Balancing out blood sugar levels can be tricky until your aging family member understands more about how diabetes impacts her body. There’s a big learning curve there, and your senior may feel all alone. But if she has help from you, her doctors, and in-home care providers, your elderly family member can get a handle on all of this fairly quickly.
Learn How Diabetes Works
It’s easy to misunderstand diabetes, especially if this is a new diagnosis for your elderly family member. That’s why it is so important to learn as much as you both can about how diabetes works and what is likely to help and what doesn’t help. Everyone’s chemistry is slightly different and your aging family member may or may not need medication to help her.
Get to Know What Might Help
Again, sometimes medication helps, but most of the time doctors recommend that someone who has just been diagnosed with diabetes starts an exercise program and adjusts their diet. If that is the case for your elderly family member, you’re going to need to help her pay close attention to how much exercise helps, what happens when she drinks plenty of water, and how sleep affects her numbers. All of this is important information.
Lean on Fruits and Vegetables
Processed food is usually not as good an idea for someone with diabetes as whole foods, like fruits and vegetables, are. Keeping up with cooking for a diabetic diet is often a challenge, however. In-home care professionals can help a lot with all of that, ensuring that your elderly family member is able to focus on other areas of keeping her diabetes under better control.
Help Your Senior to Adopt Healthier Routines
Something else that can help is to have positive routines around healthy habits. That might mean that your senior starts every day with a walk or a yoga session instead of a bowl of sugary cereal. Adopting these new routines is not always easy, however. Having help from in-home care providers can give your senior’s day a better structure, which helps her to build new routines that keep her healthier.
Keep Track of What Works
It helps a lot if your elderly family member keeps a journal along with her blood sugar numbers to keep track of what is helping her numbers. This gives her information that she needs both in the short term and the long term. It’s invaluable when she is still learning a lot about what causes her numbers to go up, down, and remain stable. The more information that she has about how her body is affected by diabetes, the better she’ll get at managing her condition.
Enlist the Help of In-Home Care
Your elderly family member does not have to go through all of this alone. In-home care professionals can help you and her to have the tools and the assistance necessary so that your senior feels her best and keeps her blood sugar numbers where she wants them to be for as long as possible.
If you or an aging loved one are considering in-home care in McKinney, TX, please contact the caring staff at Clear Path Home Care today. Call 817-928-5788
Clear Path Home Care provides compassionate, high-quality home care in Denton County, Montague County, Cooke County, Grayson County, Fannin County, Lamar County, Wise County, Collin County, Hunt County, Delta County, and Hopkins County in Texas.
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