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Are you at risk of pre-diabetes or even type II diabetes?  There are things that you can do for type II diabetes prevention.

 Many people are scared of hearing about type II diabetes and deep inside they are afraid that it may “happen” to them.

Let me tell you that diabetes don’t just “happen” but it develops as a consequence of mistreating you metabolism, your body and more specifically your pancreas. You start with a condition called pre-diabetes that if it not addressed appropriately would eventually develop into type 2 diabetes.

After I lost weight as a teenager and never gain it back I never really felt worried or scared about developing type II diabetes. I considered myself a very healthy eater and since I was quite skinny I tough I was “safe”. Until I got pregnant...  I developed gestational diabetes and I felt scared and miserable. 

Scared because I felt vulnerable. Even after losing weight, being skinny and eating healthy I had been diagnosed with diabetes, Who?! Me?!

Miserable, because it was the first and last time I was on a diet and I really hated every single day!

By the time I was pregnant with my second child, I knew enough about sugar and carbs metabolism that I made sure my body was ready to manage them and not develop gestational diabetes again.

Research suggests that 1 out of 3 adults has pre-diabetes, of this group, 9 out of 10 people don’t know that they have pre-diabetes .

If you are “scared” of developing diabetes you can’t just ‘hide”, hopping that it won’t “happen” to you. You have to start changing what is making you being at “risk” of Type II diabetes.  

The problem is not only in you but a set of circumstances and behaviors that are leading you towards specific actions, way of living and habits that result in poor insulin management (one of the health effects is pre-diabetes which is bringing you close to developing Type II diabetes).

Society has changed a lot in the last decades and with that the needs and habits in terms of nutrition. 

The food manufacturing industry has taken advantage of those changes by creating easy to consume food that is hyper-palatable (by achieving the right combination of fat-salt-and sugar) and that become addictive to the consumer. 

Also, for many years it has been considered that fat was the main enemy of your health and weight management. In an effort to create food with less fat the food industry realized that by adding sugar to the food would compensate the reduction in fat (in terms of texture, flavor, palatability and addiction). To the point that nowadays almost any processed food has sugar added. It is not your fault that you are eating so much hidden sugar since you were convinced that you were doing the right thing by eating “light” (low fat) food.

The lack of deep knowledge of how the metabolism of carbs and sugar work, the change in habits, the addiction to palatable food, the hidden sugar of most products, and the amount of sugar and carbs (complex sugars) you are eating, is enough to make you at risk of pre-diabetes and diabetes Type II.

Could you have diabetes? Take a quiz here. 

Type II Diabetes Prevention

So, what can you do to avoid or reverse pre-diabetes or even Type II diabetes? 

Learn how to:

• Manage your insulin levels and 

• Take care of your pancreas

Learn How to Manage Your Insulin Levels

Weight gain and obesity are the most common consequences of poor insulin management. Learn more about insulin here. When you continue pushing the pancreas to produce insulin, insulin resistance can occur, which could result in pre-diabetes and type II diabetes.

Insulin resistance or pre-diabetes develops due to a systematic excess of glucose consumption and out-of-control insulin production, and also as a consequence of abdominal fat accumulation usually due to non appropriate habits. 

The pre-diabetic situation can still be turned around by a diet and a change of lifestyle and habits. A program like 32 Mondays Weight Management and the associated lifestyle changes will lead to weight loss and, more specifically, to loss of belly fat. Belly fat favors the production of the hormones that makes you gain weight and are also directly related to pre-diabetes. If you don’t turn the pre-diabetic situation around, over time type II diabetes will be diagnosed. 

Care and Treatment of Your Pancreas

Your pancreas plays a very important role in the weight management story by providing the necessary insulin to balance glucose levels, especially its peaks. You need to treat this organ well and consider it to maintain optimum health.

If you want to be your pancreas’s friend, this is how to help it:

1. Learn about the Glycemic Index (GI) and Glycemic Load (GL) of food and limit the amount of high-glycemic food you ingest. If your pancreas is always working too hard, it will tire and become less effective. To learn more you can download my FREE e-book here. 
2. Give your pancreas a rest. It needs at least three to four hours to rest between shifts, which means three to four hours between each meal. Learn about snacking and how to organize your meals so you don’t eat more often than 3-4 hours but you don’t get starving to your next meal.
3. Never have high-glycemic foods by themselves. When you eat glucose alone, it pushes the pancreas to generate as much insulin as possible to remove the glucose as soon as possible. Those candies you eat to alleviate your hunger not only hit your pancreas hard, but they also have the opposite effect and don’t alleviate hunger. Always eat high-glycemic foods like sugar, chocolate, sugary or alcoholic drinks, pasta, rice, and fruit, with protein and fat, and, when possible, at the end of a meal. If there is something else in your stomach, especially some protein or fat, insulin won’t be wandering around by itself trying to reduce the amount of glucose in your bloodstream. Learn how to plan your meals, what to include, and how to balance the glycemic load of the whole meal.
4. Exercise before eating. You will deplete your glycogen reserves during exercise instead of storing as fat the energy contained in the food ingested. Then when you do eat, your glucose levels in blood will be under control because the glucose will be immediately transformed into glycogen in the liver to be used later when needed. Learn about exercising and which is the most appropriate for you.