I Love Insulinand You Should Too
When people first are diagnosed with type 1 diabetes, they typically start taking insulin. When they start insulin, they typically gain weight. Therefore, insulin is often associated with weight gain.
Insulin is necessary for people with type 1 diabetes to live. You already know this.
What you probably dont realize, however, is that insulin is not what is causing weight gain. What causes weight gain is a hamster wheel of blood sugar control issues:
Low blood sugar correct with carbs overcorrecting leading to a high blood sugar and a correction bolus too much insulin low blood sugar
The cycle is like a roller coaster that you just cant get off, seemingly forever. Youre eating more calories than expected for your goals, and suddenly, BAM! There are a few pounds you did not plan to gain, or your weight loss goals derailed.
Yes, insulin is a part of the equation, but not THE WHOLE equation.
I get it: low blood sugars can be tough, and some of them you make you want to eat the whole fridge. But, for lows and weight loss, consider the following idea:
All in all, dont worry about how much insulin youre using worry about keeping your blood sugars in great control and preventing lows, and the insulin amount will take care of itself.
To learn more about the best ways to treat lows, read How to Treat a Low Blood Sugar .
Exercising First Thing In The Morning Or Before Dinner
Old-school diabetes education has told us to exercise after eating in order to prevent low blood sugars, but this will drastically prevent your body from burning fat for fuel. Why would it need to? You just ate 400 calories your body can burn that up instead.
When you exercise first thing in the morning before eating, and with a stable in-range blood sugar youre actually going to burn fat for fuel because your body is still in a fasted state.
The moment you consume calories, your body will switch over to burning glucose for fuel.
This is something bodybuilders have been doing for decades in an effort to burn body fat without sacrificing muscle mass.
If you cant exercise in the morning, you can create a fasted environment by not eating past 3 p.m., and exercising at 6 or 7 p.m. before dinner.
The fast-acting insulin you took for your last meal at 3 p.m. will be largely out of your system. As long as your basal/background insulin is properly fine-tuned, you should be able to do a cardio workout without seeing any significant change in your blood sugar.
Strength-training workouts can sometimes spike in your blood sugar. If you see that happening consistently, then you know you may need a small bolus of insulin at the start of your strength-training workout.
When I used to lift weights in the morning, I took 1 unit of insulin to counter the glycogen breakdown from my muscles and liver.
Be patient, though. It takes easily 30 or more days to see the scale budge.
The Sooner You Get Started The Better
In research3 on men and women with type 2 diabetes who came to the Pritikin Longevity Center, those who were most successful were those who arrived when they were first diagnosed with the disease, not those who waited till theyd had the disease for many years.
The longer one continues treating type 2 diabetes with drugs while mostly ignoring what drives the disease process excess body fat, excess calories, inactivity, and a lousy diet the more rapidly the disease progresses. Beta cells are lost forever. It becomes more and more difficult to control blood glucose without drugs, explains Gomer.
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Doing Exercise And Physical Activity
How To Lose Weight With Diabetes And Hypothyroidism
Diabetes and hypothyroidism are problems associated with your endocrine system, a network of glands that plays a role in many important body functions. And its important to keep at your healthy weight-scale if you are a diabetic or/and have under-active thyroid. Fortunately, there are plenty of options to lose weight and keep it off.
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How Can Diabetes Cause Weight Loss
Unexpected or unintended weight loss is often a symptom of unmanaged diabetes, both type 1 and type 2.
With type 1 diabetes, the immune system attacks cells of the pancreas that make insulin. Since theres no insulin available to move glucose into the bodys cells, glucose builds up in the bloodstream. The kidneys then work to remove this unused sugar through urination. The sugar isnt used as energy, so the body starts burning fat and muscle for energy, resulting in weight loss.
Weight loss in type 1 diabetes may be unintentional. If people with type 1 diabetes need to lose weight, this can be done safely by reducing calorie intake. Some people may under-treat their diabetes to lose weight, but this is highly dangerous. Skipping insulin can lead to very high blood sugar levels, a serious complication known as diabetic ketoacidosis, and potentially death.
Under-treating diabetes to lose weight can be a symptom of an eating disorder. If you think you have an eating disorder, reach out to your doctor or a mental health professional to get specialized support and treatment.
When To Talk With A Professional
If youre not sure how best to eat for diabetes, or if you want help with managing your weight, consider meeting with a dietitian or nutritionist.
