If you have diabetes, you know firsthand that diabetes can rob you of your energy. In fact, one of the main symptoms of diabetes is fatigue. When your blood sugar levels are out of control, it's common to feel exhausted. Lack of exercise and an unhealthy diet can also make it more challenging to control your glucose levels, causing you to feel tired. Fatigue may lead you to skip exercise and eat poorly, which in turn makes you feel even more fatigued and even less like exercising and eating right. You can put a stop to this cycle of misery, however, and become an energetic diabetic.
Eating for Energy
Your doctor has most likely provided you with an eating plan. However, you may not have realized that carefully following your diet will do more than keep the numbers on your glucose meter within your target range. When you keep your glucose levels under control, your body will be able to use more of your food for energy. As a result, you will be an energetic diabetic.
Exercise for Energy
Eating right and following your diet aren't the only things you need to do to enjoy increased energy. Exercise is such a powerful therapy for diabetes that it can actually reduce the amount of insulin you have to take. When you are sitting on the couch, it's hard to get up and get going. Physicists call this the inertia principle, and any physicist will tell you that a nudge is the best way to break inertia. That nudge can be in the form of either a push or a pull.
What will break your inertia? Will it be a push from within, prodding you to get out there and enjoy life? Or will it be a pull from without, drawing you to the sides of your friends or loved ones?
Whatever motivates you, the trick is to use that motivation long enough to get started. Once you get started, another principle of physics, momentum, will work just as powerfully to transform you into an energetic diabetic.
Your Personalized Exercise Plan
Exercise is not just valuable for controlling your diabetes. It can also reduce your risk of developing other diseases, such as obesity and heart disease. Exercise doesn't have to be painful in order to be beneficial. Talk to your doctor about exercise and follow his or her advice about which exercises are safe and what intensity level you should maintain. Once you have your doctor's go-ahead, it's time to get started.
Exercise must become a permanent part of your diabetic lifestyle. Therefore, it is crucial that you choose a form of exercise that you enjoy and can stick with over time so that you'll continue to be an energetic diabetic. If you are the sort of person who gets bored with routines and likes to mix things up, consider choosing several activities that you can alternate.
When you make eating right and exercising a habit, you will be on your way to living life to the fullest as an energetic diabetic.