The great thing about pre-diabetes is that it can be completely reversed. The key is to change how you eat and how much activity you get each day. It’s been proven that excess body fat is a major contributing factor to the development of full blown diabetes, so losing the extra body fat is the best way to reverse the condition. Thankfully, it seems both doctors and patients are interested in preventing, rather than curing this disease.
Changes to your eating habits are crucial, and the reasons are two-fold. By changing what you eat now, you can stop making all the functions of your body have to work harder to keep you alive. Also, by changing your eating style, you can lose the extra body fat at a much faster rate. When you constantly eat a lot of refined white sugar, flour, and other simple starches, you are stressing your body’s natural functionality. The body is designed to extract the nutrients from foods we eat, and put them to good use as needed. It’s also designed to filter out the useless materials in our foods. Feeding it too many useless sugars makes it constantly have to work to remove the excess from the body, and this can place unnecessary stress on the pancreas.
The constant onslaught of sugar and starches in our diet is one of the reasons pre-diabetes and diabetes is so prevalent in our society. The pancreas has to deal with the constant up and down roller coaster we create with our blood sugar levels. Starchy foods, in the form of junk foods and sweets, spike our body’s blood sugar levels. The pancreas responds by pumping out extra insulin, and sometimes it needs to compensate a lot more than normal to deal with super high sugar spikes. Eventually, the body’s muscle and fat cells can stop responding and become insensitive to the insulin. When the excess sugar is removed from the blood stream, the body thinks it’s starving because the blood sugar levels are so low. The end result is a craving for sweets. This creates the blood sugar roller coaster that’s hard on your body, and in time the pancreas will stop being able to deal with those large sugar spikes. When the pancreas is unable to manufacture enough insulin to handle the raised blood sugar levels, diabetes has developed.
All this can be avoided by simply changing what you eat on a daily basis. A proper diet takes stress off the pancreas, and in turn it is able to continue working properly for a much longer period of time. In combination with weight loss, it is possible for the pancreas to be healed of damaged caused by the sugar spikes that disrupted its function.
Exercise is the second part of reducing pre-diabetes. This is because exercise helps stimulate our bodies to lose fat faster. Once we have changed our diet, we will gradually start losing weight over time if we are consistent with the changes we’ve made. By exercising daily, our bodies are able to burn fat faster, and this results in our bodies using insulin properly since it is no longer being stored as fat and is now building muscle.