If you have Medicare, you may be eligible for Intensive Behavioral Therapy for Obesity. This includes up to a year of in-person weight-loss counseling visits with a healthcare professional.
Certified Diabetes Care and Education Specialists are professionals who provide personal one-on-one support to people living with diabetes. They can help with:
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Understanding Excess Weight And Its Role In Type 2 Diabetes
This article is designed to help you better understand the impact of excess weight and its role in type 2 diabetes. Excess weight, obesity and morbid obesity are all risk factors for developing type 2 diabetes. Often times, individuals are not aware of the health risk of excess weight until they are diagnosed with pre-diabetes or type 2 diabetes.
Talk With Your Health Care Team
People are usually more successful at weight loss and being more active if they have regular contact and support from health professionals. Talk with your health care team about the changes you want to make to prevent type 2 diabetes.
- Tell your health care team about your progress with weight loss and activity, and if you are having trouble sticking with your plan.
- Ask your health care team if you should take a medicine called metformin. Research shows that taking metformin can help prevent or delay type 2 diabetes. It is most helpful in younger people who are overweight and have prediabetes, and for women who have had gestational diabetes, a type of diabetes that develops during pregnancy.
- Contact your health insurance provider to learn what benefits are offered for weight-loss programs, diabetes-prevention programs, nutrition counseling, or fitness programs.
- Some people with Medicare may be eligible for Intensive Behavioral Therapy for Obesity. This service includes up to 1 year of in-person weight-loss counseling visits with a health care professional.
If you smoke or use other tobacco products, you should stop. Even though quitting smoking can make it hard to manage your weight, it is a very important step to improve your health. Ask your health care team to help you create a plan for quitting. You can start by calling the national quitline at 1-800-QUITNOW . For tips on quitting, go to SmokeFree.gov.
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How Much Should You Exercise And What Type Of Exercise
If you are just starting out, you dont want to go from 0 to 100 real quick, because you may burn out or get discouraged. I recommend a combination of resistance training and cardiovascular training for optimal results.
People overlook resistance training in the context of weight loss. This is what is going to help you KEEP your hard-earned muscle mass during the calorie reduction.
Guess what?
That muscle mass will keep your metabolism firing. Your metabolism firing means youll burn more calories ALL the time, working out or not!
Recommendation: Make resistance training a STAPLE in your exercise program. For help in designing your first routine, check out my post about how to design a resistance training program.
Combine this with some form of cardiovascular training multiple times a week for 20 minutes get creative here and find something you enjoy and youve got a recipe for success on the exercise front.
Dont Obsess Over Cutting All The Carbs
There is so much emphasis within the diabetes community on cutting carbs, eating a ketogenic diet, or following the Bernstein approach. The pressure can feel overwhelming succeed at cutting carbs.
You dont, however, have to eat strictly low-carb in order to lose weight. It might feel like thats the only thing thats worked in the past but if youre still trying to lose weight today, then Id argue that it didnt actually work for you at all because you werent able to stick to it and you gained the weight back.
If trying to follow a strict low-carb diet hasnt worked for you so far, lets try something different.
The goal is to create an approach to nutrition you can sustain longterm, that doesnt leave you feeling deprived, that includes a lot of whole foods especially vegetables.
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Diabetes And Weight Gain
If we go back to history, we will understand the cause of weight gain or obesity and the fastly increasing number of diabetes. It is well known that our lifestyles were way more active before industrialization. And now the world has gone digital, people dont have to go anywhere to even buy groceries. All these facilities have made our lives almost static leading to inactiveness. And lack of physical activity develops the accumulation of fat in your body and makes us obese.
Another factor for increasing obesity is high carbohydrate food. Earlier the food that was more in trend was seafood and whole grains full of fibers and other nutrients. But now those food items come in a more refined form and eventually in an artificial form. Many recipes that have high carb amounts like cookies, pasta, and cuisine of different countries have been globalized. So these are the causes of obesity.
Weight Loss Can Protect Your Health In Many Ways
It’s more important that you focus on reducing the weight around your middle since the evidence points to central adiposity as the greatest risk for heart disease and other adverse side effects of diabetes.
Loosing weight around your belly is the most important sign that you are reducing the health risks associated with type 2 diabetes.
