A Holistic Approach to Managing Diabetes
Combining a low-carb diet with low-intensity workouts and mindful living will make managing your diabetes easier.
Most of the time, when you go to your doctor and speak about diabetes, the focus is on medication. How to adjust your insulin dose or change some of the settings of your insulin pump. When you have prediabetes or diabetes type 2, the discussions are usually around dieting and exercise. In addition to your medication, we believe that it is the combination of three factors that make managing your diabetes easier. The factors are:
Have a low-carb diet.
Work out regularly and follow a low-intensity routine.
Live mindfully.
A low-carb diet is an approach where you still eat carbs, but you limit the quantity of carbs to usually 20% or less of your total nutrition. The difference to the keto diet is that you eat more carbs than with keto and that you also don’t fall into the area of ketosis. We believe that a keto diet can be beneficial for a certain time, but it is not a diet that you can follow all the time. Keto followers will disagree, but this is how we see it. We also believe that you don’t have to count the carbs; estimates are OK with us. Just make sure that you reduce the carbs to around 20% or less of your diet.
The advantage of a low-carb diet for diabetes is the avoidance of significant ups and downs in your blood sugar.
When you eat less carbs, you need less insulin, which reduces the volatility of blood sugars and, thereby, the risk for very low and very high values. Sounds simple? It is!
Working out and exercising is great for your body. There are different approaches to sports, and we suggest low-intensity workouts. The reason is that high-intensity workouts lead to a significant drop in your blood sugar, and then you have to balance it with high carbs or sugar to avoid low blood sugar values. Low-intensity workouts reduce that risk. Your blood sugars will go down, but not dramatically.
Low-intensity workouts result in lower, average blood sugar.
Low-intensity workouts are, technically speaking, exercises at around 60% of your maximum heart rate, which is 220 minus your age. But we want to keep it simple! Make sure that you can still hold a conversation while working out and you are at the right level of intensity. Work out at least three times per week, with each workout being 30 minutes or longer.
You probably already noticed that being stressed will result in higher blood sugar, and being relaxed helps you to balance your blood sugar better over time. This is the reason why we add mindful living to the best approach to managing diabetes.
Whether it is yoga or meditation, living mindfully will help with your diabetes.
You can use apps on your phone, audio programs, YouTube videos, or read books. Whatever approach you like best, follow it. The importance is that you do it, not so much which specific method you use.
Each of those three methods helps with your diabetes, but you will see the biggest effect if you combine all three of them. Don’t just manage your medication and insulin, and don’t just improve your diet or your workout separately.
Combine a low-carb diet, low-intensity workouts, and mindful living for the best results.
Try it, and let us know how it works for you!
