Browsing Tag

Living With Diabetes

Exercise For Diabetes

Three Thousand Steps in Thirty Minutes

Like most people, I used my pedometer passively to note how many steps I took each day. Now I use it as a prod for better performance and to help control my diabetes.

We can use pedometers to motivate us to get enough of the moderate-intensity physical activity we need. The government’s official 2008 Physical Activity Guidelines for Americans, which I covered here last year, calls for us to get a minimum of 150 minutes of this moderate-intensity exercise each week. That can work out to 30 minutes on five days of the week. We can also get it in shorter bouts, typically of 10 minutes each time.

But many of us can’t figure out what “moderate-intensity” means. Until I read a brand new research report, I certainly didn’t.
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Psychosocial

On the Road

Last night I returned from my first long road trip since learning I have diabetes. Trying to eat as well as I could and making time for enough exercise every day were the challenges that I had not addressed before.

On the last leg of my 4,500 mile journey I was musing last night about these challenges and what I had learned about them and myself. I was on the road for 27 days, traveling alone, except for my SUV, my laptop computer, my camera, and other essentials.

Traveling in the off-season gave me tremendous flexibility. Nowhere were the highways or parks crowded, except at the Grand Canyon. I can only imagine with dread what the crowds of summer will be there. Never once did I need to make a motel or restaurant reservation.
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Psychosocial

Emotional Diabetes

We think about controlling our diabetes with diet and exercise and usually with medication too. Seldom do we even consider the fourth leg.

But a study published in the latest issue of the Annals of Behavioral Medicine and a forthcoming one by a Ph.D. student who just wrote me emphasizes the importance of our emotions for controlling our diabetes. Emotional health and diabetes health are a two-way street — a bidirectional relationship. When our emotional level is positive, we can more easily control our diabetes. And when we control our diabetes, we feel better.
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Psychosocial

Saving our Brains

Many of us who have diabetes are more in tune with our minds than our bodies. We are “not athletic.” Many of us will frankly acknowledge that we are “into our heads.”

Now its clear that we can’t have a good head on our shoulders without having good shoulders and all. Our diabetic body will give us a diabetic mind — if we let it. And when we control our diabetes, not only our bodies but also our brains work better.

A diabetic body has high blood glucose. When we succeed in bringing our blood glucose level down to normal, our bodies aren’t diabetic any more. When our diabetes is controlled, it may not be cured, but it’s certainly in such remission that no tests would show that it’s diabetic.
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Diabetes Testing

The Normal A1C Level

You want to control your diabetes as much as possible. You wouldn’t be reading this if you didn’t.

So you regularly check your A1C level. This is the best measurement of our blood glucose control that we have now. It tells us what percentage of our hemoglobin — the protein in our red blood cells that carry oxygen — has glucose sticking to it. The less glucose that remains in our bloodstream rather than going to work in the cells that need it the better we feel now and the better our health will continue to be.

As we are able to control our diabetes better and better, the reasonable goal is to bring our A1C levels down to normal — the A1C level that people who don’t have diabetes have. But before we can even set that goal, we have to know what the target is.
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Diabetes Basics

Positive Motivation

You need to help me a lot with this one.

All of you who read my articles here are motivated to control your diabetes. Almost all of you have a positive motivation. I doubt if many of you have a primarily negative motivation based on fear of the consequences of uncontrolled diabetes. Negative motivations just don’t keep us doing what we need to do for long.

What are your positive motivations? What do you tell people you know who have diabetes to encourage them to tame it?
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