To know what's going wrong with something, you have to know how it works normally first. When you eat food your body breaks it down into sugar, which floats around in your blood. However, your blood doesn't need the sugar as much as your cells do. Including cells in your heart, brain, liver and everything else in your body. They use it to do their job, and without it they starve and die. Just like you would without food.
Somehow the sugar has to get from the blood into cells where it can be used, it can't do this by itself. The how happens to be insulin. Think of insulin as a friendly tour guide who is hanging out in your blood and directing sugar into cells. Insulin takes sugar directly by the hand and leads him right into cells. He will do this if you just ate and have tons of sugar running around, or if your starving and have hardly any. This is good to know when medicating yourself. Inject insulin when you haven't eaten and you run the risk of bottoming your glucose, which could end with you in the hospital.
Sometimes due to obesity or other factors cells become resistant to insulin. They wont let insulin through the door with its glucose. This requires more insulin in order to get glucose into the cell. This is the beginning of what doctors call metabolic syndrome.
Insulin is made in the pancreas by Beta Cells. It's their only job and their quite good at it unless one of two things happen. The first is pictured above, cells become resistant to insulin requiring the beta cells to work overtime to make more. They get worked so much that eventually they give up and quit. With no insulin the amount of sugar in the blood skyrockets, if left alone over time it can damage everything including kidneys, eyes, heart and brain.
Usually between 80-100, glucose will eventually reach 400-600. The person becomes hot but dry, thirsty, really confused and will eventually become unconscious. This is known as a hyperglycemic attack and can lead to coma and death.
A person will undergo one of these episodes and then wake in a hospital ER with a new diagnosis of Type-2 Diabetes. The difference in Type-1 is this. Instead of the beta cells becoming tired due to insulin resistance, the body confuses them for a foreign invader and actually destroys them. This is sometimes due to a virus but we're not entirely sure why. Either way the person is left with a body that cannot make its own insulin.
If your not prescribed medication already at this point, then you will be. Your body has to get its insulin somehow. It usually involves you injecting yourself regularly or a pump monitoring your sugar for you. This route doesn't have to be taken though. Following a specific diet which cuts out most of your carbs has brought thousands of type-2 diabetics back into a drug free lifestyle. Carbohydrates like starches and sugars affect your glucose the most, something you'll find out shortly if you've just been diagnosed.
The American Diabetes Association recently recognized low-carb as a treatment for this disease. It can be hard to make the choice to not live like every other American with Frosting Crusted Sugar Sprinkles for breakfast and something-in-a-bucket for dinner, but you have to. Patients who use insulin long term consistently suffer terrible complications down the road. People complain about not being about to eat "normally". We have never eaten like this in our history, it's burning out our pancreas.
Make the decision and stick with it, you'll look back 60 days later and wonder how you lived the other way.
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