WELLNESS

As a pharmacist and Certified Diabetes Educator, I could share with you all sorts of stats, guidelines, studies, and other information that is generally meaningless on the individual level of eliciting change. In my practice, I’ve seen varied causes, attitudes, and mindsets towards diabetes and it’s management.

Today, I’m going to take a different approach and start at the beginning of it all: MINDSET.

There’s no argument that there are psychosocial factors that contribute to diabetes. These are factors that lump in your mood, mindset, approach, environment, and support that contribute to your health in diabetes. In my opinion, this is where it all begins. While there are foods that are low in sugar, and drugs that lower your blood sugar, the most effective way of managing the symptoms of diabetes is to change your mindset and habits.

At a high level, Type 2 Diabetes is caused by the body’s inability to process sugar due to being overloaded with sugar over a long period of time. Your body’s sugar processing system gets overloaded and becomes less effective over time. So to truly prevent, reduce the occurence of, and help to manage or control diabetes, it all comes down to the same thing: controlling your sugar intake.

Here is where the mindset comes in. Reading the above paragraph, many people may first jump to the thought of “I can’t live without X” or “It’s too hard to make those changes” or “I can’t do diets”. And yet, there are many people that do all those things that you’re thinking of. And because you said you can’t, you’ll be right.

So these are all limiting beliefs. They are limiting you from achieving the health that you want (assuming that we all want to be “healthy”). Our brains and bodies are complex systems that are often broken apart by science and sectioned off into components. This division is great for helping understand the different workings of the individual parts of the body. In the case of diabetes, the function of the pancreas and how it processes sugar has been well mapped out. Medications target different parts of this system and we can hack the body into lowering blood sugar levels. That would be amazing if we were just a floating pancreas.

JONATHAN NHAN

In reality, as people, we come as one whole complex and intertwined system. Our mindset and moods affect our actions that then have effects on our health. There is definitely a place for all the advances of modern medical science, and it can only be made more effective if we begin to listen to our bodies and start considering real change.

The biggest shift here is to understand that things can either happen to you, or you can make things happen. A diagnosis of diabetes could be looked at as your body is failing to process the sugar that you are taking in. What about looking at this “failure” as feedback. If your body were telling you something about how it’s processing sugars, what would that message be? Maybe there are better food choices that you could make based on this feedback from your body. Coming to a conscious understanding of this could help you begin to bring awareness to what changes could benefit you. Building in this unconscious understanding, and using that unconscious power to drive your actions is building new habits.

Find Jon at jnthn.ca

Jonathan Nhan Co-Founder, Curate and Upgrade