Getting Diabetes Under Control, Leg 4.

"Based on the research and information I have on October 06 the following makes sense to me," Harlan Jacobsen Copyright © 2006

You likely will improve the situation with a big change in diet. This will lower insulin requirements and help relieve the pancreas insulin-production problem.

There is more to diabetes then diet and one of the big modern day factors is removing stress and what originates it.

Your body is built to operate on fat conversion to energy use.

However, under stress, the adrenal glands produce adrenaline, an important stimulus for the production of glucagons by the liver to get your body ready with this emergency store to react with a "fight or flight" response.

This was to help you escape from the big bear you ran into in the woods. You could not convert fat fast enough so the glucagons in the liver saves the day.

This on going stress, results in adrenaline over stimulation of glucagons to keep blood sugar levels high, because of caveman programming for fight or flight to make you a survivor.

This artificially high blood sugar means a constant increased production of insulin to bring blood sugar levels down.

It is this continued long term high insulin that causes most of the problems such as accumulating increased insulin resistance, hardening of the arteries, etc.

Diet changes will go a long way to lower insulin requirements and help the insulin-producing glands recoup., but do not neglect these origins of stress as an important factor for long-term recovery.

One of the stress experts has said that stress is the cause of 80% of disease. He also has said that each of has a certain amount of stress reserve.

When you run out of stress reserve you die. The idea is if you are under a lot of stress such as in war for a long period, it shortens your life expectancy.

Modern man has a great deal of stress and there are charts that show different stress inducers such as the death of a long term relationship, or parent etc. Loss of job, change of job etc

This was used by the Navy originally to determine who should go on long term cruises and who not because they had much greater odds of coming down with and illness if they had high stress components in their life.

You can also predict the chances of overcoming an illness by adding stress factors.

A change in job or life-style or even relationships, may be necessary to eliminate stress in your life.

Dropping any philosophical assumptions that breed fear may be essential to bring down and keeping blood sugar levels in check.

To control your diabetes you will need to learn to eliminate sources of stress including job changes, including retiring, relationships, life style etc.

You can learn to control the stress caused high blood sugar effect with meditation, bio feedback, etc.

We recommend Han Selye's book, the Relaxation Response, as a source of learning to handle stress. Usually available at your public library. His book lists statistics like your chances of dying are more then double in the year following loss of a lifetime relationship. Chance of coming down with cancer also more then double normal under the same stress example. Stress makes your blood sugar skyrocket so this long term type of stress raising blood sugar levels and insulin long term can easily kill a diabetic.

You will often wonder why your blood sugar test is high when you did not eat anything to justify the raise.

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