Diabetes Everyday

Living your best life with diabetes. Toby Smithson provides professional guidance with personal experience.

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Reducing Stress

The Truth About Coronavirus Stress and Diabetes

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This pandemic is incredibly stressful, not only from worry but also about terribly practical stresses like illness, loss of income or even death of a loved one. Is there an answer?

Hi Everyone, I’m Toby Smithson with DiabetesEveryDay. Today I’m going to touch on a sensitive subject. Stress. Stress has an effect on our diabetes management and stress comes in all sorts of ways. At this particular time, the scope of the coronavirus pandemic makes stress essentially unavoidable…uncertainty, fear, boredom, constant change….it’s the perfect recipe. My patients have been talking a lot to me about stress eating and it is an important issue because keeping our diabetes in check is very important right now. I can help with that

Stress can make us prone to eating more food than necessary or to choose foods that we call junk foods.. foods with little nutritional value. Here are a couple of really simple tips to help limit the stress eating:

  1. I’m a true believer in setting prompts and it works well for stress eating and can help put limits within your environment…like working from home.

If you work from home, set a designated area for your office space which does not include space for eating.  And, set up a designated space FOR eating where you would eat your meals or snacks. Having these designated spaces will help you avoid distracted eating while you are working.

  • Out of sight out of mind. Keep snack foods out of reach and out of sight. Make it difficult to access less healthy food to munch on. And stock your kitchen with healthy food choices like fruits, vegetables, whole grains, dairy and lean protein foods.
  • Keep busy. If you are craving food to snack but your blood sugar is trending above target, it’s not an appropriate time to snack.  Get busy and get busy with things that require the use of your hands so they aren’t free to snack.  Sewing, riding a bicycle, walking on a treadmill or elliptical, using hand weights or even canned food as your hand weights or taking a walk with your dog and you can even take this further to keep your hands busy by carrying a poop bag as you walk the dog.

This ultra- stressful time will pass, but sometimes stress lingers. And, there are always other stresses. If you are finding yourself dealing with stress by eating more food, try one or more of my tips and please share your best tips below. Cheers to your health.

Coronavirus Challenge- Need Something To Do? Be a Dummy!

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Being on lockdown is a good time to read a book, even if you are a very, very slow reader. How about this one?

Welcome to Diabetes Every Day…. I’m Toby Smithson, your guide to credible information and guidance for managing diabetes.

Today I want to introduce you to something near and dear to my heart….Diabetes Meal Planning and Nutrition for Dummies… by me, with contributions from Dr. Alan Rubin, and lots of help from my editor at John Wiley & Sons Publishing, my husband Tony and my long personal experience with diabetes. I’m a little embarrassed bragging about this book, but the reviews from readers have been so overwhelmingly positive that I think it’s fine to tell you a little about it.

My mission was to tackle the most difficult thing about diabetes management – food. And while my book explains diabetes, how diabetes and food are connected, and what kinds of food we should be eating, I also spend a lot of space explaining why changing eating habits is so incredibly difficult. And, what to do about it….how to make this difficult lifestyle change easier.

Question– do you shop without knowing in advance what meals you intend to prepare? – Do you shop without a shopping list? Can you say “impulse eating.” That’s where the “meal planning” part of the book title comes in.

I don’t want to give away the ending, but if you’re struggling with eating healthier, I’m proud to say confidently that this book can help you. As a bonus there’s a 7 day menu and some fantastic healthy recipes. But understanding the importance of how you eat, why it’s hard to change, and how to make it easier is the real message.

All Dummies books start with a detailed table of contents….before any writing. And we can’t write chapters in order, like chapter 1 then 2 then 3. In the end it means that every chapter can stand alone, so readers can skip around and not be lost. You can actually view the table of contents on Amazon or Dummies.com. So, it’s an easy read even if you’re not a reader.

Take a look….read the reviews. If you decide to read the book, leave some comments here.

Corona Virus – What You Need To Know!!

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Our country is experiencing with corona virus an almost unprecedented approach to stopping the spread of an infectious disease with quarantines, social distancing messages, warnings about public gatherings and travel, and dire predictions about an uncertain future. Older Americans may remember localized public health interventions like this for polio or diphtheria, but for most of us it’s brand new. Having spent much of my career in public health I want to emphasize to my friends and followers with a diabetes connection why this event is different and so much more important than what we have experienced.

First, accept the fact that we are in the high-risk population, both of becoming infected and of the infection becoming serious. So avoiding infect is incredibly important. We shout out this message every fall about influenza…..get your flu shot and your pneumonia shot…. and medical experts have been clear that corona virus is medically more serious than influenza. But another way Corona and influenza are different is much more important now.

Not only is there no vaccine to help protect us from Corona virus, there is no what’s called “herd immunity.” Herd immunity is the phenomenon where people without immunity to an infectious disease are protected from exposure and infection to some extent by the immunity of other people. A disease that constantly comes against people vaccinated or previously exposed in the past can’t spread effectively. With corona virus there is no vaccinated or past exposure immunity among the population – nobody is immune.

So, these warnings and limitations on activities are not overkill. Instead, they are the tried and proven approach to limiting our exposure to this dangerous disease where there is no immunity in the population. That’s why I urge you to follow the guidance of my public health colleagues to keep yourself safe and healthy.