Diabeties Diets - For Life Improvement
By Sacha Tarkovsky

Daily exercise, especially walking is very good for Type 2 diabetics.

Your doctor will have given you some medication. Take it per the prescription instructions.

The Diet

People with Type 2 diabetes generally are put on a 1500-1800 calorie diet per day to promote weight loss and then the maintenance of ideal body weight.

This always varies according to the person's age, sex, activity level, current weight and body type. More obese individuals will need more calories initially until their weight is less.

This is because it takes more calories to maintain a larger body and a 1600 calorie diet for them may promote weight loss that is too fast and will promote complications. Also, people whose activity level is low will have less daily caloric needs.

The diet will generally have about 50% carbohydrates of the daily calories (with an acceptable range from 40 to 60%).

As a general rule the lower the carbohydrate intake the lower the sugar levels in the blood. The benefits of the low calorie diet can be cancelled out by the problems associated with a higher fat diet substituted for the lower amount of carbohydrates. You can counter this by substituting monounsaturated and polyunsaturated fats for saturated fats.

Count your carbohydrates!

You can figure that each gram of carbohydrate is about 4 calories. A diabetic on a 1600 calorie diet should get 50% of these calories from carbohydrate.

This would be a total of 800 calories or 200 gms of carbohydrate (at 4 calories per gram) spread out over the day. You will need food tables (from diet books and also read those labels in all foods you buy).

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