Understanding Diabetes - What does it mean?
Medicine prescribed by your doctor alone can't cure your diabetes nor can it protect you from all its ill effects.
Only you can do that! Medicines that are prescribed by your doctor are essential when you embark on the path towards recovery, but there are many other steps that you need to take if you want to successfully live a healthy life with diabetes.
What is diabetes?
In simple terms, Diabetes is a body condition where it can't make use of Glucose derived from the food we eat to generate energy. Because of this Glucose accumulates in our bloodstream, raising our blood sugar levels.
Unlike automobiles, we humans, aren't capable of deriving energy from petrol, so, we need to eat food.
Our body through digestion, converts the carbohydrates and starch that we consume into Glucose. Which then gets released it into our bloodstream.
Insulin is a hormone secreted by an organ called Pancreas in our body. It allows body cells to use Glucose to make Energy for our day-to-day activities.
Insulin regulates our blood glucose/sugar levels, and it does so by giving a signal to our liver and our cells to take the glucose content from our blood.
Our body cells then convert Glucose into Glycogen to generate energy for themselves.
Liver stores any excess Glycogen being produced for later use.
Now, if our body stops producing insulin or if our body stops responding to insulin's effects, our blood sugar/glucose level will start rising.
This happens because our body isn't able to convert sugar into energy anymore and it accumulates in our bloodstream.
Diabetes is a disorder of the Endocrine Gland, that occurs when a person's blood sugar/glucose levels are consistently above normal. Other than for reasons like our body's inability to produce Insulin or respond to its effects, Diabetes can also appear during pregnancy in some cases.
Type of Diabetes
There are three types of Diabetes - Type 1, Type 2 and Gestational Diabetes.
When your body stops producing Insulin and our cells can no longer use Glucose for generating energy, it is called Type 1 Diabetes.
When your body produces less Insulin or your body stops responding to insulin's effects, it is called Type 2 Diabetes.
Once we understand what Diabetes means, the next important step is to find out how it affects our body and how the food that we consume or physical activity we might undertake can help in controlling it.
Managing Diabetes is not just a simple affair of periodic clinical tests and adjusting medicine according to them.
Understanding your body's reaction to various food and exercises also plays a major role in controlling Diabetes.
We also need to look in to the possibility of naturally available herbs and home remedies.
Combining such natural remedies with useful yoga asanas would definitely be a major help in combating diabetes with no harmful effects.
Do read our future articles on Diabetes, where we will cover many more aspects of diabetes and ways of controlling it
If you take too much, then your body burns too much glucose — and your blood sugar can drop to a dangerously low level. This is a condition called