Living life to the max
It feels like diabetes can take over your life but it needs to be fitted into your life. There are many ways to make things easier for yourself so you can do what you want to do.
Here you’ll find some tips on how to look after yourself and your diabetes. Make sure you don’t shut yourself away – it’s really helpful to talk about your diabetes and deal with any feelings that you have.
Getting used to it?
You and your diabetes team will keep working on the best ways of managing your diabetes. This involves:
Finding the best insulin for you learning to balance the carbohydrates you eat against the insulin doses you inject. It’s common to learn how to count carbohydrates learning how exercise and sports affects glucose levels teaching you what to do when you’re ill being sure you and others know how to deal with hypos and hypers.
Top Tips
- Hearing the news you have diabetes may have been difficult and strange, and it may take you some time to work out how you’re really feeling and then learn how to cope with these feelings
- After the shock and anger of hearing that you have diabetes, you’ll then begin to work out ways of adapting to it
- Your life will be different and it will take some time to adjust but you’ll learn how to deal with it and realize you can still do whatever you want to do
- Getting used to diabetes might mean getting used to the fact that you may never quite get used to it - and that’s okay
- It’s good to try to master your diabetes, but remember that this is unrealistic all of the time
- There’s no reason that you can’t lead a normal healthy life but don’t worry about the occasional high or low – it happens, just try to correct it and learn from it for next time
- When you pay attention to diabetes you’ll learn to manage it so you can lead life to the full
- Learning how your body reacts to different foods, exercises and illness will happen over time and will make blood glucose management easier to handle
- Some days your glucose levels will be higher or lower than usual. Don’t think you’re a failure but think what may have caused these differences - although sometimes they are impossible to explain
- Don’t be too hard on yourself but think how you can avoid this high or low next time – it’s all part of the diabetes rollercoaster
- Work out the way of managing your diabetes that works best for you and don’t be afraid to ask your diabetes team for help as they can work with you to find a solution that works best for you
- Over time you’ll develop your own routine and your diabetes management will become second nature to you
- It can take time to adjust to living with diabetes and when you come across a new situation it may make you feel like you did when you were first diagnosed
Downloads
Download the diabetes and you pack
You can print out and use this tool to select from a choice of over 50 emotions to help identify how you are feeling right now. You can then use your finished selection to help you in discussions with your parents, friends or diabetes team, or just to track your progress . For more information and help on dealing with the emotions you may be feeling, you can download the document on “Dealing with emotions of type 1 diabetes” here.