Diabetes education is the first cornerstone in our multi-disciplinary approach to diabetes management. Diabetes requires day-to-day knowledge of nutrition, exercise, monitoring, and medication.
Importance of Diabetes Education
Diabetes is unlike other diseases, such as cholesterol and hypertension, where medication alone can often times successfully treat it. There are a lot of other components to diabetes, such as: the diabetes disease process, nutritional management, physical activity, medications, glucose monitoring and psychological adjustment.
Diabetes education makes you more aware of diabetes, what it takes to treat it, and gives you the power to control it. Diabetes education allows you to better incorporate education into your life and make the necessary changes to improve your lifestyle.
Who to Involve in your Diabetes Education
Diabetes education and self-management training should be done with a team. The team should consist ideally of:
a Medical Provider who understands diabetes
a Certified Diabetes Educator
a Nutritionist
an Exercise Physiologist
a Certified Weight Loss Management Provider
a Certified Hormone Replacement Provider
Best Practices for Diabetes Education
It’s a good idea to have individual diabetes education as well as group education. In a group, you may feel more comfortable because people have the same concerns, you can share your experiences and frustrations, and hear answers to questions you may not have thought of yourself. It’s very important that you create an individual plan after the group visit, because everyone’s lifestyle is different.
Your diabetes self-management goals should not only be individualized, but also measurable and achievable. You should create very specific short-term goals as well as long-term goals. An example of a short-term goal might be saying you’ll lose one to two pounds per week, while a long-term goal would be to lose 50 pounds.
Diabetes education is an ongoing process that should be repeated every one to two years, either with a diabetes nurse educator or a nutritionist. This allows patients to keep up to date.
Diabetes education gives you the power to control your diabetes, so it doesn’t end up controlling you.
