How Stephen Furst Lives with Diabetes Part 2/2

Dara Schuster: Well, unfortunately, Steven presents a pretty typical case for someone with Type II Diabetes. Often the disease is diagnosed many years prior to the patient taking it seriously. In many cases, it takes a catastrophic or serious event before people start thinking about managing this disease aggressively. And Steven’s case, he developed an infection in his foot. Other complications can include heart disease, loss of vision, kidney failure or other neurological problems such as numbness, tingling and pain in your extremities.

Thank goodness in his case, he woke up and began addressing this medical condition early enough to prevent some of these other problems. As much as 50% of our adult population are overweight or obese. And up to 25%, depending on your ethnicity, have Type II Diabetes. And so, we need to develop ways to manage this disease. Medications alone can’t do it. And often times, lifestyle is not employed intensively enough or consistently enough to make a difference. Yet we know that lifestyle changes in the form of regular exercise, balanced diet and weight reduction can play such a positive role in the management of the disease process. And in fact, there’d been studies to show that it can actually prevent diabetes that is exercise, dieting and weight reduction.

And so, there are a lot of things we need to do about our diabetes. Unfortunately, like Steven, many people make excuses. He had the excuse of obesity for his work. But many of us have excuses for not exercising regularly. Having to eat out more than maybe we shouldn’t or not losing that weight that we know we need to. The thing that’s probably the most difficult with this is the fact that consistency is so important. And Steven kind of alluded to that when he says that’s what he does now. He doesn’t say he did it. He lost his weight and he’s all better. He said, “I’d do this now. I exercise regularly. I watch my diet.” And so, probably, the more difficult thing is consistency.

Slow and steady wins the race. And that’s what is going to take to help our patients and the population. We are going to have friends and family that have Type II Diabetes. So, in the words of Steven, put the hamburger down, because in the long run it’s going to be lifestyle measures that help us stay healthy.


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