Heal with food

If you remember the previous article – Part 1 of PCOS and diabetes care through nutrition, you may remember that what both diseases had in common was excess fat. Figure out the way to deal with the excess fat, and you’ve figured out a way to deal with both diseases and, in many cases, eliminate impending diabetes entirely. For those who don’t have these health conditions, you’d be nipping these diseases in the bud, should you decide to surface. In order to stave off disease and lose fat, say no to:

Junk Food
Not just the junk food that comes out of food carts or is the product of home delivery offers, but things that seem to lurk innocuously on supermarket shelves like sugar-loaded drinks, chips or processed snacks.

Sweets and Fried Foods
A definite no-no on a diabetic’s diet. Try to make these foods an extremely occasional feature – none at all if you are on an active weight loss programme.

Binge Eating
This may be a surprise but even eating too much of healthy food at one time may not be good for your body, and the excess consumption may be stored as fat. This is because your body can only successfully digest a certain amount of food at one time, and doesn’t know what to do with the rest of it, so stores it as fat. Efficient though this function may have been in times where food was hard to come by, this ability of the body to send excess food to the fat reserves department may be one of the reasons you are struggling to lose weight.

Excess Alcohol
This one’s a no-brainer, a workout drainer and a weight gainer. Too much alcohol pretty much cancels out any effort that you’ve been making to get healthy: the worst culprits are sugary cocktails that are really not worth the high, trust me. A glass of white or red wine once or twice a week may be acceptable but both diabetics and PCOS patients would need to check this with their doctor.

say YES to… Eating every two hours
This works brilliantly for both fat reduction and the management of diabetes, like running, walking or swimming. Eating every two hours makes the body digest more frequently, keeping it in the burning mode. It also works brilliantly for keeping blood sugar levels stable.

Cardio
Create a calorie deficiency gap and propel your body into a fat-burning mode by doing cardio workouts paired with light weight training.

Water
Hunger and thirst centres in the brain are set very close together. There are many times the dehydrated body may send the signal that it wants to eat when, in fact, it’s thirsty. Drink at least 8-10 glasses of water a day (that is, 2-2.5 litres).

Sleep
Lastly, you need to snooze to lose weight. Sleep deprivation has been linked to weight gain and disease and you will be surprised at how vital this element is in ensuring the elimination of both.