Blood glucose levels matter. However, like most people, you’ve probably never given them a second thought believing that only diabetics had to worry about their blood sugar levels. Nothing could be further from the truth.
Ongoing research reveals that 1 in 4 people currently suffer with pre-diabetes and they are not even aware of it. If this trend continues, that ratio goes down to 1 in 3 people diagnosed with diabetes in our lifetimes.
In fact, the problem is so serious, that over the last 20 years, the number of diabetics has risen from 30 million to 246 million and is expected to climb to 380 million by 2025. Not an appealing scenario for anyone.
Diabetes is the fourth leading cause of global death and those affected have a reduced life expectancy of around 15-20 years. Are you willing to give up that many years of your life? The saddest part of all of this is that as many as one-third of diabetics are not aware that they are suffering from the disease so they do nothing to halt its progress.
Truth is, if you are carrying around excess weight (especially around the mid-section/belly), feeling tired a great deal of time or you’ve become a slave to food cravings, riding the hunger roller-coaster daily, you may already be suffering from unstable blood glucose levels.
Unfortunately, creeping blood sugar intolerance often displays no visible symptoms yet can be one of the most destructive changes to your body associated with accelerated aging and the increased risk of disease. It matters not how well your healing processes are working, they cannot counter the negative effects of constant elevated blood sugar levels.
Here’s the good news…
Lifestyle choices can either help prevent diabetes or they can put you at great risk for it. This puts the responsibility directly on our shoulders. We do have the power to control the main four factors that change the processing of blood sugar for the worse.
Factors you can control:
Not doing enough proper muscle building and maintenance exercise.
Consuming a diet high in refined and processed foods that contain man made fats, sugars and starches.
Allowing body fat levels to increase
Dealing poorly with mounting stress levels
Years of eating large amounts of refined carbohydrates and unbalanced meals can cause your cells to become poor at processing sugar in the blood and the result is insulin resistance. This means as levels of blood glucose increase, the insulin your body makes to bring these levels down becomes less effective. Higher and higher levels of insulin are needed to do the job of clearing the sugar from the bloodstream.
The result is high levels of sugar and high levels of insulin circulating around the body getting into mischief damaging arteries that lead to sensitive tissues and organs like the brain, heart and kidneys.
Attempting to protect itself, your body (trying to maintain balance) reduces and shuts down the numbers of insulin receptors. This sets into play a vicious cycle with more insulin being produced to try and force the cells to take up the excess sugar from the blood. Since insulin is a fat storing hormone, this only makes matters worse and leads to dangerous fat being stored inside the abdominal cavity where it wraps around major organs like the heart and lungs hindering their proper functioning.
This type of stored body fat (which is extremely hard to shift) is a clear indicator of insulin resistance and hormonal imbalances which progress to serious health issues if they are not properly addressed.
The disease of diabetes has been likened to an acceleration of the aging process because much of the degeneration in the arteries and major organs due to the condition mimic what happens when we age. However, it takes place much quicker and life expectancy is therefore considerable reduced once you have this nasty disease.
Adopting the right lifestyle choices is the way to prevent this happening. It only requires adopting a proper exercise program performed 2-3 times a week which works the muscles directly and stimulates muscle cells to gobble up glucose from the blood. This mechanism can transform a previously insufficient amount of insulin into an adequate amount so that it can be transported to the muscle cells where it can be burned for fuel instead of remaining in the blood stream where it causes damage.
Seems little to ask in exchange for avoiding a disease that compromises life, steals our energy and shortens our lifespan.
If you truly want to take command of your life, your muscles need to be in tip-top condition and your diet needs to be healthy in order to support them so they stay strong and toned at all times.
“Reclaim Your Longevity” can help you do just that…
For more tools and resources from Carolyn Hansen to assist you in attaining your health and fitness goals and achieving the success you desire in life, please visit:
It’s time to throw away all the false statements you’ve accepted about dieting and exercise and learn what it really takes to stay healthy and fit and avoid diseases such as diabetes long into your senior years.
