Losing weight with diet and exercise doesn’t always help the heart in people with type 2 diabetes—sometimes it helps a lot, sometimes it doesn’t help at all, and sometimes it might even make things...

For some people with type 2 diabetes who are overweight, losing weight through diet and exercise can lower their chance of having a heart attack or stroke—but for others, it might actually increase that risk.

For people with type 2 diabetes, factors like age, weight, blood sugar levels, and past heart problems can tell us whether losing weight through diet and exercise will help or hurt their heart health.

Making lasting changes to how you eat and move can help stop prediabetes from turning into full-blown diabetes—but in real life, most people struggle to stick with these changes, so they don’t work as well as they do in fancy research studies.

In obese adults with type 2 diabetes, losing weight through diet and exercise improves blood sugar control, reduces body fat, and increases aerobic fitness, and these improvements continue for at least one year after the program ends.

For people with type 2 diabetes, how closely they follow a reduced-calorie diet matters more for losing weight and reducing body fat than whether their diet is higher in fats or carbohydrates.