Signs and symptoms of Gestational Diabetes can be seen while screening during the time of pregnancy in women. Gestational diabetes is a disease that occurs with women who have not been diagnosed blood sugar ever before and they show signs of high level of blood glucose in pregnancy. There is no specific cause for the disease that has been found, but experts say’s that during pregnancy hormonal changes takes place and insulin level in increased which affects the tolerance level of the body to glucose badly.

Signs and Symptoms of Gestational Diabetes:

· There are no specific symptoms that may be related to the disease, but generally women fell excess of thirst and which can cause the urge of urinating more as compared to the normal routine.

· The signs of gestational diabetes are somehow similar to type 2 diabetes. Women with the disease feel exhausted and fatigue. Vomiting is also reported as a symptom of the disease.

· One may find problem in the vision. If you are not able to see everything clearly and the thing you see seem blurred to you, it may be a symptom of this type of blood sugar.

· Some other symptoms of gestational diabetes are bladder infection and yeast infection.

Self Diagnosis of Gestational Diabetes:

There are many home diagnosis kits available in the market now days that can help diagnose the disease on your own at home. These kits are easy to use and cheap too. The process is real easy and all you would need to check the results is your urine or blood sample. The authenticity of these products has been proved as they are all CE marked. Some special type of dye is used in these gestational diabetes diagnosis kits. You need to put 3 drops of urine or blood on the vessel and if the result is positive, the colour will change from yellow to whatever colour is mentioned on the packet.

Similarly, negative result will have a different colour and if the test has not been performed properly, there would be no change in the colour.

Signs and symptoms of gestational diabetes can be easily detected if you keep on doing a regular check up of yourself.

When the doctor said, “You have type II diabetes.” Immediately scary thoughts spun through my brain like an F5 tornado. I am scared of needles and shots! Will I go blind? How long before my feet will be amputated? All these thoughts in a nano second!

I must have been dazed and in a shock-fog at hearing my diagnosis, because my ears may have heard my doctors words, but my brain didn’t register them. Diabetes. Type II Diabetes? Medicine?

When I walked out of the doctor’s office and got outside, WHAM! It hit me like a whack to the head! I don’t even know what diabetes is. What does diabetes affect, and how did I get it? And now I have to take medicine for it? Wait a minute; I didn’t just catch this diabetes like you do a cold or a virus.

I started in on researching type II diabetes, obsessively. For 3 months I poured through medical journals, article after article, searched the Internet, interviewed doctors, a dentist, an eye doctor, a chiropractor, a foot doctor, and an endocrinologist. All were informative, but the natural health practitioner advice was what struck me, as “this is it”.

I found that the medical profession mostly talked about the conditions and what medicines help relieve those condition symptoms. The natural health practitioner actually told me that you could possibly control or reverse the conditions that diabetes brings through nutrition and exercise.

Through my research, insulin quickly became the focal point. When you get down to the root of a problem (at the molecular/cellular level) you will find that insulin seems to have an effect on most body functions. When insulin is not controlled, bad things happen in our body. So basically diabetes is insulin out-of-control, causing unwanted reactions within our body, thus creating possibly debilitating health conditions.

Control your blood glucose at a normal level through nutrition and exercise or physical activity and possibly supplements and you may not have to succumb to a lifetime of ever-increasing doses of diabetic medications. I am not saying to dump your medications and start eating correctly all in one swoop, but do your homework. Find out what steps to take to reverse the type II diabetic conditions. You will find it is through proper balanced nutrition and physical exercise.

After interviewing close to 100 people diagnosed with diabetes, I found only 4 people actually trying to reverse their condition through nutrition and exercise. Two have succeeded in getting off their medication completely, and the other two have cut their medication requirements by more than half.

What is sad about this is, the other 96 people were never informed about how to control their blood sugar through nutrition and exercise by their doctor, or just took it at face value that “yes, I do have diabetes, give me a pill”. They accept someone else’s opinion that you have to take medication the rest of your life to control their “diagnosis”.

Come on! Learn about diabetes. You can’t hit the re-run button of life, but you can prevent, delay, or reverse your type II diabetic conditions through knowledge, nutrition and exercise. This is it. Be vibrant. Be healthy. Be smart. You deserve it, don’t you?

