Making a plan
If you have followed the step by step approach you would have acquired additional knowledge and skills that will enable you to make those behavioural changes and the chance to look at your own risks. You have discovered insight into how to control food intake, make healthier food choices, adopt a healthier eating pattern using portion control and safely increase physical exercise. This should help to lower your risks factors onto target levels and will help reduce your likelihood of developing further problems.
What happens next
Think about the options you have for making changes to your lifestyle to improve your health profile. This should lead you to your doctor, practice nurse and dietician to discuss what risk factors you should tackle.
For example, if you want to stop smoking, you might decide to find out about ‘Stopping Smoking’ sessions at your local doctor’s surgery. Or if you decide you wanted to reduce your blood pressure, you might decide to look initially at being more physically active or losing weight.
Now it is time to start the preparation stage by identifying the risk factors you would like to change and prioritise their importance according to your own needs. You may be wondering how to begin. The answer lies in taking small steps to gradually replace your old habits with healthier ones. This works better than trying to make many abrupt changes in a short period of time because it prevents feelings of being overcome.
This is the most influential stage of your journey and is the bedrock for any successful change in behaviour. Preparation will help you integrate the commitment to change into your daily life. Without any preparation your action plan will be undermined and has a good chance of failure.
The purpose of this stage is to learn how to develop a "small step" for the behaviour changes you have identified, which will enhance your commitment to minimising diabetic complications, as you now have the required skills and knowledge to enable you to develop the blueprint for your action plan, which will be your key to expediting healthier self management choices. You will learn how to set realistic goals to reduce your risks, and map out how you are going to attain them.
The first stage is to focus on what risk factor requires action to bring it into target. To help you the next page will focus on a summary of your risk factors.
Next Page - Focus Summary
