Real Life Fitness and Health

Source: Diabetic Digest

How do doctors determine if you have Type 2 Diabetes? The healthcare team has three different tests they can perform to see if your blood glucose levels fit into the range of diabetes or pre-diabetes. These include the fasting plasma glucose, the oral glucose tolerance test, and the random plasma glucose test. All but the last one will then diagnose diabetes and pre-diabetes. The last one will only diagnose diabetes. When you come into the doctor’s office with a list of symptoms, your doctor will likely recommend one of these three. Let’s look at each one and what the results may be.

The first type of test your doctor may perform to check for type 2 diabetes is the fasting plasma glucose or FPG. This health test is both convenient and also low priced. This makes it the first choice for many physicians to make an initial diagnosis. It may occassionally yield a wrong answer or a false negative. So many medical teams may use another test to then verify. With this test, the patient must fast for 8 hours before. Many doctors perform the test early in the morning before the patient eats breakfast. The test measures the glucose levels in milligrams per deciliter or mmol/L. With a blood sugar level of about 99 mg/dl (5.5 mmol/l) or below, the patient is normal and does not have diabetes. If the reading is between 100 and 125 mg/dl (5.6 – 7.0 mmol/L), the individual most likely has pre-diabetes. A value over 125 mg/dl (7.0 mmol/l) now implies the individual likely has Diabetes Type 2. Your doctor will repeat the test to verify results.

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Two out of three people n America today are either overweight or obese. That means every time you sit down in an airplane or a packed movie theater, more likely than not you’re going to wind up as the lean center of a fat sandwich. But as you look right and left and see nothing but heft, you can’t help but think, What happened?

How did we all get so darn fat?

Well, the simple answer is that we eat more calories. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that American men eat 7 percent more calories than they did in 1971; American women eat a whopping 18 percent more—an additional 335 calories a day! But the harder question is this: Why do we eat so many more calories? Are we suddenly more gluttonous? Do we have some kind of collective death wish? Is the entire country hellbent on qualifying for the next season of Biggest Loser?

No. There’s an even crazier reason: It’s the food!

We’ve added extra calories to traditional foods, often in cheap, mass-produced vehicles like high fructose corn syrup. These new freak foods are designed not by chefs, but by lab technicians packing every morsel with maximum calories at minimum cost—with little or no regard to dietary impact. Indeed, Eat This, Not That! 2011 has uncovered the truth about some of your favorite fast food and grocery store items and how they’re causing you to pack on unnecessary pounds. It’s enough to kill your appetite, which—in these cases, anyway—would be a good thing.

Read more at http://health.yahoo.net/experts/eatthis/truth-about-your-weight-gain

Dressing in layers, protecting your hands and feet, and paying attention to the forecast can help you stay safe and warm while exercising outdoors in cold weather.