Type 2 Diabetes is a chronic disease whereby your body has higher than normal levels of sugar in your blood. When a healthy person consumes foods with sugar in it, blood sugar levels will spike. The pancreas detects the spike and releases insulin. The insulin will take the sugar from the blood and bring it into cells to be burned as fuel or stored as fat. Once the sugar is brought into the cells, blood sugar levels are normalized. Now, let’s look at a blood sugar analogy for a diabetic person. In this analogy, the house represents your cells, the wood is the blood sugar, and the man at the door is the insulin.
A man (insulin) knocks at the door of the house (cell) and says, “Hey, take this wood (sugar) in.” At first, it’s not a problem to bring the wood into the house (sugar in your cells). But as more sugar is entering the blood stream, this guy is constantly knocking on the door: knock, knock, knock, “take this wood in.” Knock, knock, knock, “take this wood in.” Knock, knock, knock, “take this wood in.” Pretty soon, you have all of this wood (sugar) in your house (cells) and nowhere else to put any more. So, your body just stops listening to that guy (insulin) and the wood starts to stack up outside the door (sugar stays in your blood stream).
But in the meantime, your pancreas’ reaction is to send more guys (insulin) to knock on the door, because it knows that it needs to do something about all of the wood (sugar) that’s stacking up outside of the house (still in your blood stream).Now, there’s a battle happening inside of your body. Your cells are ignoring the knockers (insulin resistance), meanwhile, your pancreas knows that all of the sugar in the blood (wood outside the door) is a bad thing, so it works harder and harder at sending more door knockers.
In a person with type 2 diabetes, no matter how hard the pancreas works, it can’t produce enough insulin to normalize the blood sugar levels. Eventually, the pancreas will become permanently damaged. And, the increased blood sugar levels will cause increased rates of heart disease, nerve damage, kidney failure, strokes, loss of vision, circulation issues, and other effects of diabetes.
