The Complications Of Diabetes
Posted by Owen Jones in Uncategorized, tags: beverages, diabetes, diet, disease, exercise, family, food, health, illness, lifestyle, nutrients, other, pregnancy, self help, UncategorizedIf you have been diagnosed with diabetes or that you are in a pre-diabetic state, it is very worrying. Everything is new to you and you have heard horror stories about diabetes. Well, those horror stories are a fact for those who cannot afford medication or who do not take the condition seriously.
Organ failure, blindness and amputations are the natural result of diabetes unless it is treated. The first step after being warned of the disease is to learn as much about it as you can.
What it can do to you; how you can recognize the symptoms and what you can do to avoid the natural consequences of being diabetic. The consequences that have befallen diabetics for thousands of years.
It takes more thought, preparation and effort to live with a disease than it does to live without one. That is understandable, but your life changes when you are given the information and you have to choose whether to tackle it or roll over.
‘Fighting it’ often means no more than living sensibly, maybe for the first time in your life. It involves taking the time to eat sensibly and not grab a candy bar or junk food. It might even mean learning to cook properly, if you never bothered before.
It will mean re-evaluating your life and deciding whether you would like to carry on. However, if you choose to ‘carry on’, your old lifestyle will be closed to you, because that would mean certain death.
If you decide on ‘life’, then it means a change of lifestyle and that ‘new’ lifestyle is close to what you should have been living all your life, which is fairly ironic.
It will have taken you getting a life-threatening disease to do what you should have been doing anyway.
However, you will end up healthier than you were, which sounds ironic too. In short, your illness, diabetes (mellitus) will force you to live a healthy life or die. This is the body’s ultimate way of getting its own way.
At the end of the day, people do not die of diabetes. It is similar to AIDS in that respect - people do not die of AIDS. They die in both cases of complications caused by or as a result of diabetes or AIDS.
Some of these complications are:
Heart disease and stroke: diabetics have more chance of heart disease and a stroke because their blood, if unregulated, is thicker (with the extra sugar/glucose) and does not diffuse into the lesser blood vessels.
Kidney disease is a major hazard, but one which can be avoided, like most other health concerns.
Eyesight problems, like cataracts are very common in cases of untreated diabetes. Numerous diabetics used to go blind as a matter of course.
Amputations were fairly common too, because the thicker blood cannot reach the extremities which tend to have narrower blood vessels, They die, resulting in gangrene.
All of these complications can be avoided by doing what your doctortells you, even though lifestyle alterations are the most difficult to implement
Owen Jones, the author of this piece, writes on a variety of subjects, and is now involved with how to cook for diabetics. If you would like to know more, please visit our web site at Cookbooks For Diabetics.
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