Talk about weight, and a discussion of diabetes isn’t far behind. Countless articles and healthcare workers urge readers to lose weight as a means of preventing chronic illness (including diabetes), but few identify why you should do so after a diagnosis, and why exactly weight loss plays an important role in successfully and happily managing diabetes.

How Weight and Diabetes Are Related

Weight alone isn’t enough to cause diabetes; plenty of people who are overweight never go onto developing Type 2 diabetes.More important than weight is the food and lifestyle habits that lead up to being overweight or obese.

Weight is symptomatic of issues with your body that traces back to your diet and physical activity. When your body is inundated with sugars and fats, it may come to a point in which it can no longer process or utilize everything it is taking in, which eventually leads to the breakdown of your body’s metabolic system. This breakdown is the source of decreased insulin sensitivity and the advent of pre-diabetes or diabetes itself.

Weight is often a result of an unhealthy diet and the failure to get enough movement but does not necessarily accompany it. You can be within “normal” bounds of your BMI and develop diabetes just as easily as you can be overweight and develop the condition. The proof is in what you put into and do with your body, not how your body looks.

Is Weight Loss Necessary in Diabetes?

Given that so many people are not obese but do have diabetes, is weight loss truly the answer to an improved condition? The answer is both “yes” and “no.” In somewhat recent diagnoses, weight loss has been shown to improve glucose control. In more advanced cases, however, weight loss was not directly tied to the improvement of blood sugar at all. Instead, focus on lowering blood sugar fell to food and exercise, regardless of weight gain or loss.

Losing weight is not necessarily a problematic goal. If weight loss is your goal, eating a healthy diet and upping your exercise is fine. If, however, you do not successfully lose numbers from your scale or inches from your waist, it should not be counted as a loss; the fuel and activity you give your body is far more important.