Transcription
So I had a patient recently, and you might be in exactly the same situation as them. She had a blood test for feeling tired all the time, and her results showed that she was a new diabetic. She said to me, "But doc, I don't eat sweets, I don't eat desserts. How can I be diabetic?" Seriously, do you believe she was telling the truth?
My name is Khalid. I'm a family doctor from London. In this video, I want to share with you seven signs that your body gives you to tell you your sugar levels are too high. The truth is, you can be diabetic without eating too many sugary foods. At the end, I'll explain to you the science behind this.
All right, this better be good. Very first sign to look out for is you've lost weight. Unexplained weight loss or loss of muscle bulk. And you might be surprised with this because most people, when they think about type 2 diabetes, they think about it as a condition to do with being overweight or obese. So why would you suddenly start to lose weight? Well, it's all something to do with insulin, and that plays an important role. It's a vital hormone that you can't survive without. It regulates your blood sugar levels, AKA your glucose levels. It's released by the pancreas, and it pushes sugar into your cells. And as our blood sugar levels rise, the pancreas pumps out more and more of insulin to try and get that sugar levels into your cells. Over time, the cells stop responding to all of that insulin, and they become insulin resistant. And because the sugar is high in your blood but not actually inside your cells, you can't use it for energy. Your body starts to break down fat and muscle to use for energy. This is why you may get unexplained weight loss.
So that brings us nicely on to point number two, and that is that you're peeing more frequently. [Music] This happens when you're trying to get rid of that extra sugar from your blood. So normally, what happens is your kidney filters blood to make urine. They reabsorb all of the sugar to return it into your bloodstream. In diabetics, the levels of sugar in the blood are abnormally high. So lots of sugar ends up actually sitting in the urine. This draws water out of your body and into your urine, so you're peeing more frequently.
The third one, as you may have guessed it, if you're peeing more, you're gonna be more thirsty. I'm thirsty. Is anybody else thirsty? And you may have a dry mouth. So I've got a dry mouth at the moment because I've been talking a lot. Let me get a drink. So your brain then goes, "Okay, so I've got this really good idea. If we're losing more fluids, let's get some fluids on board." And tells you to drink more to balance things out. Thanks, brain. Health. So if you are peeing more and you're more thirsty, then you definitely need to get your blood sugar levels checked to make sure you're not diabetic.
Number four is blurry vision or visual problems. When our blood sugar levels are too high, this can impact the lens in our eyes, and which can cause it to swell up. This alteration in the lens can lead to blurry vision. But people who have had high blood sugar levels for many, many years can also get something called diabetic retinopathy. These are changes in the back of the eye in an area called the retina. And although this can take many, many years to develop, in the later stages, you could get blurred vision, you can get floaters, which are shapes that go across your vision. Not the brown stuff that you've left in the toilet. Don't look at me. I'm just, just clarifying, making sure we're on the same page. Okay, okay. Where was I? Um, you can also get pains in your eye, redness in the eye, difficulty seeing in the dark, and also at the very, very late stages, you can get sudden visual loss. This is why diabetics have yearly checks for things like that vision, their kidneys, their legs. And if they miss those checks, then things could have been picked up a lot earlier. Get missed. I always talk to my diabetic patients and tell them it's really important to go to those checkups.
Are you tired? Oh, I'm exhausted. Number five is feeling very tired or fatigued. I mentioned earlier that with type 2 diabetes, it's about having high levels of sugar, but also more importantly, something called insulin resistance in the body. You aren't able to use the sugar in the blood to push it into the cells efficiently. So the sugar levels build up in the blood, but not in the cells. And importantly, you need sugar in the cells for energy. So that sugar in the cells means less energy, and you get tired and fatigued easily.
So bullet wounds don't just magically heal overnight. So number six is noticing sores or injuries take longer to heal. And this could be down to a few different things. First of all, high sugar levels can impact the blood vessels in our body. This could lead to blood flow issues and circulation issues. Wounds need good blood flow, oxygen, nutrients to heal quickly. So if you have poor circulation, it's going to take longer to heal. Secondly, you can also get something called neuropathy, which means high sugar levels are damaging the nerves. So this could lead to pins and needles, tingling, and loss of sensation. This is bad because pain, believe it or not, is a good thing. If you have a stone in your shoe, what do you do? That. That's almost sounding like a rap. I did not expect that to rhyme. Um, so you take your shoe off and you check where the stone is. You take it out and chuck it away. With diabetics, if they've got a loss of sensation, they may not notice that stone. So it may cause blisters, scrapes, wounds to get worse, and you're more likely that those areas are also going to get infected. Rap battle is going to stop now. As a caveat to that, diabetics are also more prone to infections in other parts of the body too.
That brings us nicely on to point number seven, which is our final one, and that is getting itching around the groin, armpits, genitals, and breasts. When you have high sugar levels, you're more prone to fungal infections like thrush. They often grow in moist, damp areas. They are also more common in diabetics because high sugar levels create an overgrowth of them. In addition to this, high sugar levels over time could also weaken our immune system. This means that diabetic patients who are more prone to infections are less likely to be able to fight them off due to a compromising their immune system, and also the poor circulation we talked about.
And so many people can have type 2 diabetes for years without realizing it because early symptoms can be quite vague. Some additional symptoms to look out for for men would be a decrease in your sex drive, erectile dysfunction, that's often related to circulation problems or nerve damage, and also reduced muscle strength. For women, it's the symptoms we talked about, but also if they can get vaginal dryness, recurrent urinary tract infections and thrush, obviously, and also dry, itchy skin. And so it's super important to see your healthcare professional if you have any of these symptoms to fully test yourself for diabetes. Early signs and symptoms can be very vague. And like Brenda, you don't have to have a sweet tooth or love for desserts to have diabetes. Brenda could have been type 1 diabetic, which is a condition where you're, it's not related to your sugar intake. You basically have an autoimmune response, and the body attacks cells in your pancreas that create insulin. But in her case, actually, she was a type 2 diabetic, and the key part for her was insulin resistance. And this can happen due to a number of different reasons, including genetics, excess body fat, especially around the tummy part, and the sedentary lifestyle. Also, our diets are super important. Even if we don't have lots of sugary foods in our diet, if we eat a diet that's full of certain carbohydrates like chips, pasta, bread, pizza, then you will break all of this down into glucose, which is sugar in your blood. And so your blood sugar levels will rise.
Drop a comment if you've had any of these symptoms. And next week's video is about this miracle cure for obesity which has been doing the rounds on social media, Ozempic. It's a medication for diabetes. Is it too good to be true? Hit the like, subscribe, and bell to be the first to see that video. Of course, I can. Okay, but thank you for watching. I hope you have a lovely day, and as always, peace out. I need some more water, so better get checked for diabetes.