A Guide on the Top 5 Diabetes Hacks to Try in 2022

Kasparas Aleknavicius

2022 May 02

10 min read

When it comes to treating diabetes, many suggestions and recommendations are available online, including those that are indeed helpful and aren’t. This explosive number is significantly attributed to the consistent and steady growth of the condition despite the different efforts to control it.

For some patients, the usual complaint is that most of the supposed recommendations don’t work the wonders they expect and that their blood sugar levels consistently remain in the risk range.

The reality is that most supposed diabetes medications don’t bring the expected results due to improper prescription or poor adherence. Type 2 diabetes—the more common condition among US adults—can only improve if appropriately managed with effective and simple proven diabetes hacks. These hacks are known to work wonders on people with high blood sugars.

This guide outlines these diabetes hacks and how they help patients make better choices.

Treating Diabetics: What You Need to Know

For most people, treating diabetes means implementing everything they hear or see on the internet. Many patients erroneously choose the advice of non-professionals over that of endocrinologists and diabetes health experts due to a misplaced belief that the former have a better idea of how to tackle blood glucose spikes.

The reality, however, is that no two diabetes patients are the same. Moreover, that someone struggling with high blood sugar could recover by following certain rules doesn’t mean the same will work for you. You still need the direct help of a health professional to get the right treatment for your condition.

The next section reveals important steps designed to help you reverse your diabetes risk and ensure a completely changed blood sugar level. The aim is to ensure that your pancreas produces as much insulin as possible and that your body maximizes all of them.

A Look Into the Top 5 Diabetes Hacks

hacking diabetes

As already stated, there are certain steps that people can take to improve their health and feel better. Top professionals and endocrinologists confirm that these hacks help regulate blood sugar levels. More importantly, these hacks or steps aren’t difficult to implement and only require your deliberate commitment to derive their benefits.

However, it’s important to note that you need to follow these hacks moderately. Generally, it’s advisable to seek the assistance or consultation of a health professional due to their vast understanding of how each step works. That will help you preclude the danger of slipping into a low blood sugar condition.

Health professionals are generally well-grounded in their profession with several research experiences and can help you get the best benefits when accessing the appropriate treatments for your condition. That said, below are the 5 different hacks for diabetes you should try today.

Use A Diabetics Meal App

Irrespective of the health professional offering you blood sugar control advice, one of the major common grounds they all agree on is that “meal choice plays a crucial role in having a successful regulated sugar.” Implementing other diabetes control hacks and paying little caution to the kind of food you eat won’t leave you with many happy results. This underscores the need to meet with a dietitian on the best food choice to go for.

The major suggestion that you’ll get from most dietitians and online resources is to avoid carbohydrate-dense food as much as possible. However, this claim isn’t entirely right. Here’s why.

Firstly, the body needs carbs as the primary energy source, and totally substituting will lead to overstuffing other nutrients like fats and protein, which can also have side effects. Rather, you should go for “healthy or good carbs.” These types of carbohydrates don’t have a high glycemic index and can help people better regulate their blood sugar.

Fiber is one of the best carbs that people who have diabetes can eat due to its effectiveness in stabilizing blood sugar and reducing diabetes risk. Also, other whole carbs have considerably little sugar content and can serve as a better alternative to the more popular sugary carbs. For example, coconut sugar is a better alternative to white table sugar, and this is the same with brown rice over white rice.

While it’s essential to consult a dietitian to help you sort out the food that’ll work for you, you could also use a diabetes meal management app for better results. With a diabetic meal app like Klinio, you’ll get the right foods that work well with your body and blood sugar right from your mobile device. The best diabetic meal apps are regularly updated with the most diabetic-friendly foods to help you deal with blood sugar.

Self-Testing

diabetes self testing

It’s crucial to be able to perform a simple diabetes test all by yourself if you want to make headway on your condition. While you can get tested in a specialist care center, it may not always be convenient. In these instances, having the popular diabetes glucose monitors used to monitor blood sugar spikes will help you test your blood sugar at your convenience, allowing you to maintain it better.

Using a continuous glucose monitor can be quite helpful, and the good thing is that it’s relatively easy to use. Generally, you only need a drop of blood for the meter to read your blood glucose level. The result lets you know exactly how many calories you need to cut off or the level of physical activity you need to attain to ensure optimal blood glucose levels.

There are many ways to get a blood glucose meter and determine how much insulin sensitivity your body allows. You can often get one from a health specialist or a referred order given by your doctor or health professional.

Track Carbs

A key step you can take to handle your condition is to track your amount of consumed carbs. Carbs are apparently the major culprits responsible for high blood glucose, and they’re present in most foods we eat daily.

