Keep A Journal
One way that an expectant mother can help with the treatment of gestational diabetes is to keep a food journal with her charts of blood sugar readings.  The mother can track everything eaten for each of her meals and snacks to see how well she has kept to her prescribed diet.  Along with this, she should write down her blood sugar readings after each meal.  This will help her chart which foods create a blood sugar spike so she can modify her diet accordingly.

Walk It Off
The experience of gestational diabetes can be stressful with the dietary changes and prescribed medications.  Exercise is a key not only in helping to regulate gestational diabetes, but also to help alleviate stress.  This may become more difficult as the pregnancy comes to term.  However, an exercise program which keeps the doctor’s guidelines in mind will benefit both the mother and baby.

Build The Support System
Expectant mothers may feel like they live in a vacuum regarding their diagnosis, with little understanding from family and friends.  In order to keep up with the treatments prescribed, the mother should bring a close family member or friend to the doctor’s appointments and meetings with the dietitian.  She can cook carbohydrate-friendly meals for her family to show how one can be healthy and enjoy good food at the same time.  She can also allow her family to experiment with the glucometer, taking their blood sugar readings and comparing them with hers.

A diagnosis of gestational diabetes does not have to cast a shadow over an expectant mother’s pregnancy.  With these simple management tips, she can assist her doctor with controlling her blood sugar levels while enjoying all of the experiences of a healthy pregnancy.

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1. Gestational Diabetes: Treatment
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The fetus’ growth is supported by the placenta, and it is hormones in the placenta which help the baby develop. However, these hormones can interrupt the natural function of insulin in the mother’s body. When this occurs it is called insulin resistance and when this happens it becomes difficult for the mother’s body to effectively use insulin and she may end up needing as much as three times the normal amount of insulin.

When the mother’s body is unable to make and effectively use all the insulin needed for pregnancy, glucose cannot be changed into energy when it leaves the blood, and as a result the glucose can build up to high levels.

Due to the fact that gestational diabetes does not affect the mother until late in pregnancy and until well after the fetus’ body and organs has been formed, the gestational diabetes will not cause birth defects that can sometimes result from pregnancies with pre-existing diabetes.

Untreated or mismanaged gestational diabetes can however, harm your baby. With this condition your body will signal your pancreas to work harder to produce more insulin, but this insulin is not effective in lowering the mother’s blood glucose levels. Even though this extra insulin will not cross through the placenta to the baby, the higher levels of glucose will. This will cause the baby’s pancreas to create extra insulin in order to get rid of the extra glucose. As a result, the baby gets more energy than needed and this extra energy can be stored as fat. This process can lead to a condition called macrosomia, or ‘fat’ baby. This condition can lead to damage to the baby’s shoulders during delivery, or due to the extra insulin the newborns may have low blood sugar levels and can be at risk for breathing issues. Finally, babies born from mothers with gestational diabetes often become children who are at higher risk for obesity and become adults with a higher risk for developing type 2 diabetes.

The good news is that gestational diabetes usually disappears after birth. However, once having had this condition, a woman is more likely to develop it again in future pregnancies. In some rare cases type 2 diabetes results from having gestational diabetes, or in other cases pre-existing diabetes is caught due to the screening process while pregnant.

While not cause for serious alarm, gestational diabetes can result in dire repercussions to the baby if not managed properly. The doctor or health care provider will advocate a strict course of diet, exercise and sometimes medication, in order to properly control blood sugars and to manage a diagnosis of gestational diabetes.

Related posts:

1. Gestational Diabetes: Treatment
2. How to Manage Gestational Diabetes
3. Oral Agents for Type 2 Diabetes

Your special diet will include plenty of whole grains rich in fiber, as well as ensuring that you consume some protein with each meal to help deter blood sugar fluctuations. Exercise may also be advocated, as this will help your body to use the extra glucose without having to take insulin shots. This will also help avoid insulin resistance.

Carbohydrates or other foods high in starch or sugar, are turned into glucose during digestion, therefore they have the highest impact on blood sugar levels and consumption needs to be strictly counted. The nutritionist or dietician will counsel you on how many carbohydrates you should be consuming at each meal and snack, and will educate you on what kinds of foods are better sources of carbohydrates than others.

Eating at the same time each day and not skipping meals or snacks will help maintain blood sugar levels, and eating fewer carbohydrates at breakfast is always a good idea because that is the time of day when typically insulin resistance is at its greatest. Women with gestational diabetes should avoid fruit and fruit juices at breakfast for this very reason.

Reading nutritional labels will become second nature to the woman with gestational diabetes. Every food has the potential to contain carbohydrates, and it is only by looking at the nutritional information that these can be accurately counted. Likewise, it is helpful to have a kitchen scale on hand for measuring weights so that you can get an exact number of carbohydrates per serving.

While having gestational diabetes is certainly a concern, most women easily manage it with the help of their health care team. Careful monitoring of blood sugar levels will reduce the chances of any adverse affects on the baby, and will help ensure continued good health for the mother as well.

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1. How to Manage Gestational Diabetes
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There are now six classes of diabetes pills and several combination oral meds. Each has a different way of helping you control your diabetes.

