There are 29 million people with type two diabetes, and now here's the interesting thing they also say there's another 84 million people who have pre-diabetes that means their blood glucose is high but not high enough to be diabetes yet. So that's a total of almost 120 million people, which is almost a third of the adults in the United States, Hi, and welcome to the solving type two diabetes podcast. I'm Tom. And I'll be your host. As I share what I'm doing in my daily life to solve my type two diabetes. Listen in, as I share the food. Movement and tools that I'm using each day. This podcast is intended for entertainment purposes only. For a full transcript or to follow the solving type two diabetes podcast on social media. Please head over to Solvingtype2Diabetes.com. For all those links and more now onto the show. Welcome to this week's episode. I hope you had a great week. I had a very interesting week this week. I've been traveling. And in fact, I'm out visiting my oldest daughter and her family in Arkansas and I'm living in Pennsylvania, so it's a bit of a flight out here actually had to go to Dallas and then to Northwest Arkansas. That wasn't too bad. It gave me a chance to practice packing the proper snacks and getting my walks in airports, and it was a little challenging, but that's to be expected with travel and I will be having an episode coming up focusing on travel and the challenges with your movement and your, eating with type two diabetes when you're traveling. That'll be an interesting episode coming up in the future. Again, it's easy to subscribe you. Head over to SolvingType2Diabetes.com, subscribe, and you make sure you get these new episodes when they come out. Anytime you're traveling, you might not have the same exercise equipment that you use to, but you can make due, for example, this week I've been mostly walking and making sure that I brought the right snacks with me to the hotel, not relying on hotel snacks. Bringing bottled so I don't have to rely on this soda machine et cetera. So far that's working well. So I want to talk a bit about, my numbers this week. There are certain things that I do track and each week, I want to be able to talk about those things and stay consistent with what I track and what I discuss in the podcast. So let's start off. I have an apple watch that I use my fitness rings with. Some folks might have a Fitbit or other things like that, but I make sure that I closed my apple rings and I have done that this week I've closed my apple rings, each of seven days . I have my three rings. If you're familiar with the apple watch, the three rings are move, exercise and stand. And I have my move goal as 600 calories burned through a movement. Exercise at 30 minutes and that's basically, you get your heart rate up past resting . For me, if the heart rate goes above a hundred, it usually counts as at least mild exercise. And then standing, I have it set at 12 hours a day, so I have to stand for at least a minute or so each hour. Yes, I closed my rings this week, which is very good. That's one of the key things that I track. The other thing I track is body fat percentage . We'll get into the details on this, once again, in a future episode , but I just want to say that my body fat percentage for this week is 28.2%. Also. I check my blood glucose. I wear a continuous glucose monitor and I'll be detailing all that in a future episode. My average blood glucose over the past seven days has been 137. And you can look that up that equates to an A1C of about 6.0. And 6.0 is right in the middle of the pre-diabetic range. I'm doing this off the top of my head, but that runs from about 5.4 to about 6.4 and anything in there they would diagnosis pre-diabetes , but anything higher than 6.4 is type two diabetes. So right now with the medication, with the exercise with helpful eating, right now that's for this week coming in at a 6.0, which is a week average of 137. And the nice thing about that continuous glucose monitor, I'm actually talking about this in a news article later in this episode. Is that, it gives you a reading, it reads it every 15 minutes. So 24 hours a day. I get a reading every 15 minutes. So it's sorta cool. You go in there and you can see, how your blood glucose responds to certain foods you eat, certain exercise you do. Time between meals, snacking, things like that. That's really a helpful thing to have. Each episode, I want to talk about my small wins or challenges. So I'm going to call my small wins for this week. Being successful in packing the proper snacks, making sure that even though I'm traveling. I'm visiting family. I still got in a good hour, at least an hour walk every day. I had My snacks here at the hotel. I did not hit the vending machine. My challenges were the same thing. Traveling, the fact That, you're in an airplane at least for two of the days, coming in and going out, you're in an airplane for several hours. Each way for me, it was like, I don't know, four and a half, five hours each way, because it had a layover. And then also a hotel. Not having a gym equipment, not having things you're used to your schedule, your routine. So that was a challenge, but I think I handled it fairly well. All right. I'd like to talk about, what's in the news. And, this week I have three articles. The first one is from medicalexpress.com. And it's entitled individuals with type two diabetes respond differently from exercise. And I found this article very interesting. And by the way, I'm going to have the links to these three articles in the show notes and they are always available over at the website. So it goes on to say that, folks with type