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However, as stated in the first tip for controlling diabetes, you shouldn’t necessarily eradicate carbs from your diet as it makes up a significant part of a balanced diet. The best way to handle carbs such that they don’t negatively affect your condition is to ensure that you track your intake of them. While “good” carbs will always be the best option when considering carbs, you may also want to eat other moderately sugary carbs once in a while to avoid hypoglycemia.

Summarily, tracking your carb consumption can help you eat sugary carbs with minimal effect on your blood sugar. That way, you’ll be able to ensure low carb consumption and enjoy good health.

Occasionally Adopt a Keto Diet

Keto diet is one of the more famous diets that people with high insulin resistance are advised to adopt for blood sugar levels regulation. The keto diet is a zero carbohydrate diet made up of mostly healthy fats that don’t have lots of calories.

Typically, too much fat consumption is considered unhealthy and could lead to weight gain and other more serious health complications. However, keto diet fats are mostly polyunsaturated and monounsaturated healthy fats that don’t significantly affect the body negatively following appropriate consumption.

Keto diets aim to replace carbohydrates and make healthy fats the primary energy source. That way, people will successfully reduce their sugar intake and have their blood sugar in the healthy range.

Apart from fats, the keto diet may also include some vegetables and protein foods. However, fats are the dominating nutrients because they discourage blood sugar increase, unlike most protein-dense foods with considerable carb content.

There have been many commendable results regarding the success of the keto diet in controlling blood sugar. However, it’s important to know that this diet is only recommended for the short term. If your blood sugar range is incredibly risky, opting for the keto diet can significantly push it down.

Nevertheless, keeping up with a keto diet for the long term isn’t entirely healthy as there’s the risk of eating too much fat, leading to liver complications and causing other dangerous conditions. Also, it’s not sustainable to depend on only fatty foods as the blood needs carbs.

Furthermore, research has shown that many people who seek to adopt the keto diet as their regular dieting choice fail to do so and usually return to their former diet after a while. Therefore, it’s important to understand that this hack is only sustainable as long as it can help you reverse a significantly high sugar level.

Fasting

fasting and diabetes

While there aren’t so many talks about how fasting can reduce sugar levels, it can be efficient for diabetes patients. Unlike the popular understanding that fasting usually connotes having to deal with hunger, there are ways that you can fast without exactly denying yourself food for long. As such, even diabetes patients that have ulcers can also implement certain fasting techniques and not feel the effect.

A major type of blood-sugar control fasting is intermittent fasting. Unlike most fasts, people with diabetes can eat more than one meal daily—up to three times—and still control how much they consume.

Intermittent fasting is a type of fast in which there are eating hours and fasting hours. The most popular and highly recommended type of intermittent fasting is the “16:8 window,” where you’ll need to abstain from food for 16 hours and only eat for 8 hours.

The most popular 16:8 window is the 11 am to 7 pm window. There are 8 hours between 11 pm to 7 pm, and you’re expected to eat for the day within this window. The other hours outside this window are the 16 hours of fasting.

This window is quite achievable as it’s somewhat easy to stay away from food in the morning until 11 am. After that, you could eat your lunch at 2 pm or 3 pm and must eat your final meal for the day at 7 pm.

You can drink water in the fasting period but must stay away from junk and all types of food. Ending your final meal by 7 pm will give your body enough time to use the extra food as fuel before you sleep.

Also, health experts recommend that people shouldn’t go to bed until three hours after eating their last meal. Eating by 7 pm makes this recommendation achievable as you can stay awake till 10 pm before sleeping.

Conclusion

Dealing with diabetes usually requires professional medical advice from a doctor and a diabetes management plan. However, there are simple steps you can take yourself to live healthily. This guide successfully outlines some of these steps and how you can implement them to manage your illness and enjoy better health.

Evident in the hacks outlined in this guide is that food and diet choices are significant in diabetes management recommendations. This, therefore, underscores the importance of watching what you eat. Even if you perform heavy workouts and exercise a lot, eating too many carbs and other unhealthy foods will render your efforts almost insignificant.

This guide outlines different ways to control what you eat, and the use of a diabetes meal management app is the easiest and most effective option to go for. While dieticians can help you with food choices, a meal app is generally effective in providing users with the newest healthy foods they can eat.

Klinio app is one of the top diabetes management apps you can trust to help you choose the best meals for adequate management of your condition. Namely, this virtual caregiver provides you with proven diabetic-friendly meals that are tasty and enjoyable.

Written by

Kasparas Aleknavicius

Kasparas is one of our freshest doctor’s in the Klinio family. With his master’s in medicine and broad-spectrum health experience, he is helping our customers better understand diabetes management. Kasparas is also participating in every product project - from our blog and hub articles to diabetes management subtleties. As a healthcare futurist, he constantly looks for innovative ways to control blood glucose and ensure the most efficient diabetes management.

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