Who else wants to be certain about diabetes signs and symptoms? You can be, you know.
And put your mind at ease.
I know diabetes can be a scary disease.
It's still the leading cause of kidney and eye disease.
But if you know the truth, you can relax and take action.
So what are the signs? If you're wondering about type 2 diabetes (adult onset), you need to know the symptoms and treat the underlying process.
So let's take them together.
Here's the process beneath the diabetes signs and symptoms: If you have diabetes, your cells have stopped responding so keenly to the call of insulin.
Insulin should open up cells to absorb the sugar in your blood (glucose) so the cells can burn it and use the energy.
But your cells are resisting the insulin and the glucose is accumulating in your blood.
How does that show up? First - you're fatigued.
No matter how much you eat, your cells are starved.
Second - You're caught in a cycle of drinking and peeing.
There's too much sugar in your blood.
Once you get more than 180 mg/dl of sugar in your blood, it starts to spill over into your urine.
Your urine absorbs water to dilute the sugar.
You're dehydrated and your bladder is always full.
Third - You have blurred vision.
The lens of your eye is absorbing and giving off water faster than the muscles can readjust.
So your vision blurs.
Fourth - You're getting infections that don't heal quickly.
The biological zoo in your body (fungus and yeast) like the sugar.
They thrive.
And your white blood cells don't so the bugs in your body increasingly win out.
Fifth - If you've had high blood sugar for a longtime, you're getting numbness and tingling in your feet or legs.
This is the distal neuropathy you've heard about.
The bad news is that the excess sugar in your body is wreaking havoc.
And in the long term it does damage you can't fix.
The good news is that diabetes is very manageable, even reversible if you act and turn things around.