If you have any risk factors for diabetes, such as family history, being overweight, taking certain medications or having heart disease, then it’s important to have regular checkups with your doctor.
Your doctor should be well familiar with your history and be able to point out any changes in your physical health over time. They should be giving good, healthful advice including dietary upgrades and adopting a proper exercise routine.
This is how I am trying to stay one step a of this disease. After seeing what it did, and is currently doing, to members of my immediate family . . . . this is going to be a daily battle.
To prevent pre-diabetes, I’ve changed my diet and focus on a daily exercise routine which includes high intensity workouts. I attribute these things to having lower blood sugar levels and improved circulation as well as good weight maintenance.
Read the following article by Amy Norton on how ramping it up can help.
Any Exercise Is Good, But Higher-Intensity May Be Better
By Amy Norton
HealthDay Reporter
MONDAY, March 2, 2015 (HealthDay News) — For people who are obese and sedentary, any exercise can help trim belly fat, but it may take a bit more effort to get other health benefits, a new study suggests.
Researchers found that when they got middle-aged, obese adults regularly moving — even with a half-hour of slow walking — it helped them shed a little bit of weight and a couple of inches from their waistlines.
However, it took higher-intensity exercise to lower people’s blood sugar levels — which, over the long term, might reduce their risk of type 2 diabetes.
While “higher-intensity” might sound daunting, experts stressed that it’s within reason for even dedicated couch potatoes.
“The people in this study were middle-aged, sedentary and abdominally obese,” said lead researcher Robert Ross, an exercise physiologist at Queen’s University in Ontario, Canada. “We didn’t have them running. ‘High-intensity’ just meant walking briskly on a treadmill,” he said.
“It was very doable,” added Ross, who reported his team’s findings in the March 3 edition of Annals of Internal Medicine.
A researcher who reviewed the study called it “beautiful work.”
And, the results may help alter current exercise guidelines, said Dr. Timothy Church, a professor of preventive medicine at Pennington Biomedical Research Center in Baton Rouge, La.
That’s because there’s been so little good research on exercise intensity, and “this study fills a major gap,” Church said. “It shows that intensity does matter.”
Besides the benefits for blood sugar, Church noted, study participants who exercised at a higher intensity also saw a bigger improvement in their cardiovascular fitness — which is an important factor in the risk of dying from heart disease or stroke.
For the study, Ross and colleagues recruited 300 people in their 40s and 50s who were abdominally obese and got little to no regular exercise. They then randomly assigned everyone to either a “control” group that remained sedentary, or one of three exercise groups.
All of the exercisers came to five supervised sessions a week, for six months. One group did a low amount of low-intensity activity (about a half-hour of slow walking); another group stuck with the low-intensity regimen, but for a longer period (averaging an hour per session); and a fourth got higher-intensity exercise — namely, faster-paced walking.
Those fast walkers burned the same number of calories as their slower-paced peers who walked for an hour — but they did it in 40 minutes.
After six months, the investigators found, all three exercise groups had lost a small amount of weight and one or two inches from their waistlines, on average. But only the high-intensity group showed an improvement in blood sugar levels.
“Will this [regimen], if performed for years, lower the risk of type 2 diabetes?” Ross said. “We don’t know.”
But, he added, “I like the chances.”
And why would higher-intensity be better for blood sugar control? According to Church, it’s likely related to muscle — which is the biggest consumer of blood sugar in the body; put simply, higher-intensity exercise may improve the muscles’ ability to pull sugar from the blood.
“Blood sugar control is not just about body fat,” Church said.
In his own research, Church has found that combining aerobic exercise and strength training is better than either alone for improving blood sugar levels in people who already have diabetes.
According to Ross, the new findings are “good news” for people who are overweight and sedentary — which describes a huge swath of North Americans, he noted.
You can view the original post here.
P.S. How is that for some good news — lower blood sugars and improve cardiovascular health by just walking, jogging, running, cycling, swimming, or any thing that increases your heart rate. And the next time you are out doing any of these activities . . . pick up the pace.