Living With Diabetes – Listen to Your Body

If you’re living with diabetes, your doctor may schedule periodic appointments to monitor your condition and check your blood glucose level. If carefully managed, people with diabetes can live relatively healthy lives. But if a person with diabetes maintains a poor diet or makes other unhealthy lifestyle choices, this can spell trouble.

While you may take your medication as directed by your doctor and adhere to periodic lab work, managing diabetes also involves knowing your body and recognizing changes that can indicate problems.

If you’re living with diabetes, it is important that you closely monitor your thirst. It’s normal to feel thirsty after a workout or after you’ve eaten a salty meal. Furthermore, if you haven’t had a beverage in hours, it’s also normal to feel unusually thirsty. But if you cannot pinpoint the cause of extreme thirst, and you’re feeling unusually weak or tired, make a doctor’s appointment. This can indicate changes in your blood glucose level, and if not corrected, this can trigger complications with your diabetes.

Top Symptoms for Diabetes

Your doctor can order a blood glucose test to see whether you have diabetes. Diabetes is a serious medical condition in which the body has difficulty processing or breaking down sugar. Poorly managed diabetes increases your risk of blindness, stroke and coma, but the sooner you’re diagnosed with diabetes, the sooner you can start managing your disease.

If you have a family history of diabetes, it is important that you keep an eye out for symptoms for diabetes. You can develop diabetes as a child or an adult. If you recognize the early signs, you can bring these symptoms to your doctor s attention and receive the necessary medical treatment.

Here are three classic symptoms for diabetes:

1. Frequent urination is common when there is too much glucose present in your body. If you have not increased your consumption of liquids, yet you have frequent urges to urinate, speak with your doctor. This can be an early sign of diabetes.

2. Frequent thirst is one of many symptoms for diabetes. This is usually described as the inability to quench your thirst. This symptom is triggered by frequent urination.

3. Constant and unusual weakness or fatigue is another sign of diabetes. If you go to bed tired and wake up tired, consult a doctor and ask him to check your blood glucose level.

Recognizing the Symptoms for Diabetes

The challenges of detecting the symptoms for diabetes can be many but understanding the disease, and its symptoms can help those who are afflicted live normal lives. It all starts with glucose and the fact that there is not enough in the body’s cells. Instead, there is an overload of glucose in the blood.

There are two types of diabetes. For Type 1, the challenge is that the abundance of glucose in the blood is due to the fact that insulin produced by the cells have broken down and been decimated. For Type 2, the cells have, somehow, become resistant to the insulin that gets produced.

Recognizing the symptoms for diabetes can be challenging if one is not alert to one’s own body reactions.

The major symptoms include:
- Too much urination due to an increase in the glucose. The kidneys are constantly filling up due to no insulin and too much glucose. The kidneys are unable to effectively filter the glucose back into the blood.
- A loss of weight without dieting or exercising and weakness are definite symptoms for diabetes. The pancreas begins to break down in its ability to produce insulin. The body’s cells are not getting their energy from glucose so the cells begin to feed on fat and muscle.
- Constantly being thirsty. The kidneys are pulling out as much water as they can, and many trips to the bathroom eventually cause a continuous dehydration.
 

Other symptoms for diabetes include:
- tingling in the extremities
- dry and itchy skin
-blurry vision
- constant and prevailing fatigue

 

Blood Tests Can Identify Onset of Type 1 Diabetes as Much as a Decade Before Symptoms Appear

As America grapples with an ever-growing diabetes epidemic, more researchers are looking at the “other” diabetes — Type 1 diabetes.

Type 1 diabetes affects close to three million Americans, and is far more difficult to manage than Type 2 Diabetes. Type 1 diabetes has been growing at an annual rate of three percent, and experts are not sure why, although the typical theories abound: lack of exercise, poor diet, and other lifestyle choices.

However, the greatest factor in determining if an individual gets Type 1 diabetes is their family history: people who have a family member with Type 1 diabetes have a 15-times greater risk of developing it compared to the general public.

Fortunately, a simple blood test can identify the onset of Type 1 diabetes — sometimes as much as ten years before symptoms appear — which is far more preferable than finding out you’re diabetic after slipping into a “critical insulin deficiency” (e.g. a “diabetic coma.”)

While typical symptoms for diabetes include increased thirst and frequent urination, individuals — especially those with family members with Type 1 diabetes — shouldn’t take any chances. Get tested today.