Diabetes is a serious and life-changing condition. Although it can be managed with diet and lifestyle changes and while most people will live a perfectly healthy and happy life with diabetes, the reality is that diabetes will change the way you eat, create a need for regular injections and generally have a huge impact on how you feel and how you operate on a daily basis.
For these reasons, it is of course better to avoid experiencing diabetes in the first place. Fortunately, while diabetes is often unavoidable and occurs without warning or any specific explanation, it often can be averted with some simple diet changes and perhaps some changes to your lifestyle as well.
In this post, we’ll look at 18 different things you can do to help prevent your diabetes. Note that none of these things can guarantee that you will be diabetes free – but all of them are healthy lifestyle changes, most of which will improve your general health as well.
Thus everyone can benefit from heeding these tips, and those at higher risk of diabetes could benefit even more!
1. Lose weight
One of the most common pieces of advice when it comes to avoiding diabetes is to lose weight. If you are overweight and particularly if you are obese or you are carrying a lot of excess weight around the abdomen area, then you will be at greater risk of developing diabetes and should take measures to try and shed the pounds.
What can you do to accelerate weight loss? Diet changes will help, as will exercise. That means trying to maintain a calorie deficit by consuming fewer calories than you burn during the day (some simple calculations and perhaps a fitness tracker can help you do this). It’s also important to remain generally active and to avoid foods that are overly sugar – which we’re just getting to, actually.