some fruits that you can safely eat when you have diabetes. Some others should not be eaten by diabetics because they can raise blood sugar. Click HERE for a list of 7 low glycemic index fruits that diabetics can eat.
Exercise regularly
1) In addition to taking care of your diet, another very important component of how to keep your blood sugar under control is regular exercise.
2) It is generally recommended to perform 40-45 minutes of vigorous aerobic exercise – daily if possible, or at least five times a week. Now aerobic exercise means it would be jogging, brisk walking, swimming and playing games like ball, tennis and basketball.
3) For elderly patients, brisk walking for 40-45 minutes is sufficient.
4) Even if you can’t or don’t have time to walk briskly for 40-45 minutes straight, then people – especially busy office people – should make sure to take a 10-12 minute casual walk after each meal. . Recent evidence has shown that it also tends to lower blood sugar levels overall.
Manage your stress
People may not pay much attention to this, but controlling stress is an important part of lifestyle management because whenever you get stressed, your blood sugar and blood pressure tend to rise. It is therefore very important to learn how to manage stress. It is not possible to eliminate stress from our lives, but what we can do is learn to manage stress. Yoga and meditation techniques can actually help us reduce the stress level in our reactions to various life situations.