While insulin pumps are a great piece of equipment, they are just that, a piece of equipment. They do not do ‘all the work’ for people with Type 1 diabetes.

Let me give you some background here before I get ahead of myself. People with Type 1 diabetes need to give themselves insulin to live. There are currently only two ways that the human body can receive insulin, other than from it’s own pancreas. People can either inject themselves with a syringe full of insulin or use an insulin pump.

The use of a syringe to administer insulin should be pretty self explanatory. A person with Type 1 diabetes takes insulin from a vial or cartridge, draws it up into the syringe, and injects it directly into their body. The amount of insulin, the type of insulin, the area of the body that the shot is given, are all particular to the person with Type 1 diabetes. All people with Type 1 administer insulin very specifically to them and their plan.

Like I wrote about before, my son receives 1 unit of insulin for every 21 carbs that he eats at breakfast. This is something I figured out from logging numerous blood glucose checks to determine his number 2 hours after eating breakfast, 3 hours after eating breakfast and 4 hours after eating breakfast. Once these numbers all look good, I know that the ratio that we have set for the breakfast hour is working fine. These ratios do change sometimes and the hourly checking happens again.

There is no difference with an insulin pump, other than the way the insulin is put into the body. Let me start by telling you what an insulin pump does not do.

An insulin pump does not check the blood sugar. That still needs to be done by the a finger prick 10 times a day.

An insulin pump does not count carbs. Yes, that has been said to me. “Oh, the pump must be so easy, it must count the carbs too.” No, an insulin pump is not smart enough to know if my son is eating a burger or not, sorry. Carbs can only be counted by a human, namely the person living with Type 1 diabetes.

An insulin pump does not figure out how much insulin a person should receive for each meal. Those ratios for meals and snacks are still created by the person with Type 1 diabetes by numerous blood glucose checks and taking copious notes.

An insulin pump does not know if a person’s sugar is running high or low, therefore it does not automatically give more insulin for highs and less insulin for lows.

Now, that’s all the things an insulin pump does not do. While it seems like I am knocking the pump for all it can’t do, that is not the case. To me the pump is a fantastic invention. There are some things it does do, but it does not ‘do all the work’ for us as some people suggest.

The insulin pump does hold 200 units of insulin, making it easier to go places without having to bring lots of syringes and vials of insulin.

The insulin pump does administer very specific basal rates at a continuous every few minutes for 24 hours a day, thereby making it easier to provide a very individual amount of insulin. This cannot be done on shots.

The insulin pump does store all the ratios entered by the user making it easier to administer insulin because the pump will do the math for the user. For instance, for my son I have programmed the pump to use the ratio 1:21 for meals between midnight and 11am. So when he eats 42 carbs, he can put in the number 42 and the pump will suggest that he dose himself 2 units. When on shots this math had to be done in my head (or on a calculator for more exact calculations).

And my favorite part about the pump, it allows my son to feel like a regular kid. While he still has to check his sugar while playing, and before eating, and whenever he feels high or low, it is still better to access the pump then give a shot in the middle of a game of tag. No one likes shots, a pump is way more outsider friendly.

A pump is an invention that makes have Type 1 diabetes a little easier. Just like a vacuum or a stroller makes cleaning or walking with a baby easier. A vacuum makes cleaning easier, but it by no means ‘does all the work.’ A stroller makes walking with a baby easier, but without the mom or dad taking charge, the stroller would do nothing.

The same with a pump, if the person with Type 1 diabetes or caregiver doesn’t take charge the pump would do nothing. It would be a useless piece of equipment without the person that really ‘does all the work.’

Diabetes, it affects 23.6 million children and adults in the United States alone. That is roughly 7.8% of the population. There are already 17.9 million who have been diagnosed with this illness and 5.7 million who still are unaware of that they have it. And it is time for those 5.7 million to know. So let us spread the word about this illness.

Diabetes has 2 major types. Type 1 is characterized when the body fails to produce insulin. The estimated number is that 5-10% of Americans are diagnosed with type 1 diabetes. Type 2 diabetes is when the body fails to use insulin properly. The statistics tell that most Americans have type 2.

Alternative medications are already coming out that can help treat diabetes. Two of the more famous ones are hyperbaric oxygen therapy and digestive enzyme therapy. Hyperbaric oxygen therapy involves patients breathing in pure oxygen inside a hyperbaric chamber.

