I wouldn't worry too much, pretty much anyone over 50 can be classed as at risk. A few dietary changes should be enough to nip it in the bud and it only takes a few days to get used to tea without sugar
Type 1 diabetes came to me at age 50, I am now 76 and inject insulin twice a day to keep me alive. Type 2 diabetes is very common and late onset and probably due to body not producing as much insulin along with a poor diet full of sugar and alcohol so the body can't cope with high blood glucose, so you get raised blood glucose readings. My advice is treat it seriously and cut out most sugar from the diet, I don't have sugar in mu tea or coffee, you will get used to it, and reduce alcohol consumption, beer has high sugar levels. If you Google type 2 diabetes, there is a lot of helpful information about keeping it under control and you will soon learn about a better diet and how more exercise is helpful too. At some stage, having your own blood glucose meter like the Accuchek Mobile kit for occasional tests would show you what is going on now , rather than an annual GP checkup.
Had one last week, booked the day before - needed to have a check up before the doc gave me more Amitriptyline.
Sugar is definitely the worst evil in a diet, and it's not an insurmountable task to cut the majority of it out of one's diet. Your taste buds will adapt over time, to an extent if you taste anything very sweet (for example a sticky bun covered in icing) you'll be grossed out. Yes it's hard to start with, but so is almost everything that's worth doing.
Cut down on white carbs helps ...pasta .Baked potatoes hold in a lot of carbs ..boiled spuds gets rid of some of the carbs . Sent from my SM-A135F using Tapatalk
Well you can, I did, Don't have sugar in tea or coffee and haven't for years and couldn't drink them with it in. I'm still over weigh though!
By 'white carbs' (I've never heard that phrase before) I guess you mean 'simple carbs', those which are easily broken down into sugars. Yes, bread, potatoes, rice, pasta. All bad.
Yeah, I understand. But take it from me, one who struggles with food, and has all his life and still does (I was 21st at age 21 and now almost thirty years later I am about 13 1/2 st but that's still overweight but another battle to come..) Food to me is like alcohol is to a recovered alcoholic. They're still an alcoholic but in remission, and I'm still a recovered, er, emotional eater?, I guess... and it doesn't take much slippage for me to fall off the wagon. The problem with high carb foods, is that they're the ones that raise temporarily raise the emotional state and that's why we tend to crave those types of food. Cutting out carbs completely (Keto diet) helped me with that. It really is like going tee-total in some respects. And like alcoholism, it also gets easier the more you go on, then you start to see and feel the health benefits. More energy, better focus, clearer thinking, less water retention, and it can also help with diabetes, reversing it in some cases. Plus it's always fun when your doctor does your bloods, they are in shock when they compare the results to last time BTW - sorry for oversharing personal stuff... It's hard for me to talk about myself like this on a public forum but in case it will help someone...
Thats a similar journey that Tom Watson went through, I found his book interesting as it talked about many aspects of life which we could change. He has some interesting things to say about diet, Big Sugar and sleep.