Managing diabetes takes time, dedication, experimentation, patience and knowledge. Great blood sugar levels are not achieved just by taking a couple of shots of insulin and doing a bit of exercise here and there. In fact, it’s very far from it as there are so many variables that can affect the success of the insulin; the amount of food you eat, the exercise you do, your height, weight, resting activity levels, stress levels etc.

With all of the above in mind I would definitely say that the key to diabetes management is understanding your own body and how it responds to all of the above. To do this you will have to monitor, assess, and make changes, but most of all BE PATIENT.

I know it sounds like a lot of work, but here’s the way I see it… experimenting every so often in order to maintain decent blood sugar, will take up much less time and energy than dealing with hypers and hypos every day. That’s really exhausting. I mean, of course I would rather not be playing around with blood glucose levels, but sometimes you’ve just got to do what you got to do.

Anyway, as I said earlier, if you are trying to figure out what works best for you, patience is everything because, again, there are so many variables.

My tip for maintaining patience is to know why you want to achieve a better level of blood glucose. An obvious one is that you want to achieve good health. However, sometimes this is not enough to motivate you, especially when you look fine on the outside and can’t see the potential damage of crappy levels on the inside.

Try to think more about immediate benefits of good blood glucose levels.

For me, my motivation is that I want to I want to dance to the best of my ability every day for the rest of my life. This is difficult to achieve if my body is preoccupied with high or low blood sugar levels. Also, healthier blood sugar makes me happier in general and I feel that I am much nicer to be around if my levels are in range. You must know what I’m talking about here… Cranky hypos / hypers are not fun.

Choose your motivation for finding out what works for you and keep a note of it close by.

Start your experiments with something small; if you are spiking after a certain food, experiment with the timing of your insulin or if you feel shitty after eating a certain food, try eating it at a different time of the day, less of it or none of it at all.

Write down the results.

If you feel like you are doing a really great job, reward yourself. Buy yourself something nice and say well done. No one else is going to do that for you because they have no idea how much of a victory it is to be able to manage and maintain health whilst living with this disease. Celebrate all of your achievements with diabetes.

I hope this helps. I really try to give you advice that you can use as a starting point to find out more about yourself. We are all different and what works for me might not work for you. There is never only one way.

Rowena x

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