Diabetes is a chronic metabolic disorder and it calls for lifelong medications and of course a strict diet control regimen. As this disorder affects the normal metabolic activity in the body, it obviously is closely associated with your diet, your body weight and overall health. One of the major concerns for a diabetic patient is to maintain normal body weight. This post aims to highlight the reasons why weight loss for diabetics is so important.
Relation between Body Weight and Diabetes
There is an intrinsic relation between your body weight and diabetes, especially the Type2 Diabetes. Research has unearthed the fact that about 80-90% of Type 2 Diabetics are also obese. This means that the link between both the conditions is definitely strong. When you are obese your body finds it difficult to maintain a normal insulin and blood sugar response. In other words it means that your body has to overwork and strain in order to maintain normal blood sugar values when you are obese and often excessive body weight is the precursor to Diabetes.
Another issue is that if you continue to put on weight after developing Diabetes Type2, your body will need larger amounts of medications to keep your blood sugar in control.
So these facts clearly demonstrate that if you want to avoid Diabetes or want to control it, then maintaining a normal body weight is very crucial.
Weight Loss with Diabetes
Consuming a healthy balanced diet is an important step towards weight loss for diabetics. Now it goes without saying that a healthy balanced diet is a necessity for every individual and not only for diabetics. But a healthy balanced diet for a diabetic focuses more on consuming a diet that will help in keeping blood sugar (glucose/ fructose) levels under control.
Dieticians advise a diabetic diet, which basically is a diet that includes all the essential nutrients vital for normal physiologic functions of your body and excludes anything that can raise your blood sugar in sudden spikes or over prolonged durations. If you can stick to this diabetic diet plan then it will not only help you in keeping your Type2 Diabetes under complete control but also aids in weight loss (if obese) and maintaining a healthy body weight and promotes fitness.
Foods Included in Diabetic Diet Plan
The major feature of foods that are included into the Diabetic diet plan for weight loss is that they have a low glycemic index (G.I.) The glycemic index of a food is its ability to influence the level of glucose / sugar in your blood stream. So a food that has higher glycemic index will obviously cause higher blood sugar levels and low G.I. foods are hence preferred for diabetics.
Since the glycemic index for foods varies between 1 and 100, it is preferred to look for foods that have G.I. lower than 55 and even among these foods, the lower the better. In grains barley has the lowest G.I. at 28, followed by whole wheat kernels at 30. Rice is not a preferable grain for diabetics or for those looking for weight loss as the lowest G.I. that it provides is 50 (which is not the regular white rice, but the brown variety).
Among beans, chickpea has the lowest G.I. value of 10 followed by soy at 15, and then by kidney beans and lentils at 29. Among vegetables, avoid parsnips and potatoes like the plague as their G.I. is very high. The safe vegetables are onions, artichokes, asparagus, bell peppers, broccoli, celery, mushrooms etc. Fruits like grapefruit, cherries, prunes, plums etc are safe.