Time and time again, the American public is inundated with news clips and commentaries about how we are the most overweight country in the world. While experts chat on daily talk shows about the latest fad diet or quick fix exercise plan, fast food joints encourage us to come in and try the newest-biggest-baddest-burger that they’ve just concocted.
Sadly, the topic that might encourage people to really think about their weight as a real health issue, and make changes in their daily lives is often not mentioned at all: pre-diabetes.
Pre-diabetes is a nutritional disorder that affects over 100 million people in the US. Some of the outward signs of pre-diabetes can be an extra layer of fat around the waist, insulin resistance, craving sweets or starchy foods, and/or feeling tired or mentally in a fog. What people can’t see is the damage that this disease is doing on the inside where, without treatment, there is great risk of developing heart disease, hypertension, high cholesterol and, of course, Type 2 diabetes. Although pre-diabetes can lead to serious health conditions, it can be reversed!
Here are five tips to avoid pre-diabetes:
1. See a doctor.
Meeting with your doctor and having a simple glucose test, to confirm if you have pre-diabetes, is the essential first step towards dealing with this disease. By seeing your doctor, you are providing him or her with a baseline of your health as it stands today so that, going forward, your doctor can work with you to monitor any pre-diabetes symptoms. He or she can also be a valuable resource towards giving you recommendations to see other specialists or support programs such as Insulite Laboratories which helps people with pre-diabetes develop a comprehensive plan to battle the disease.
2. Develop a smart eating plan.
We all know that some foods are better than others. But when dealing with a health concern such as pre-diabetes, evaluating and thinking about what we put into our bodies becomes essential to our overall health. That’s why sitting down to develop a healthy eating plan and really evaluating food choices will help you adopt lifelong, healthy eating habits.
Obvious good food choices that have proven to reverse pre-diabetes include low-fat proteins such as chicken and fish as well as fruits and vegetables such as assorted greens, spinach, tomatoes, onions, peppers, apples, cherries, broccoli, and blueberries. Other not so obvious good food choices include organic foods, low-glycemic foods such as lentils, chickpeas, and yogurt. Also, foods with essential fatty acids such as fish oil GLA, CLA and flaxseed oil. Foods that you should avoid when diagnosed with pre-diabetes include high-glycemic foods that break down quickly in the bloodstream like white bread, bagels, white potatoes, and corn.