two diabetes typically have a dysregulated inflammatory response. So that they don't always react typically to really intense exercise. It can affect them differently, their blood tests would come out different. That, it sometimes because of this higher levels of inflammation that diabetics people with type two diabetes really run into issues long-term. While people with type two diabetes often respond differently. They might be more tired. Things like that from exercise. In fact, exercise does them a whole lot In the longterm. Exercise can really give health promoting effects. And help with the metabolic issues that folks with type two diabetes have. So I think there was a helpful article. Again, I'm going to link it in the show notes. The next article is at time.com it's the online version of time magazine. And it's entitled high blood pressure and diabetes are linked. And it's claims on showing you how to reduce your risk for both, and the reason I wanted to bring this up is because quite often, folks with type two diabetes have high blood pressure and folks with high blood pressure sometimes go on already have type two diabetes. So they both seem to be linked. They both can cause according to this article, increased rates of stroke, kidney failure and other complications. , and it doesn't really claim to say, which came first, the chicken or the egg, it's just that there's a high correlation that the two seem to go together. And the two really have, fairly intense side effects. It might be worth a little read if you're interested in that and, exploring that a little bit, it gives links to other, studies and, It looks like a quick read , the article itself in time is only about a page but, I thought it was fairly interesting . And then the last article here. Is in the Sun-Times of Chicago and it is entitled. Ask the doctors. CGM. A useful tool for tracking blood glucose. Tracking blood glucose in real time. Now, this is something that I do use. I actually, have been using it for over a year and I find it to be extremely helpful. It's probably the most helpful tool that I have in solving my type two diabetes. This is a interesting article . The person asks, I have a friend she has to do finger sticks all the time. But should she be using a continuous glucose monitor? Now I have to say it does go on to say that, Hey , if you have type one, if you, really need a very good control. tight control. You have to know everything. To a very close degree that may be fingersticks are still, actually a little bit more accurate, but for somebody like me, who just needs to get a general sense. Are they running generally high this week? Or is it really high or what is it? That a CGM, a continuous glucose monitor. Can be a very, helpful device. In fact, here, they even say sometimes they, let healthy people use them. Just to get a sense of how food affects them, which I thought was really interesting. Okay, so this is the main topic for the show. Each episode, I will have a main topic and this week is, what is type two diabetes. So as I like to say, I am not a doctor. So this is not coming from me. This is coming from webmd.com. Which I personally like to use. It's just their article called type two diabetes. It says medically reviewed by Michael Danzinger MD. So it starts off, with the general part of what is type two diabetes. And it talks about how that it is. A diagnosis that you get, when you are, they call it insulin insensitive or insulin resistance. They're saying that most people are middle-aged or older. It used to be called adult onset diabetes, but now type two diabetes also is affecting kids and teens. They say that's mainly because of childhood obesity. There are 29 million people with type two diabetes, and now here's the interesting thing they also say there's another 84 million people who have pre-diabetes that means their blood glucose is high but not high enough to be diabetes yet. So that's a total of almost 120 million people, which is almost a third of the adults in the United States, Which is very interesting. This article was written back in December of 2020, so that's over a year and a half ago. So I'm wondering if it's not actually higher a, at this point. So it goes on to talk about signs and symptoms. So how do you know you have type two diabetes, a doctor of course will diagnose it. When you have, like I said, an A1C level, a higher than about 6.4, 6.5. And I think it's repeated measurement of that an A1C is your average for the last three months. So it says, what are your symptoms that you might have? It says being very thirsty. It's like having blurry vision. Maybe tingling or numbness in your hands and feet. Wounds that won't heal. Some people have experienced weight loss without trying. Or getting frequent infections. So those are some of the symptoms that this article says that folks experience. Now they say what actually causes it. Again, it's when your pancreas is having difficulty producing sufficient insulin. And the insulin isn't being, effective in getting glucose into your cells. So it remains in your blood system. So they say it could be caused by genes. They say it could be caused by being obese, which is very overweight. Or a combination of metabolic syndrome and metabolic syndrome is having high blood pressure and high cholesterol and high triglycerides. Your liver, they say could be pushing out too much glucose. Your cells, the gates and your cells could not be functioning properly. And that's usually because they're being bombarded by too much glucose and bombarded by then too much insulin. And they just don't react well at all. And also the cells in your