Relax to beat diabetes: Mastering stress

Relaxation and counteracting the stresses of daily life can make your body handle blood sugar better and help you store less abdominal fat. Lowering your body's levels of stress hormones will even make you less hungry.

Eating right and getting yourself moving every day are key to any program for managing diabetes or losing weight. The third element that may be almost as important: dealing with stress. Lowering your body's levels of stress hormones will even make you less hungry.

From deep breathing drills to exercises using your imagination, there are plenty of ways to be master of your stress. Treat yourself to a massage — it can lower your blood sugar — or try another blood sugar-lowering weapon, sleep. All of these will help you focus on a truly important aspect of your life: your health. Research is now beginning to reveal just how important stress management is when it comes to diabetes. Here are some reasons why:

1. Stress hormones raise blood sugar. When you're on edge, your body pumps out stress hormones, such as cortisol, to help you react to danger. Among other things, these hormones make your heartbeat and breathing speed up. They also send glucose stores into the blood to make energy immediately available to your muscles. The result: higher blood sugar.
2. Stress contributes to insulin resistance. That's bad enough when you have diabetes, but there's more. Stress hormones also make it more difficult for the pancreas to secrete the insulin that's needed to remove glucose from the blood. These hormones may also contribute to insulin resistance.
3. Stress leads to weight gain. A major reason to keep chronic stress in check is that cortisol is known to increase appetite. Yes, stress makes you eat more. It also encourages cells in your abdomen to conserve fat — meaning it packs on the belly weight that seriously raises your risk of a heart attack. When you're stressed, you're probably tempted to chow down on whatever fatty, high-calorie snacks are in reach. You're also less likely to take a nice, long walk when you're busy fretting over deadlines or family problems. When you practice the art of relaxation, you'll step back and see the big picture, and real priorities — like taking care of your body — will emerge. Mastering stress has other benefits. It helps ward off emotional problems linked with poor blood sugar control, particularly depression and anger. Since stress exists in both mind and body, tackle it on both fronts. Progress in one automatically creates gains in the other.

You probably think breathing comes naturally, but the way we breathed as babies isn't how we do it as stressed-out adults. Tension causes the body to tighten up, which constricts the lungs and keeps them from filling with air. That makes your breathing shallow and fast. When your body has trouble getting enough oxygen, it can lead to a faster heartbeat, higher blood pressure and an increase in stress hormones that raise blood sugar.

• Simply breathing more evenly, slowly and deeply can reduce stress and bring blood sugar down.
• The trick is to make your lungs expand as much as possible, filling them with air from the bottom up.
• Breathe with your belly and stretch your diaphragm at the base of your lungs. If you're used to shallow breathing, this may not feel natural at first, but with practice you won't have to remind your body how to breathe the way nature intended.