Responding to Change

When you start to see positive changes in your health, such as a decrease your weight or better control of your glucose, make sure that you document this in your health diary. The more pertinent information that you can record in an organized fashion in your diary (without obviously overdoing it), the easier it will be for you to find and capitalize on the key components that have allowed you some success. For example, if you have type 1 diabetes or type 2 diabetes requiring insulin, you may discover from your records that, on mornings when you exercise after taking your monitoring your progress and responding to change insulin, your glucose after breakfast is low. With this information you and your doctor can make the decision to decrease your rapid-acting insulin morning dose, change your exercising time, or change your meals.

If you have type 2 diabetes, you may find that your BMI has been decreasing, but you still have not achieved good glucose control. In this case you and your physician or dietitian may decide to analyze and make changes to the types of foods that you have been eating that may contribute to the elevated glucose levels. Or perhaps your physician will add glucose-lowering medication to your plan.

If you encounter a change in your health that would be considered negative, such as difficulty losing weight or symptoms of hypoglycemia or little or no change in weight, lipids, glucose levels, or blood pressure, document these results in your diary as well. In some cases it may be even more important to document the negative changes in comparison to the positive changes because some of these can pose a serious threat to your health.

If you find that you are not making progress in your action plan, it will be easier for you and your health care team to find solutions to the problems if your plan is well documented. For instance, you may find yourself gaining weight instead of losing weight while adhering to your action plan. This can be frustrating and may even cause you to quit your plan. Fortunately in most such cases, the problem and its solution lie within the realm of energy balance. It may be a simple miscalculation of the total number of calories you consume and the amount of exercise you need to burn those calories and create an energy deficit to stimulate weight loss. This is an easy problem to fix if you have detailed documentation of the intensity, duration, and type of exercise you are doing, along with the food log to allow you and your dietitian to redo the calculations to make your plan work for you. Sometimes the problem may be more difficult than this, but finding the solution will still be far easier if you have monitored and documented the details of what you have been doing in your action plan for diabetes.

You should note that you may not see a change in your weight for a couple weeks. Give your body some time to adjust the new activity and caloric intake. If you continue to have a problem despite recalculating your energy balance, visit your health care team for more specific guidance.

Monitoring Progress and Responding to Change