pancreas, your beta cells. Might be, wearing out injured damage, that type of thing. So those are the things that they say could be the causes. Now the risk factors, like what might help you get it? They say age. Is one that typically people who are 45 or older. If you have a close family member with type two diabetes. Or some ethnicities. And, they say, if you have pre-diabetes, you're very likely to get diabetes. If you have a heart disease, you're likely to If you have high blood pressure. Again, being overweight. These are things that can, they believe lead to type two diabetes. Another thing is, smoking. Lifestyle, things like that, or getting no exercise or having a whole lot of stress. They say can lead to it. So again, under type two diabetes diagnosis and tests, the main, the gold standard, for example, they say is the A1C, and again, that is the amount of red blood cells that have been damaged by sugar that are in your bloodstream. So checking that A1C level. Is what the doctors use to say, this is a diagnosis of type two diabetes, or it's not a other tests are the fasting plasma, glucose test or the oral glucose tolerance test. Okay. That's all a lot of information. Again, this is from web MD. You can look that up and look at their type two diabetes article. So treatment. They have number one, lifestyle changes. And I am a firm believer in that I finding that is helpful for myself. So they say weight loss, healthy eating, and by healthy eating, they say. Eating fewer calories overall, cutting back on refined carbohydrates. Adding vegetables to your diet and getting more fiber. And then exercise. They say that is, very helpful. And again, I'm, I can show in myself anyway. And again, I like to say I'm an experiment of one just because I do something and it works doesn't mean it's going to work for anyone else, but I can say for myself, the exercise and a healthier eating. Is very helpful. So medication, they do have lots of medications for it. One of the most common initial medications, especially for like pre diabetes or beginning type two diabetes is Metformin. And Metformin lowers the amount of glucose your liver makes and it helps your body respond better to the insulin that it still does make. And from Metformin, it goes on to different. Drugs, some that, help your body make more insulin. Some that make you more sensitive to insulin. There are, drugs that can slow digestion. So your insulin doesn't spike as high. And then there's ones that help your kidneys filter out more glucose and, and then it goes out. With everything else, your kidneys filter And then finally. You can actually take insulin in the form of an injection. But that's usually the more severe types of type two diabetes. But there's also lots of combinations. So I found that interesting. The big things that I take away is if you want to try and prevent it all together, it's the lifestyle changes the losing weight to getting active, eating right and that can avoid the complications of heart disease, kidney troubles. Problems with eyes and seeing. Problems with sleeping. That was our topic of this week. I hope you found that interesting and helpful. I would look forward to getting topics from you as well. Over on our website SolvingType2Diabetes.com. We have a feedback. Link. And you just click on that, you type in your suggested topic, or maybe a question you have or suggestion. It just sends me an email and I would see that right away. So feel free to do that. And, it would be great to, have topics that you come up with that you find helpful as well as the ones that I think Okay. So here is where, I want to try and answer questions that you send in, for me. And I can answer them on the air. If you don't want me to answer your question on Just say so in the email you send and I will, just, answer your privately. Unfortunately, because we're new. We don't have any questions yet. So I'm looking forward to that first question when it comes in. And you can make it anonymous. At most, the only thing I would use on the air would be your first name. We really don't have any questions, so we're going to move All right. That's wrapping up this episode of solving type two diabetes podcast. Next time. We're going to talk about my story. So this time we read some stuff off the web. And, you really didn't learn anything else about me, but I thought it was important to learn what we're really talking about here with type two diabetes. So we covered that this week, but next week I'm going to talk about myself. Which hopefully that's not too terribly boring. But I'm going to give you my story. My background, talk about my diagnosis. Let you know what I've been going through for a few years, what I've tried. Some of the things that have worked. So you'll get to learn more about me and my life as I'm dealing with my diagnosis. I hope you find that, interesting. And, I will see you next week. That wraps up another episode of the solving type two diabetes podcast. I hope you found it valuable. Please follow and leave a five star review. As it helps other people find the podcast. By subscribing you ensure you won't miss the next episode. You can always get a full transcript of the episode at solvingtypetwodiabetes.com. There you also find the links to leave feedback and links to follow on social media. I'm very interested in hearing from you with comments and suggestions. Thanks very much for listening. Please remember that everything I share is just from my own personal experience. And should not be taken as medical or health advice. Please consult your own medical professionals. This podcast is intended for entertainment purposes only.