If you are reading this, you probably have been told by your doctor that you, or someone you care about, have diabetes or prediabetes. You may be surprised, shocked or even scared. You wonder how and why this is happening.

Basically diabetes means that the level of glucose in your blood (or blood sugar) is too high. Everyone has glucose in the blood. We need it to provide energy for all the cells in our body. Having diabetes means you have more than you need – usually WAY TOO MUCH.

The diagnosis of diabetes is somewhat arbitrary and keeps changing over time. Some time ago, your fasting glucose levels had to be 140 mg/dL or higher to be considered diabetic. Today the official number is 126, in the future it may be even lower.

The important part it’s not something that happens overnight. It is a PROCESS that takes YEARS and the sooner it is recognized and stopped, the better.

Type 2 diabetes does NOT just SUDDENLY come out of nowhere, like a bolt of lightning, althouth many people may feel that way when they first hear the diagnosis.

Quite to the contrary, it usually progresses GRADUALLY from normal blood glucose levels through various intermediate stages of prediabetes until your glucose control becomes so poor that you are diagnosed as having full-blown diabetes. It takes ten or twenty years for most people to progress from being normal to being a diabetic, and most of them don’t know that this is happening. 

Normal blood glucose levels

The blood glucose level of people with no signs of diabetes is about 80-90 mg/dL before meals and may rise up to 120 mg/dL or a little more after they eat, depending on the food they had.

Prediabetes

Prediabetes begins when your body is beginning to lose control of your blood sugar levels. It used to be called borderline diabetes or impaired glucose tolerance, (IGT ), but whatever the name, the condition means you are at an extremely high risk of progressing to full-blown diabetes.

At this stage, your fasting blood glucose levels may be close to normal when you wake up in the morning and before meals. The cutoff for prediabetes is considered 100 mg/dL. However, after eating the same meal, the levels rise higher than normal to almost 200 mg/dL. Because the peak is higher, it also takes longer for it to come down. Then about four or five hours later, they may drop lower than normal – below 70 or even 50 mg/dL, causing symptoms of “low blood sugar” that include shakiness, nervousness, and intense craving for food, especially something sweet.

What this means is that your body is losing control over its blood glucose levels. Your body does not produce sufficient insulin right after a meal to keep the blood glucose level down, and then when it starts producing insulin, you produce WAY TOO MUCH because the blood glucose level is so high by this time causing your blood glucose levels go TOO LOW. This can go on for years before the person is diagnosed with diabetes.

Diabetes

When you are diabetic, even the fasting blood glucose levels will be higher than normal, over 100 mg/dL. They will zoom to even higher an extremely high level after eating, and because it is so high it takes hours to go back to the starting level.

Keep in mind that the blood glucose level before a meal for a non diabetic person and a person with prediabetes may be very similar. The blood glucose before meals is usually very similar to what is called the fasting glucose level, which means the blood glucose level that you have when you wake up in the morning, having fasted all night.

Diagnosis of diabetes is usually based on measuring your fasting level, so a person with prediabetes may be told that everything is fine. This will usually mean that such person will continue the unhealthy lifestyle of eating too much food, eating wrong foods (too many trans fats, too many processed foods), and moving/exercising too little.

This is unfortunate, because being diagnosed with prediabetes would serve as an excellent wake-up call for many people to change their ways and adopt healthy habits. Obviously, it is much easier to reverse prediabetes before it progressed to full-blown diabetes.

Diabetes is a serious condition can have a devastating effect on the entire body, including eyes, kidneys, and heart, ultimately leading to blindness, kindey failure, amputations, heart disease and stroke. Everyone who has diabetes, whether type 1 or type 2 is at risk, and even people who have pre-diabetes can be affected - so it's never too early to take aggressive preventive measures by changing your lifestyle choices.

What is important that you can prevent, and in most cases reverse type 2 diabetes because the disease is largely influenced by the person's lifestyle choices, most importantly dietary choices and physical activity/exercise.

Do not wait until it is too late!

You can read more about normal blood sugar levels and diabetic blood sugar levels on my blog.