Welcome to the Diabetes Digital Podcast. I'm Wendy.

And I'm Jess and we're best friends, registered dieticians, and diabetes educators.

Through our telehealth platform, diabetes digital.co, we offer accessible and personalized virtual nutrition counseling for people with diabetes and pre-diabetes.

Visit diabetes digital.co, that's CO, to book your first appointment. We accept insurance and offer affordable self-pay options.

Now let's get into today's episode.

A quick Google search asking, do you need to lose weight to improve type 2 diabetes will have

you a hundred percent convinced that you should focus on weight loss to manage diabetes.

In this episode we're going to unpack if weight loss is or is not the goal for diabetes management.

And as always our disclaimer this podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be

considered a substitute for medical advice.

So a scenario that I see all of the time in clinical settings is a patient comes in, they want

to lose weight, so they go on a calorie restricted diet and what that means

is they're cutting out foods they're not eating as much as what they used to eat as

much as what their body needs to feel satisfied, they feel like they're going hungry.

And for people with diabetes,

something that happens often is they cut out carbohydrates

because they think that that's going to help

with their blood sugar management.

This particular patient might also start exercising and initially for many people they might see

a drop in weight and they take that as a sign that this is working.

You have doctors, even some dietitians, they're cheering them on, they're telling them to keep

going, and there's a false narrative that if you just keep doing what

...