We Uncover How Exercise can Help Manage Your Diabetes
Overview
Aside from medication and a good diet, exercise is the next most important aspect of managing your diabetes and helping to prevent long term complications.
Of the benefits, most important is the reduced risk of heart disease. Of course everyone is at risk of heart disease, but diabetics face an increased risk which exercise can reduce. Exercise is also helpful to weight loss, lowers your blood pressure and can lead to a reduction in stress levels. Exercise, if done properly, will give you increased energy levels and a general feeling of wellbeing, combating depression.
So what exercise are we talking about here? Well of course it depends on your age, your weight, your current fitness levels, if you suffer from Hypos and many other factors. So before you go from couch potato to Olympic marathon runner, you should talk to your Doctor to see what is safe for you.
Sensible precautions
- It is good practise to wear a medical ID bracelet at all times, but this is especially true if you are just starting to exercise. You are at a raised risk of Hypos until you get used to your increased activity level.
- Make sure you carry with you some glucose tablets or some other way to treat a hypo.
- Test you glucose before you start to exercise, during (if practical) and after. Once you get an idea of how your glucose levels behave, you can better judge your medication requirements.
- Look after your feet! Some sports shoes are very expensive, go for ones with lots of padding and wear a good pair of socks with them.
- Don't think that exercise has to be painful to do any good! There is gain with no pain. We talk about sensible levels of exercise later on.
What Exercise does for your body
When you exercise, your muscles demand extra glucose to make them work. This causes the liver to convert stored energy into glucose and push it into the blood stream. If you are exercising steadily for a long time, eventually the liver will stop producing glucose and the body instead starts to convert fat deposits to glucose. This is generally the best form of exercise for diabetics and it is called 'aerobic'. In actual fact, if you exercise in short intense bursts, the liver can be fooled into producing too much glucose, which is not in fact required (because the exercise stops). This can lead to an otherwise perplexing rise in glucose levels after exercise.
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