By controlling your blood sugar and weight loss, you can reduce your risk of complications.

If you are diabetic and overweight, you should listen to your doctor’s advice. You should also listen to any other advice you get. You should read whatever you can find, take any classes available to you, and generally find out everything you can about this condition. Educate yourself–make an intelligent, well-informed, and well-thought out decision about whether weight loss is advisable for you.

A person trying to control their diabetes must modify their diet and activity patterns to bring their blood glucose (bG) into a certain range. The drugs and insulin therapy help to reduce your bG and/or increase your insulin. Consequently, the insulin therapy (whether oral medication or insulin injections) helps to put your bG into a range which can then be managed by manipulating your diet and exercise.

The problem is that the manipulations which you perform in order to control your bG sometimes align with what you try in order to lose weight. At other times, they are directly the opposite. Add to that the fact that a diabetic (just like anyone else) should have enough variety and volume in their diet to assure that they are getting enough of the nutrients that they need. Americans spend so much time worrying about eating too much of the wrong things that they forget that the most serious and immediate diseases associated with eating involve not eating enough of the right things.