Your body is amazing

 

Your body is amazing.

 

• Every day your heart beats about 100,000 times to pump blood through your 60,000 miles of blood vessels.
• When you laugh, you increase your blood flow by 20%.
• Your kidneys are the hardest working organs in your body. They use a quarter of the blood from every heartbeat.
• Your brain has over 60 trillion nerve connections and generates at least 6,000 thoughts each day. It's capable of more than 1,000 processes per second.
• If the human eye was a digital camera it would have 576 megapixels, more than the highest resolution camera you can buy, a 400-megapixel camera costing £43,000.
• You have around 250,000 sweat glands in your feet. No wonder feet can smell!

 

Yet you can easily take your incredible body for granted. 

 

The shocking statistic though is that 500 people die early from avoidable diabetes complications every week in the UK.

 

You are the person who probably has the greatest control over whether you become part of that statistic or not. Looking after your body makes a real difference to preventing the complications of type 2 diabetes, which include heart disease, kidney failure, dementia, eye disease (retinopathy) and nerve damage (neuropathy) affecting your feet.

 

You may be wondering three things:

1. Why bother trying to reduce my diabetes complications risk? It helps to think about your wider life goals like achieving long term happiness, developing deep relationships, living your full potential or fulfilling a sense of purpose. Looking after your body will help you enjoy these things. It's much more challenging to fulfil life goals if you lose health due to complications.
2. Does trying to reduce complications risk really make any difference? The short answer is yes. Research shows that keeping on top of blood pressure, blood glucose (HbA1c) and cholesterol can reduce your risk of early death, heart attack, stroke or other complications by about half. Together with eating more healthily and getting more active, this can add years to your lifespan. 
3. If it really does make that much difference, what action can I take?

• • Know your numbers. Ask your GP for your HbA1c, blood pressure, cholesterol and kidney function.
  • Stop smoking if you smoke. It really does make that much difference and there's help for this.
  • Overweight? Consider becoming more active and changing your diet. Visit Lose weight | Know Diabetes for more information and tips.

Denis was diagnosed with type 2 diabetes while being treated for heart and kidney failure but decided to make some positive changes to improve his quality of life.

"Looking after my health today gives me a better hope for tomorrow."

Confused about blood glucose measurements like HbA1c? This video helps to explain what the numbers mean.

Want to understand more about cholesterol? This short video explains the different types of cholesterol and actions you can take to reduce the bad types of cholesterol in your body.