Control/Prevent Diabetes and Save Money

What if I walked up and handed you $85,000 [57,600+ GBP]? Think you might like it? What could you do with it? Maybe it would secure your retirement. Send children to college. Buy a couple of cars. There is a lot it could do. And, $85,000 is what it costs to treat Type 2 Diabetes and complications per person over their lifetime. Think it might be a good idea to prevent Diabetes? Think it might be a good idea to control Diabetes? Would you like $85,000? Uhhhh – yeah.

This is just one of the numbers I came across recently. And, with health costs skyrocketing, I imagine that $85,000 will easily be $100,000 in a few years. But, what do you care, you have insurance. Oh, I forgot to tell you, the $85,000 is what the average person with Type 2 Diabetes will have in out of pocket insurance.

KEY POINTS

 

• A person with type 2 diabetes spends on average more than $85,000 treating the disease and its complications over their lifetime.
• Lifetime costs for treating type 2 diabetes are slightly higher for women than men.

Your health insurance pays even more. Suddenly that $85,000 really means something, doesn’t it? So, what can you do?

Prevent Diabetes

The first thing you can do is to prevent Diabetes. That is the best thing you can do. But, how do you do prevent Diabetes? Well, as it happens, it’s not that hard. Prevention is a matter of eating a healthy, well balanced diet that is heavy on fresh vegetables, fruit, some protein and whole grains. Just your garden variety (pun intended) great diet.

But so many of us aren’t there at this moment. So, what do you do? You start like my friend Chuck started, by almost eliminating sugary drinks and limiting alcohol to one or two drinks a week. It’s a great starting point. Just by almost eliminating sugary soda pop Chuck was able to cut 4,000 calories from his diet every week. That’s over two days of eating for me! You can read more about Chuck, if you missed it.

By the way, when I spoke with Chuck today and told him how many calories he cut from his diet, he responded with, “No wonder I lost eight (8) pounds when I stopped drinking Coke.” Want to lose weight and take the first step toward preventing Diabetes? Cut the sugary soda pop!

The other thing to start is regular exercise. You don’t have to go out and join a gym, Just start to walk. Can’t walk far? Start with what you can do and build on it. Really. Just walking, which is something most folks can do, is all it takes. Work up until you are walking 30-minutes a day, five days a week.

What if you can’t walk? Then start by lifting simple weights. No hand weights in the house? That’s okay. Start by using canned vegetables or fruit and lift them. Start with what you can do and build.

That’s all it takes to beat back and to prevent Diabetes, or at the very least delay it.

Control Diabetes

What if you have Diabetes? Then you work to control it. Sure, you might not save $85,000. But you can save a lot of it.

Start by establishing a Diabetes Goal with your doctor. This goal is hopefully having an A1c of less than 7.0 [57.0 UK]. How do you do that? Diet, Exercise and Meds. It’s the same Diet and Exercise as listed above – how simple is that? And, then just take your meds as prescribed. Again, it’s really simple and you take it one step at a time.

Notice anything going on here? It’s all about taking one step and then taking another and another. Take enough steps and you will control Diabetes. And, if you can get your A1c down to under 6.0, most folks would say you have reversed it. How about that? How often are you in control of a disease? How often can a little work lead to reversing a disease?

Diabetes is in your hands. You can decide to prevent Diabetes. Or, if you have it, you can decide to control Diabetes. It really is up to you.

What are you going to do? I say declare War On Diabetes and be victorious. You can do it!

As always, thank you for your time.

Read more at WarOnDiabetes.com