Healthy living to avoid gaining weight from meds

It's a cruel irony that a disease whose primary cause is weight gain uses medication that has the side-effect of gaining weight. Diabetes is a hard disease to manage, but with some tips for a healthy lifestyle, you'll be closer to having it controlled.

• It's a frustrating fact of life that many diabetes medications can boost the numbers on your bathroom scale.
• Drugs that put more insulin into your bloodstream or make your body more insulin-sensitive help your cells absorb more glucose, or blood sugar, from your bloodstream.
• But if that sugar isn't burned for energy, it gets stored as fat. You can talk to your doctor if you're gaining weight despite a cutback in calorie consumption.

It's not just diabetes pills that can affect your weight. Insulin injections can also cause weight gain. Your doctor probably cannot reduce your dose but she can help you come up with a diet and exercise plan to burn off the extra blood sugar and calories.

• Don't ever let weight gain keep you from taking good care of your blood sugar. Stay on your medicines and battle the kilograms (or pounds) with healthy, portion-controlled eating and regular exercise.
• Consider joining a weight-loss program, or work with a certified diabetes educator so you have accountability and structure — key ingredients for weight-loss success.

If living healthy helps you achieve more stable blood sugar, it's certainly possible that you won't need to continue taking diabetes medicine. You can start by keeping your portion sizes accurate using the list below as a guide.

Fruit

• 1 medium piece of fruit (the size of a tennis ball)
• 180 mL (3/4 c) fruit juice
• 75 g (1/3 c) chopped, cooked, or canned fruit or berries (the size of a large ice cream scoop)

Vegetables

• 180 mL (3/4 c) vegetable juice
• 75 g (1/3 c) non-leafy vegetables, cooked, chopped, or canned (the size of a large ice cream scoop)
• 150 g (2/3 c) raw leafy vegetables (the size of a baseball)

Meat, Poultry, Fish, and Beans

• 84 g (3 oz) of cooked lean meat, poultry, or fish (the size of a deck of cards)
• 75 g  (1/3 c) of cooked dry or canned beans (the size of a large ice cream scoop)

Grains

• 95 g (1/3 c) cereal, rice, bulgur, barley (the size of a large ice cream scoop)
• 70 g (1/3 c) pasta (2 servings equals the size of one baseball)
• 1 slice of bread