About 90 percent of diabetes in the U.S. is the type 2 form, which occurs in most people after the age of 40.  Type 2 diabetes is increasing in young people, especially among those who are overweight, physically inactive, or have a family history of diabetes. Obesity is a major risk factor for diabetes. Upper-body obesity is a stronger risk factor for type 2 diabetes than excess weight below the waist. Regular physical activity can protect against type 2 diabetes, while a lack of exercise is a risk factor for developing diabetes.

if you’re a typical person with type 2, your blood glucose levels are high because you have:

# a pancreas that doesn’t make enough insulin to control your blood glucose
# a liver that releases glucose inappropriately
# muscle cells that don’t easily take in glucose

But it wasn’t always that way. Here’s how things worked before you developed type 2 diabetes:

# You ate. Your blood glucose level started to go up. When your pancreas sensed the glucose, it sent out insulin. When your muscle and fat cells sensed the insulin, they let in glucose.
# Your liver helped control your blood glucose levels, too. it tracked insulin levels in your blood. Under normal conditions, when there was insulin in your blood, glucose levels were high, too. Your liver would
say, “oh, good, the body just ate. no need for me to send out glucose.” But when you didn’t eat for hours (like when you were sleeping), your liver sensed the lack of insulin in your blood. it then released glucose to keep your glucose level from dropping too low.

But today you have type 2 diabetes. If your diabetes is typical, it began like this:

# You’d eat. Your blood glucose levels would go up. Your pancreas would put out the right amount of insulin. But your muscle cells couldn’t sense the insulin. So they didn’t take in much glucose.
# Your liver may have failed to sense the insulin, too. it would think, “Hmm, no insulin means the body hasn’t eaten recently. i’d better put out glucose.”
# Your pancreas would sense that there was still a lot of glucose in your blood, so it would produce extra insulin. This may have gone on  for years. When your pancreas could no longer keep up with the extra
demand, your blood glucose levels went up and stayed up. And you were told you had diabetes.

So type 2 diabetes involves several problems, and there are a number of potential solutions. one may be insulin injections. These can overcome insulin resistance. There are also six classes of diabetes pills. Each class acts in a different way to control blood glucose  levels.

Many people benefit from taking two or more diabetes drugs, each of which addresses a different problem. such combination therapy is so common that some drug companies now market combination pills.  (see “Combination pills” TABLE 1)

No matter which diabetes pill you use, you may also need insulin injections to move glucose into your cells and control blood glucose levels.

TABLE 1. Oral Agents for Type 2 Diabetes

Related posts:

1. Gestational Diabetes
2. Gestational Diabetes: Treatment
3. How to Manage Gestational Diabetes

Diabetes is on the rise, both in men and women, young and old. Some 16 million Americans have diabetes, about one-third of whom do not know it. More people than ever before are developing type 2 diabetes, mainly because of obesity and inactivity, the two major risk factors for this type of diabetes. Most women with diabetes have type 2 diabetes, which is more common in older people. Women who develop diabetes during pregnancy, known as gestational diabetes, are at increased risk of developing type 2 diabetes later in life.

Diabetes can lead to blindness, kidney failure, nerve damage that can result in foot or leg amputation, heart disease, and stroke . Special attention must be paid to this public health problem, particularly in women.

Did You Know That…

# About 90 percent of diabetes in the U.S. is the type 2 form, which occurs in most people after the age of 40.
# Type 2 diabetes is increasing in young people, especially among those who are overweight, physically inactive, or have a family history of diabetes.
# Obesity is a major risk factor for diabetes. Upper-body obesity is a stronger risk factor for type 2 diabetes than excess weight below the waist.
# Regular physical activity can protect against type 2 diabetes, while a lack of exercise is a risk factor for developing diabetes.

Many studies have shown that women with diabetes have more than three times the risk of developing heart disease – the number one killer of all women – than women without diabetes. (Men with diabetes have a 1.7 higher risk.) Even younger women with diabetes have an increased risk of heart disease.

Why do women with diabetes face an increased risk of heart disease? When women develop diabetes, they have more adverse changes that add to heart disease risk. Their blood pressure rises, HDL (good) cholesterol levels fall, and abdominal fat increases. Similar changes occur in men with diabetes, but not to the same extent as in women.

According to recent statistics, diabetes is increasing among women of all races. Hardest hit are African American, Hispanic, and Native American women. Rates of diabetes are generally higher among American Indians but vary considerably among tribes. Over the age of 55, more than 50 percent of women from some American Indian tribes have diabetes.

Diabetes occurs about equally among men and women, according to NIH’s National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases (NIDDK). Unlike men, women rarely develop heart disease before age 45. However, women catch up with men after age 65, when diabetes is more prevalent in both sexes.

A Word to the Wise…

If you are a woman, you can do things to reduce your chances of developing diabetes, or, if you have diabetes, to help prevent long-term complications:

# Maintain a healthy lifestyle by eating the right foods and getting regular exercise. Some diabetes may be prevented with weight control and physical activity.

# Find out if you have any risk factors for diabetes, such as: being older than 45, being overweight, having a close family member (parent, sister, or brother) who has had diabetes, having had diabetes when you were pregnant, and being African American, Hispanic/Latino, Asian American or Pacific Islander, or Native American.

# Avoid cigarette smoking. Although it is not directly related to diabetes, smoking increases the risks for a number of diseases, such as heart disease.

# If you are at risk for diabetes, have regular check-ups and speak to your health care provider about what you can do to prevent diabetes.

# If you have diabetes, find out what you should do to control it.

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