There is great news for people with diabetes. Studies say that keeping your blood sugar under control helps to prevent or delay some diabetes problems.

     People with diabetes need to make it a priority to maintain healthy lifestyles and stick to daily routines like regular exercise, eating healthy, monitoring blood sugar and regular visits to your doctor.

     To keep your glucose at a healthy level, one needs to keep a balance between three important things.
1. What you eat and drink.
2. How much physical activity you do.
3. What diabetes medicine you take.

     By empowering yourself to keep a close eye on what you eat and drink, monitoring how much physical activity you do and understanding your medication, you are beginning to take the first steps toward taking control of your diabetes.

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    Home blood sugar monitoring is one of the most important tools you and your doctor have to keep your blood sugars under control.

     The Diabetes Wellness Center Team will provide you with a meter and instructions for its use. They will tailor a plan for how often to test and instruct you to keep a record of your daily readings.

     You may be asked to call these readings to the case manager weekly. This enables you and your diabetes team to make adjustments in your treatment plan between visits if needed.

    Home blood sugar monitoring provides a "snapshot" of how your blood sugar treatment program is doing at one moment in time. This information is particularly important to help you tailor your daily eating program and medication needs to keep blood sugars in a healthy range. It's vitally important to tell you if the symptoms you are experiencing - sweats, feeling faint, etc. - are the result of a low blood sugar reaction (hypoglycemia) so you can treat this problem swiftly. Home blood sugar monitoring is also vitally important when you are sick, or under stress, as it provides you with information you need to make adjustments immediately in your treatment program to keep your blood sugars from going too high or too low. By keeping track of blood sugars over a period of weeks, you can begin to see patterns and identify ways in which food, exercise or other factors influence your blood sugar levels

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     The Diabetes Wellness Center Team providers will ask you to have an A1c test according to the Indian Health Service Standards of Care for Patients with Type 2 Diabetes. This standard recommends that patients have their A1c tested every 3-4 months. Patients in acceptable control (A1c< 7.0%) should be tested at least every 6 months. The A1c is the standard way to measure glycemic control. An A1c test gives you a picture of your average blood sugar control for the past 2-3 months. The results give you and your doctor a good idea of how well your treatment plan is working.

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