You have found out you have diabetes and you are looking for a way to lose weight and reverse diabetes. Diet is the most effective treatment for diabetes.

Here are a couple of suggestions to help you follow your diabetic diet and lose weight.

Make Your Diet Easy to Follow - Changing your diet is a difficult task and will require dedication and behavior modification. In order to change your diet you are going to have to make it easy. If you make your diet easy to follow then you are more likely to stick to it and lose weight.

Get Organized - When you get up in the morning know what your meals are going to be and know when you will exercise. When you are shopping have a list of the foods that you are allowed and stick with the list. Do not fall into the old habits of purchasing snacks that are not on your list.

Goals - Set goals for yourself regarding how much weight you want to lose. If you set a realistic goal you will probably obtain that weight loss and maybe more.

Hobby - After you have eaten your meal clean up the kitchen and put the food away so you will not snack. Place the food in a container and label it for your next meal. Now get busy with something that you enjoy so you will not think about food. Just do something to keep your mind off of food.

Make your diet easy to follow. Follow these suggestions and then the new lifestyle will develop into a habit and before long you will be thinner, happier and healthier.

Once you know that you have diabetes visit your doctor and have your feet examined and at every visit. Diabetics are susceptible to foot ulcers because you might have some decrease in blood flow to the lower legs and feet. You will have to be tenacious about your foot care.

1. Never walk barefoot because this will just increase your risk of injury.

2. Check your shoes before putting them on to be sure that something has fallen in them. You could have something like a pin in your foot and not know that it is there.

3. Wash them daily and apply a moisturizer because sometimes your feet will get dry with cracked skin.

4. Do not use heating pads on them at night because if the pad gets hot you might not realize it and it could burn your skin.

5. Stop smoking because smoking decreases your circulation to your legs and arms.

6. Take your shoes off every 4 to 5 hours to check your feet to be sure there are no red spots caused by your shoes which could develop into sores.

7. If you develop a sore take all pressure off of that site and elevate your legs.

Ulcers can develop on your feet due to too much pressure from a worn out shoe or constant pressure from standing or walking.

The effective treatments for diabetes are exercise, medications and diet. Diet is the most effective treatment for diabetes and could reverse diabetes type 2.

Individuals with diabetes who are treated with the antidiabetic thiazolidinedione drugs pioglitazone or rosiglitazone are at increased risk for fracture, report researchers.

“Patients with Type 2 diabetes, despite having greater bone density, appear to be at higher risk of fractures and falls,” say Colin Dormuth (University of British Columbia, Victoria, Canada) and colleagues.

“Although it has been argued that the use of drugs to control diabetes may reduce the association between diabetes and fractures, a recent meta-analysis of randomized trials of the peroxisome proliferator-activated receptor-? agonists (thiazolidinediones)… concluded that the use of those drugs more than doubled the risk of fractures in women but did not increase the risk of fractures in men.”

To investigate further, Dormuth and team carried out a prospective cohort study of fracture risk in 84,339 Canadian individuals, aged 59 years on average, who began treatment with either a thiazolidinedione (n=10,476) or a sulfonylurea (n=73,863) for diabetes between January 1998 and December 2007. Of those treated with a thiazolidinedione, 3596 were treated with pioglitazone and 6880 with rosiglitazone.

Writing in the Archives of Internal Medicine, the team reports that in comparison with treatment with a sulfonylurea, treatment with a thiazolidinedione increased the relative risk for peripheral fracture in men and women by 28%.

The researchers identified 2214 fractures in total during a follow-up period of 460??”534 days. The mean time to occurrence of any fracture event in the sulfonylurea, rosiglitazone, and pioglitazone cohorts was 1.71, 1.66, and 1.44 patient-years, respectively.

Of note, pioglitazone, but not rosiglitazone, treatment was associated with a significant 77% relative increase in peripheral fractures among women compared with sulfonylureas. A similar 61% increase in peripheral fractures was observed among men treated with pioglitazone compared with sulfonylureas.

“Our findings suggest that both men and women are at increased risk of fracture as a result of exposure to thiazolidinediones and that pioglitazone treatment may be more strongly associated with fractures than rosiglitazone treatment,” conclude the authors.

“Larger observational studies are needed so that fracture risks with pioglitazone and rosiglitazone treatment can be known with greater certainty,” they add.

“There is insufficient clinical trial evidence to show that treatment with thiazolidinediones provides clinical benefits beyond glycemic control, and in the absence of mitigating clinical benefits, mounting evidence of harm should discourage physicians from prescribing those drugs.”

MedWire (www.medwire-news.md) is an independent clinical news service provided by Current Medicine Group, a part of Springer Science+Business Media. © Current Medicine Group Ltd; 2009

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