Tuesday, November 10, 2009

Got Type 2? Here's a List of Resources

Welcome, MizFitOnline readers!

If you or someone you know has type 2 diabetes, you might like some of these handy (and, I think, dandy) diabetes-related resources.

Locate free health screenings: See this article on "The Savvy Senior" about how to find free or low-cost screenings for any number of medical issues.

Free online diabetes resources:

Jenny Ruhl's "Lower Your Blood Sugar" article is a good place to start if you are recently diagnosed; I highly recommend her excellent Blood Sugar 101 book or web site. (I think it saved my life, or at least my eyesight and a limb or two.) Some of the medical people might feel that her blood glucose recommendations are extreme; however, if you compare the ADA, Joslin Diabetes Center, and the American Association of Clinical Endocrinologists recommendations, you’ll see that not even the experts agree. (My own medical team had made different recommendations, mainly because of different perspectives of how to bring a new patient on board, not because they felt that higher was better.)

UCSF Online Diabetes Education provides online education for people with diabetes. If you have a friend or loved one with computer access but who does not have access to a diabetes educator, this is a terrific first resource! It does promote higher carb intake than the lower-carb sites like Blood Sugar 101, but who says you can't do it in phases? This site has a lot of information you'd get from a diabetes educator, and if you're without one, it may help getting one closer to better blood glucose management.)

Diabetes etiquette tips for people without diabetes (PDF file) provides a guide to what is and is not helpful for interacting with your friends and family who have diabetes, from the Behavioral Diabetes Institute.

dLife is a good general resource with lots of articles. My pal Travis from Tu Diabetes contributes articles for this site. Their article on "The Plate Method" may be helpful if you are in a dining situation in which you need to guesstimate portions (or are just fed up to HERE with weighing and measuring stuff).

Tu Diabetes is a social networking site for people with all types of diabetes. It's a good community for not feeling quite so alone with the disease.

Exercise Guides

Gold's Gym has a free (and nicely done) guide to starting an exercise program, applicable for any gym. You can download it from their "Fighting Diabetes with Fitness" web page. I like that they advised new exercisers to set goals, work up to their goals (rather than going gung-ho in the first session, getting sore and tired, and abandoning it), and to combine strength training and cardio. (I would set more performance-based goals instead of weight or size goals to begin with, though.) In a way, my recommending this is kind of ironic, because I always associated this gym with the serious fitness people and felt very intimidated by it. But with much encouragement from my blog buddies and trying it for a week, I found it to be a really positive place.

To get started running, I started with the Zen Habits Beginner's Guide to Running. But now, there's also the amazing Julia Jones's 5K Training Program (via Two Fit Chicks and a Microphone). Not a runner? Train to walk a 5K! Training for an event helps reinforce your fitness goals and can benefit a good cause, too.

Finally, here's what I do: A friend of mine wanted to know what I was doing to manage my type 2 diabetes, so I summarized it here. (Standard disclaimers apply, not a doctor, don't play one on TV, etc.)

1 comment:

Sagan said...

GREAT list. There is so much that most of us don't know about diabetes.