Diabetes can feel like a combination of several symptoms caused by high blood sugar levels and the body's inability to properly use glucose for energy. Common feelings and experiences include:

• Increased hunger and thirst: Because glucose can't enter cells effectively without enough insulin, your body feels starved for energy, making you hungrier and thirstier than usual

• Frequent urination: High blood sugar causes kidneys to work harder to filter excess glucose, leading to more urine production and frequent trips to the bathroom

• Fatigue and tiredness: Without glucose entering cells, your body lacks energy, causing persistent tiredness

• Dry mouth and dry, itchy skin: Fluid loss through frequent urination can cause dehydration, leading to a dry mouth and skin that may itch

• Blurred vision: Changes in fluid levels can affect the shape of the eye's lens, causing vision to blur

• Unintended weight loss: When the body can't get energy from glucose, it starts burning fat and muscle, leading to weight loss without trying

• Slow healing wounds and increased infections: High blood sugar can impair circulation and immune function, making cuts and infections take longer to heal

• Numbness or tingling in hands and feet: Nerve damage from high blood sugar may cause sensations of numbness or burning pain

• Mood changes: Fluctuating blood sugar can cause irritability or symptoms similar to depression

In children, symptoms may also include crankiness and behavior changes

. Overall, diabetes can feel like persistent thirst, frequent urination, constant hunger, tiredness, dry and itchy skin, blurred vision, unexplained weight loss, slow healing wounds, and sometimes numbness or mood changes. These symptoms can develop quickly in type 1 diabetes or more gradually in type 2 diabetes