While digestive enzyme therapy is about cases of diabetes where it is caused by pancreatic deterioration that affects the production of insulin thus interfering with a healthy digestion. By taking digestive enzyme supplements, the damage will be lessened and digestion will speed up again.

Right now the three best digestive enzyme supplements out in the market would be Pain Power, Cardio Zyme and Super Digesta Zyme. These three are all natural and safe. They also rate number 1 in customer satisfaction.

Other than diabetes, digestive enzyme supplements can also prevent illnesses such as ulcers, lack of energy a reduction of the function of the immune system, heartburn, constipation, gas, allergies and bloating.

So that is just about it with the information about diabetes. Let us spread the word and get everyone of that 5.7 million to get diagnosed. Chow!

Type II diabetes happens when your body becomes resistant to the insulin you are creating. Easy to say, but what does that mean?

Insulin moves glucose (blood sugar) into the muscles and liver. It stores glucose in the liver as a dense carbohydrate called glycogen, which your body uses as a reserve of glucose for use between meals or during times of stress. Once the glycogen reserve is full (and it’s a pretty small reserve), excess glucose in the liver is turned into triglycerides (fat), and moved into your fat tissue. Thus, an overload of carbohydrates makes your butt bigger. Ever had your doctor tell you that losing weight will help your diabetes risk factors go down?

When insulin is high, your body goes into ’savings mode’, and hoards your excess blood sugar for storage as fat. When insulin is low, your body goes into ’spending mode’, draining your fat supplies for energy.

So what’s the point?

The result of diabetes is that the body’s cells have become resistant to insulin (so your cells do not absorb glucose to burn). This is what causes diabetes sufferers to have enormous jumps in blood sugar: their blood sugar isn’t properly utilized, so it just sits in the bloodstream until your body can figure out what to do with it.

Thus, your cells enter a ’starvation’ mode (nothing for them to ‘eat’) even if the diabetic has recently eaten. The brain interprets the starving cells’ signals as actual starvation, and releases signals that make a diabetic hungry, especially for carbohydrates - which would normally stimulate insulin production in a healthy person, resulting in your cells absorbing glucose for energy.

What modern doctors or pharmaceutical companies do not often discuss, however, is that your body can burn fat as well as sugar (in fact, your body prefers it - your body gets as much energy from a pound of fat as it does from six and a half pounds of sugar!). The chemistry of fatty-acid metabolism is too complex to get into here, but the result for diabetics is this: if you can get your body to burn fat instead of glucose, you can stop relying on blood-sugar levels to maintain your body’s energy supply.

Be careful.

The question for diabetics becomes: how do you start burning fat instead of glucose? The answer is simple: don’t eat carbohydrates. This is a counterintuitive method of approaching a disorder wherein the biggest fear is death from a blood-sugar crash, but it works if you can get your body to make the switch from burning glucose to burning fat. This is done through a hormone called glucagon, which (along with several other hormones that are constantly pressuring your body to burn fat) triggers the fat-burning process and, as an added bonus, causes your body to turn its existing fat reserves into glucose (so even those parts of your body that require glucose, like the brain, don’t require you to eat any carbohydrates).

Glucagon production, unfortunately, is suppressed by the presence of insulin in the blood. This means that diabetics are injecting the very substance that is keeping them from making the switch from glucose to fat! Of course, every diabetic knows that simply ceasing to inject insulin may be lethal. The trick is to make the switch slowly.

Each day, reduce the amount of carbohydrates you eat, starting by cutting out processed carbohydrates like sugar and flour, then, if you need to, other high-carb foods like potatoes (most people shouldn’t need to). At the same time, go out of your way to eat more protein - lots more protein. Proteins turn into amino acids in your blood, and glucagon production is stimulated by high blood amino acid levels. As you do this, slowly lower your insulin levels. Over several months or even weeks, you can work your way entirely off of insulin.

But I love my pasta!

The best news? Once you are off of insulin, the lack of it in your blood while on a low-carb diet will teach your cells to lose their insulin resistance! After a year or two of strictly monitoring your carbohydrate intake, you may be able to resume eating some of your favorite carbohydrates again (in moderation, of course).