Your 8-Step Daily Diabetes Checklist
Managing type 2 diabetes can seem like an endless to-do list of eating healthy, exercising, testing your blood sugar, and taking medications. But by taking some simple steps to control diabetes, you can help prevent or delay serious diabetes-related complications including nerve damage, vision loss, kidney disease, and stroke.
Streamlining your daily checklist will help you stick to it more easily. Here are the essentials:
1. Test your blood sugar and record it in a logbook.
Monitoring your blood sugar levels is an important part of managing diabetes. Daily monitoring provides ongoing feedback about your blood sugar levels and diabetes management, says Alison Massey, RD, CDE, LDN, director of diabetes education at Mercy Medical Center in Baltimore. Use the information to guide your decisions about what to eat and when and how to exercise, and to provide insight into proper medication dosing if you’re on insulin, she adds.
Recording the information in a logbook is vital, according to the American Diabetes Association (ADA). Your logbook becomes a tool that can be used during visits with your doctor to see how well your diabetes management plan is working and to make changes if necessary.
2. Take your medication.
When diet and exercise alone are not able to keep diabetes under control, your doctor may prescribe medication to help with blood sugar management, Massey says. “It’s important to understand how your diabetes medications work to control blood sugar levels, how to treat low blood sugar if that happens, and how and when to take your medication,” she says. Your
Continue
reading