Taking care of our health takes many forms. Most of us focus on the simple ones like eating right, exercising occasionally, and making sure that we see our doctor for routine checkups. This tends to help keep us overall healthy. Some of us need to go a little farther though if life has made things a bit more complicated. Type II diabetes can hit almost anyone thanks to the fact that genetics frequently play a role in the overall likelihood of being affected. It is hard to accommodate for genetics, after all. There are other factors that increase both the risk of developing Type II diabetes and magnify the potential negative effects of the disease. While there is no real cure, lifestyle choices can go a long way towards helping you to live with diabetes, if you have it, or to avoid it entirely.

Exercise
This is one of the two core components of taking proper care of yourself at any point in your life, but it takes on a special importance when you have diabetes. Exercise helps to manage your overall weight. A healthy weight helps to ensure that diabetic bodies have fewer overall issues and is associated with increased insulin sensitivity overall. If you have never exercised routinely before, then you will need to start after receiving a diabetes diagnosis. The catch is that you’ll want to figure out the best kind of exercise available to you by discussing things with your doctor. Many studies indicate that forms of strength training are typically the best. This makes perfect sense as they help promote the most muscle growth overall and as a result help to ensure that your weight remains lower. Fortunately, there are plenty of simple strength training exercises like push-ups and squats that can be done anywhere.

Diet
As the other core component to diabetes management, diet has a particularly special role. You need to learn to cut away all the extra and unnecessary sugars and fats from your diet. That’s the only place where eating well with diabetes is simple though. There is much debate in the medical community as to what the best form of diet you can adopt at that point. Many people favor high fiber, and therefore carbohydrate rich, diets that are good for managing overall blood sugar. This immediately makes sense, but others have suggested a low carbohydrate diet might be the best approach. Fewer carbohydrates necessarily means you’ll be eating fewer sugars and have less to manage from your diet. The real solution is likely highly individualized. Your best option is to discuss things with your doctor and work to figure out a suitable diet through trial and error.

Taking Care of You
What a lot of people don’t talk about is that proper management of any form of diabetes also means considering arranging to see a mental health professional regularly too. Something about the disease appears to make people with it more likely to suffer from depression. Depression can make it hard to remain appropriately motivated towards maintaining a proper diet and exercise routine. That makes it one of the hidden danger of diabetes. Ensuring you meet with a mental health professional once or twice a month can help you ensure that your mental state is being tracked just like you’re likely tracking your physical health with your doctor. Both mental and physical well-being are important to helping circumvent the worst aspects of diabetes. Additionally, your mental health professional can help you develop cognitive strategies that keep you motivated over the course of changing your lifestyle. That alone is incredibly useful given how hard it is for most of us to readjust our lives.

There is no way to truly circumvent Type II diabetes once it has started. We end up stuck with the illness and the potential negative effects. Proper diet and exercise can go a long way towards management to the point that the illness isn’t even noticeable most of the time. That should be everyone’s goal ultimately. Whether you end up needing medication even after making all the appropriate lifestyle changes or not, these tips will certainly help you to keep living a healthy life.