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How to support a friend with diabetes

“One of my best friends is a Type 1 diabetic and she often skips taking her insulin to keep her weight down… I know this is going to cause her long-term damage, but I don’t know how to convince her to look after herself better. Any advice?” Sune Terblanche.

Dear Sune,

One of my favourite quotes is by Seneca: “One of the most beautiful qualities of true friendship is to understand and to be understood.”  How lucky your friend is to have you. Teenagers are inclined to focus on one thing and not see the bigger picture. Your friend is most probably also feeling the peer pressure of other girls to be thin.

Teenagers are sometimes just tired of medicine as well. They get frustrated and even feel embarrassed by having diabetes and having to test and take shots and make excuses for not eating cake and drinking cooldrinks. At some stage they just decide to stop using insulin. Stopping insulin makes it easy to lose weight which seems like the ultimate solution.

Without insulin, the body cannot break down sugars from food to use as energy. So it breaks down fat already stored and flushes out the excess sugar through the urine. This leads to weight loss, but it also causes nerve damage, damaged eyesight, kidney damage and osteoporosis, amongst other things.

Being a good friend isn’t always easy, but taking the time to look after a lasting friendship is worth every ounce of effort. The big thing is to be honest. To be a good friend and get her trust, you have to be honest about your feelings and her actions. If you’re honest about how you feel, that will open up direct lines of communication with her and help her talk to you about skipping insulin and how you can help her stop doing this.

You owe it to your friend to start a conversation about it. Being honest is different from being so blunt that you’re hurting your friend. Try not to nag or police her, but use opportunities to point out to her what she is doing to herself. Reinforce the fact that you care about her and ask her how you can help. Remind her that she is brave enough to face the challenge that diabetes has brought into her life. Remind her that everyone is an individual.

– Jeannie Berg, Diabetes Educator

 

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Sweet Life is a registered NPO/PBO (220-984) with a single goal: to improve diabetes in South Africa. We are funded by sponsorships and donations from aligned companies and organisations who believe in our work. We only share information that we believe benefits our community. While some of this information is linked to specific brands, it is not an official endorsement of that brand. We believe in empowering people with diabetes to make the best decisions they can, to live a healthy, happy life with diabetes.