Did your doctor just tell you that you have pre-diabetes or diabetes?
Are you struggling to get your blood sugars down?
Are you wondering where to begin?
The bad news:
Diabetes is a debilitating and expensive disease affecting 30 million, or 1 in 10 American adults and children. As a leading cause of death in the United States, diabetes kills more Americans per year than AIDS and breast cancer combined. Complication of this disease are severe and include heart-attack, stroke, blindness, kidney failure and dialysis, neuropathies such as loss of sensation in lower limbs, wounds that won’t heal, amputations, elevated cholesterol and triglycerides levels, and hearing loss. With an average medical expenditure of $7,900 per person per year for treatment of diabetes alone, the annual cost of diabetes has reached $245 billion dollars; 1 in 5 healthcare dollars is spent treating diabetes and its complications. One in 3 Americans have pre-diabetes and 70% of those will develop diabetes within 10 years. The incidence of diabetes is expected to increase to 1 in 5 Americans by 2030, and to 1 in 3 Americans by 2050.
The good news:
Most patients are unaware that 90% of Type 2 diabetes is preventable and even reversible with lifestyle modifications, including proper diet, exercise, sleep.
While most physicians are aware of this fact, lifestyle modification counseling is time consuming, and without proper “how-to” follow up it is difficult for the patients to put the knowledge into action. Let’s face it changing anything takes time and effort and usually lots of encouragement. Doctors are so busy there is only a small of amount of time for this type of instruction and, therefore, this education is often overlooked or underemphasized.
Solution:
Add a Registered Dietitian (RD) to your medical team! A typical visit with me, Dana West, RD/LD, is about 60 minutes focusing on getting you the realistic results you want and helping you work through the hurdles that may be holding you back from achieving your goals.
You can control and possibly even reverse diabetes and its complications.
One-on-one coaching with a Registered Dietitian and group health programs have both been proven to improve the health of those living with diabetes.
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