5 Ways to Help Manage Diabetes and Better Choices, Better Health – Diabetes

Learning how to manage your diabetes can be a lot of work and may often seem overwhelming. The National Council on Aging (NCOA) recently posted an article (read in entirety here) describing five things you can do to make living with diabetes seem a bit more manageable.

1. Know your ABC’s. Discuss the numbers with your health care provider so that you keep track of your A1C, blood pressure, and cholesterol.

Seek Advice. Work together with your health care provider to create a schedule and individual goals for how often you check your blood sugar and the ideal numbers. There are online tools that may be helpful for tracking these numbers, or your health care provider may have suggestions for tools to use.

Think before you eat. Eat foods that you enjoy which are also good for managing diabetes in order to make eating healthy easier.

Get Active. Any kind of physical activity you can think of can be good for fitness and stress management, as well as just plain fun. 

Laugh and relax. Taking the time to seek out humor, as well as ways to relax, can be very beneficial to your mental well-being.

If you want to build a stronger social support network, NCOA is offering an online workshop called Better Choices, Better Health – Diabetes. This six-week online workshop provides more tips and tools to stay healthy, allows you to discuss any problems you’re having with other participants and come up with solutions today and celebrate your successes. Enrollment for this workshop is free through March 31st, so don’t miss your chance to participant in this exciting new opportunity that has been proven to help individuals with diabetes improve their health!