Getting Started: Understanding the Basics

Perhaps you or a loved one has been recently diagnosed with diabetes. Diabetes is a serious condition. It is the fastest growing disease in the United States, affecting seven percent of the population — 20.8 million people. But diabetes can be managed by working closely with your healthcare professional and by making healthy lifestyle choices.

Keeping a Positive Attitude

Discovering you have diabetes can trigger emotions of fear, anger, or discouragement. All of these reactions are normal, but keeping a positive attitude is important.

Yes, there’s a lot to consider. But having the right tools, information, and support at your fingertips can help you and guide you down the path to self-managing your condition. That’s what the Diabetes Control for Life™ program is all about.

Healthy Lifestyle Habits

When you make a concerted effort to practice healthy lifestyle habits and work with your diabetes care team, you can significantly reduce your risk of diabetes complications

Begin With the Basics

1. Monitor your blood sugar frequently — testing your blood sugar levels and keeping track of the results will inform decisions about diet, activity, and medicine.

2. Have your health care provider check your A1C at least twice a year — A1C tells you what your average blood glucose levels have been for the past 2 to 3 months.

3. Plan your meals — prepare in advance for balanced nutrition and spread your carbohydrate intake throughout the day.

4. Be more active — activity helps manage blood sugar levels.

5. Know when to take medication — when you plan your meals, you can also plan when to take medication ahead of time.

6. Manage your blood sugar, blood pressure, and cholesterol — these three are among the most important to watch to help prevent long-term complications.

7. Lose weight by eating less and being more active than you are right now — for a person who is overweight, even a moderate amount of weight loss can help lower blood sugar levels. For example, at 200 lbs., a 5% weight loss is 10 lbs.

8. If you smoke, get help to quit — smoking can aggravate many problems that people with diabetes already face, such as heart and blood vessel disease.

Your Next Steps

The more you know about how your choices affect your diabetes, the better you’ll be able to self-manage your condition. We’ve prepared five “lessons” to help educate you on the basics of diabetes control and on using the resources of this site. Please take time to visit each of the following “lessons”.