With diabetes, trying—even if you never see skinny—matters. Exercising and watching what you eat (as well as taking medication, if necessary) can help lower your blood sugar and help prevent serious complications, even if you don't lose a lot of weight.
If you do lose weight, it will likely:
- Lower your blood sugar, which may allow you to delay or cut back on medication.
- Cut insulin resistance.
- Curb blood pressure and cholesterol, which can reduce your risk of heart attack, kidney failure and other serious complications.
And you don't need to lose that much weight to benefit.
"People used to think it was necessary to lose tons of weight," says Sharon Movsas, RD, a diabetes nutrition specialist at the Clinical Diabetes Center at Montefiore Medical Center in New York City.
Losing just 5% to 7% of your weight is associated with lower blood pressure, lower cholesterol, lower blood sugar, and reduced insulin resistance. "It's sort of a relief for people that modest weight loss can help," says Movsas.
Sometimes a dramatic weight loss can even reverse type 2 diabetes, but that's more likely to occur in younger, obese patients who shed pounds soon after diagnosis (and haven't had the disease for years without knowing it).
Even if you still have diabetes after you shed weight, you have reduced your risk of complications.
"Only about 10 percent of patients with diabetes in my clinic have been successful at losing weight," says Larry Deeb, MD, a past president of medicine and science for the American Diabetes Association. "But we continually, patiently work with people who need to lose weight because it has its own benefits for people with type 2 diabetes, independent of exercise."
