Tracking Diabetes Issues to Stay on Track

Diabetes isn’t a get it and forget it disease. You have to pay attention to the disease and what’s going on in your body because of it. That’s the only way that you can control the condition rather than allowing it to control you.

Being informed of what’s going on with diabetes can help not only you, but your doctor as well to make decisions that benefit your health. Sometimes a day can pass before you’ll need to make any changes to your diabetes. Other times, you have to make decisions about changes on an hourly basis depending on what’s being affected.

It’s not easy to make decisions when you don’t have the information that you need. That’s why you have to have a way to track everything. With all the applications and diabetes journals you can find online, there are a lot of easy-to-use options available to help keep your diabetes on track for better health.

Plus, it helps to have everything you need in place so that keeping up with everything doesn’t feel overwhelming. There are specific things about diabetes that it’s important for you to keep track of even if you don’t record everything.

You’ll want to make sure that you track your blood glucose numbers after you check them. These can fluctuate from day to day and sometimes in as little time as 15 minutes after eating something.

Knowing your blood glucose numbers allows you and your care team to see how well your diabetes is being controlled or what the issues are that are affecting it. You should check your numbers before you eat and after you eat.

Check again right before you head off to bed. Check your levels before you exercise, after taking any new medications, and whenever you feel sick or stressed. After you check them, make a note in your journal where you’re tracking them what’s going on at the time - such as whether it’s a routine check or you’re doing it because you’re not feeling well.

By checking your glucose and tracking it, you’ll be able to see how well your numbers are doing. You’ll also want to track the food that you eat. When you know what you’ve had to eat, you’ll be able to tell how it affected your glucose numbers.

The foods that you eat should be broken down according to meal and by snacks. So you should have a way to log your breakfast, lunch, and dinner meals. It can be helpful to have a journal that allows you enough to space to write out the recipes for the meals, but some of the journals don’t have this.

However, you can find some diabetic journals that have spaces on separate pages that allow you to fill in the recipe ingredients. If you’re able to do that, make sure that you break the recipe down by how many carbohydrates as well as how many calories it contained.

There are some diabetic cookbook journals that have recipes included but not the breakdown. If possible, write the information in the margin. One of the things that affects diabetes control is excess weight.

So if you’re on a low carb diet to try and shed some pounds, make sure that you have a way to log the carbs that you’ve eaten throughout the day. You can do this in a carb log book or by using an online or cell phone application.

Many of these carb logs have areas for days, weeks and months so that you can track both short term as well as long term food goals. Keeping a diet log with your carb numbers is good way to track which foods are helping you and which ones are causing problems with your diabetes.

Not only that, but when you’re busy and don’t have time to count carbs, having a record of meals that do list them is a good way to pull together a low carb meal fast. Keeping up with the amount of water that you drink is also essential.

Some diabetic journals and apps have boxes that can be checked indicating water consumption. You can also find ones that will let you keep up with the amount of sleep that you’ve had.

Besides making sure that you keep track of your blood glucose numbers and meals, you’ll want to have a way to track the exercise that you do. The reason for tracking the exercise is because with diabetes, it can sometimes be more difficult to lose weight.

Being resistant to insulin makes it harder, and when you’re able to see progress on paper or in an app, it will help you stay motivated when you don’t feel like anything you’re doing is making a difference.

Tracking your weight is important with diabetes - not just because of wanting to lose any extra weight you might be carrying. Gaining weight suddenly or losing it suddenly can both be an indicator that something could be going on with your diabetes.

When we don’t track things, we don’t always realize that there’s an issue. You can also track the medications that you take, how often you take them, and the amounts that you take them in.

This way, you have a handy record to take with you to all of your appointments. This is especially helpful if you’re seeing a new doctor. Make sure you track your doctor’s appointments and any pertinent lab results that resulted from those visits - such as what your A1c level was, what your cholesterol count is, what your blood pressure was and so on.

This information will help give you an overview of how your diabetes is affecting your overall health. You can track appointments with your eye doctor, your podiatrist and your endocrinologist along with the different information you gained from each visit.

This way, you’ll have a way for each doctor to know what the other one is doing so that they can all work in sync. You can also use tracking tools to keep up with the goals that you have concerning your diabetes. Most of these tools have spaces to write down thoughts, motivations, and tidbits of support that help you to stay focused.