If you have been told you have prediabetes, or you are newly diagnosed with type 2 diabetes, by decreasing your weight by about 10%which is no more than 10-15 lbs for many peopleyou may be able to reverse your diabetes, putting it into remission, or putting off developing it at all.¹
Even more compelling, weight loss will likely protect you from developing common diabetes-related complications like eye diseases , neuropathy , kidney failure, liver damage, high blood pressure, stroke, and heart disease.
If youve recently been diagnosed with type 2 diabetes and have been advised to lose weight, you’re probably saying to yourself: “easier said then done,” or more likely, “don’t you think I’ve tried everything to do that already?!”
Understanding how to achieve lasting weight loss starts with a focused assessment of how you are currently eating so you can pinpoint habits that may be holding you back from succeeding.
For many, the best way to do this may be to work with a registered dietitian or certified diabetes educator to help you design a plan that will work for youa , , and to set realistic goals to help you reach a healthy weight.
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This Diabetes Drug Is Being Prescribed Off
Y2K fashion is officially backand many worry that with the return of low-rise bottoms comes an infatuation with thinness. Sydney Sweeneys ultra-low-rise skirt and crop top, which she wore to the MTV Movie & TV Awards earlier this year, sparked a debate about a potential setback for the body-positivity movement. Kim Kardashians Met Gala diet stunt similarly sent the internet spinning with worry that thin bodies were once again trendy, a step back from the progress made in the last 10 years for people who dont fit the straight-size mold.
We almost never know with any certainty what exact methods celebrities are utilizing to look the way they do, though its usually a combination of measures that are financially inaccessible to most. Hollywoods latest glorification of thin bodies, and of wearing fashions that are made with this very thin body in mind, as Gianluca Russo, cofounder of size-inclusive digital community The Power of Plus, put it to Yahoo, is harming more than just the millions of impressionable young people who consider celebrities aspirational: Disabled people are being affected too.
Ozempic, a diabetes drug that boosts insulin sensitivity and suppresses appetite, oftentimes resulting in weight loss, has recently faced shortages that coincide with the drugs exploding popularity on TikTok as a kind of miracle drug for weight loss.
Originally Appeared on Glamour
How Does Diabetes Cause Weight Gain
Insulin is essential hormone produced and released from pancreas, an organ behind and below stomach. It plays a key role to allow glucose in the bloodstream to be absorbed by cells of the body .
In diabetes, there something goes awry with insulin. Without insulin, its difficult for glucose in the blood to enter to the bodys cells. This can lead to high amount of glucose in the blood.
Managing high blood sugar in diabetics can use insulin treatment, especially for those with type-1 diabetes. As well we know that type-1 is insulin dependent since it causes a significant decrease in insulin production even in some cases, the pancreas cannot produce insulin at all.
Type-1 is thought as a consequence of autoimmune condition. Without known reason, the body immune system attacks and destroys its own healthy cells, tissues, or organ. In this case, it mistakenly attacks cells of pancreas.
Type-2 diabetes is more common, even its the most common form of diabetes. It occurs when the amount of insulin produced by pancreas is not enough for the body needs or if the body cannot use insulin effectively . Its not insulin dependent since the pancreas is usually still able to produce insulin. But sometimes it requires insulin treatment, too.
And when it comes to weight gain and diabetes, the use of insulin treatment is often to blame. Insulin and the risk of gaining excess pounds of weight often go hand in hand.
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You Dont Have To Do It Alone
Find family and friends who will support and encourage you in preventing type 2 diabetes. Join with a neighbor or coworker in changing your lifestyle. Talk with your health care team to learn about programs that may help, such as the National Diabetes Prevention Program.
- National Diabetes Prevention ProgramLed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention , the National Diabetes Prevention Program offers lifestyle change programs based on the Diabetes Prevention Program research study. Participants work with a lifestyle coach in a live group or online setting to receive a 1-year lifestyle change program that includes 16 core sessions and 6 post-core sessions . Find a program near you.
Calories In Calories Out
The simplest fact about weight loss is straightforward: you need to burn more calories than you consume. This probably isnt news, but its the central truth of the matter, and the one fact that any weight loss program needs to grapple with. And so its exactly where we need to begin.
A calorie is a unit of energy. The calories we get from food are the fuel that our bodies need to run and survive.
Your body only needs a certain amount of energy. If you eat more than this amount , the energy is stored as fat, and you will gain weight. If you eat less , your body harvests the stored energy , and you will lose weight.
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