Learning how to regulate your blood sugar is really crucial in losing weight.
So the way your body normally regulates blood sugar, is your body always has to have a certain amount of sugar in your bloodstream at all times to provide energy for your brain and for your muscles and for your liver, and just for basic functioning.
If you have too much sugar in your bloodstream, it’s going to cause problems.
It can cause nerve damage ,eye damage,kidney and heart problems so it is extremely detrimental.
And if you have too little sugar in your blood, it’s going to make you tired and you’re not going to have enough energy for your brain.
So your body always has to keep a certain amount of sugar in your bloodstream at all times, not too much, and not too little.
A well-balanced blood sugar level is crucial to your overall fitness and well-being, regulating your hormones, triggering your body to burn stored fat, and increasing your metabolism to help you lose weight.
Unfortunately, most people’s blood sugar is not properly balanced.
If you’re getting too much glucose, it leads to high blood-sugar levels, which your body can’t break down and stores as fat.
Ironically, not getting enough sugar can also lead to putting on extra pounds!
Eating too little glucose can lead to a low blood sugar level, causing your body to go into “starvation mode” where it burns your lean muscle instead of the fat.
When we eat, our body converts carbohydrates into blood sugar (glucose), our main source of energy. Blood sugar levels can affect how hungry and energetic we feel.
Glucose also determines whether we burn fat or store it.
To understand diabetes, you should first understand how your body handles glucose, the sugar that fuels your metabolism.
After you eat, your digestive tract breaks down carbohydrates into simple sugars that are small enough to be absorbed into your bloodstream.
Glucose is far and away the most important of these sugars, and it’s an indispensable source of energy for your body’s cells.
But to provide that energy, it must travel from your blood into your cells.
Insulin is the hormone that unlocks the door to your cells.
When your blood glucose levels rise after a meal, the beta cells of your pancreas spring into action, pouring insulin into your blood.
If you produce enough insulin and your cells respond normally, your blood sugar level drops as glucose enters the cells, where it is burned for energy or stored for future use in your liver as glycogen.
Insulin also helps your body turn amino acids into proteins and fatty acids into body fat.
The net effect is to allow your body to turn food into energy and to store excess energy to keep your engine running if fuel becomes scarce in the future.
Diabetes is a single name for a group of disorders.
All forms of the disease develop when the pancreas is unable to supply enough insulin to meet the body’s needs.
In some cases, the problem is a low supply, in others, the body resists the insulin it has, and in still others, it’s both a low supply and insulin resistance.
The initial assessment of people with diabetes should include the following measurements: height, weight, calculation of BMI (kg/m2) and waist circumference (WC) to assess the degree of abdominal obesity.
If you adopt a diabetes diet you may find yourself losing some weight, because high blood sugars make us more insulin resistant and that causes weight gain.
But there’s another reason why diabetes diets can help you lose weight , when you flatten out your blood sugar after meals, you eliminate the overwhelming hunger that comes with blood sugars that go very high and then drift back down.
When you aren’t starving all the time, losing weight is a lot easier.
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It is the carbohydrates you eat that raise your blood sugar. If you cut back on carbohydrates, your blood sugar will come down. It’s that simple.
Use your blood sugar meter after each meal to determine how many grams of carbs you can eat and still meet a healthy blood sugar target.
Start out by measuring your blood sugar one and two hours after each meal. Write down what you ate and observe what it did to your blood sugar.
If a meal allows you to reach your blood sugar targets, try eating it again on a different day and test it test again, possibly at a later time, to make sure that your good numbers weren’t just a result of slow digestion.
If you end up too high after a meal, the next time you eat it, cut back on the portion size of the carbohydrate-bearing foods in the meal and test again.
Do this until you can hit your targets, or flag the carbohydrate-containing foods in that meal as ones your body can’t handle and replace it with something else.
How much carbohydrate you can manage depends your body size and muscle mass as well as on how damaged your beta cells are.
The more you weigh or the more muscle you have, the less each gram of carbohydrate you eat will raise your blood sugar.
You must learn how many grams of carbohydrate are in normal portions of the foods you eat.
The best way to learn how many grams of carbohydrates are in the different foods you eat is to read food labels carefully.
When you estimate how many grams of carbohydrate there are in a portion of food, it is very important to find out if the amount of food on your plate corresponds to the amount in the “one serving” listed on a label,or in a cookbook.
The best way to do this is to invest in an electronic food scale and to weigh your foods for a few weeks until you get the hang of estimating portion size.
This may sound like a lot of work, and when you first start, it is.
But after you do it for a few weeks you’ll find you have memorized the carbohydrate gram counts and the portion sizes for the foods you usually eat.
Foods with a lot of fat in them take longer to digest than those without a lot of fat. This is why pizza and ice cream often give deceptively good readings on your meter.
If you test a meal and see a reading that is too good to be true, be sure you test at 3 or four hours after eating.
Come up with new recipes and finding new, delicious and healthy foods you can substitute for old, high carb standards.
As you learn what foods raise your blood sugar and what foods don’t, you will almost certainly find that there are a lot of foods you used to love that don’t work for you anymore.
If your dietitian tells you a food is good for you, but your meter tells you it is raising your blood sugar to a level that is high enough to cause complications, you will have to listen to your meter.
Your meter will tell you what is safe to eat and while you are learning how to get your blood sugar under control and how to bring those high blood sugars down to normal levels you will have to accept that you can only eat those foods that don’t cause spikes.
INFOGRAPHIC – Calculating Protein Intake for Weight Loss And Reduced Risk of Type 2 Diabetes
While the exact cause of Type 2 diabetes is still not fully understood, it is known that being overweight or obese (having a body mass index – BMI – of 30 or greater) has a significant impact.
In fact, recent research suggests that obese people are up to 80 times more likely to develop type 2 diabetes than those with a BMI of less than 22.
So losing weight and bringing your BMI below this value is one of the most important, and controllable, ways to reduce your risk of Type 2 diabetes. And according to research, simply optimizing your protein intake can help you achieve rapid weight loss results – even with light-to-moderate exercising.
Thanks to Thinner You Centers, the following infographic on protein for weight loss contains science-based information about the effects of protein intake on body composition, and how to calculate your optimal protein intake for maximum weight loss potential!
Click here to view YOUR SECRET WEAPON WEIGHT LOSS INFOGRAPHIC!
For more great Health and Nutrition Tips refer to the website positivehealthwellness.com.
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