Hi, I am Dr. Milind Pimprikar and you are listening to fighting fit Fridays with Dr. Pimprikar. Last episode we talked about accepting your disease as your friend. And today we are going to take this dear friend Diabetes, for a walk. When we go for a stroll with your friend one normally wraps a hand around the shoulder which indicates intimacy. Sometimes you tightly hold the hand of your friend to embark a feeling of oneness in two souls. Here your friend is staying inside you. You are in sync with it so having held its hand in hand. And we are going to discuss how we could proactively co-exist in this relationship with our friend.
Diabetes is one of the best friends one can have….one might label this as a very weird statement but yes! It is a fact. In the walk of life, you come across so many people who walk only a few steps with you, some hold your hand walk for a little longer, some a little longer and you part ways…. this goes on and on and on, so on and so forth. But this friend Diabetes is not going to leave you alone. It is going to stay with you in all your highs and lows of life.
Now imagine you have gotten someone who is going to stay with you till the time you are living, and this faithful friend is going to lay dead the moment you stop to exist. Wow! that sounds great! In today’s materialistic world there is somebody who is going to stick around with you for ever…so why not discuss the whole issue with your best friend over a walk and settle on a note of proactive co-existence?
To achieve this, you need to understand your friend. As we all know our friends so well, we can predict their responses to small things. We are aware of their likes/dislikes, their preferences, their flaws, their strengths and their nuiscence value also. So, we must understand this new friend. Let us understand what diabetes all is about.
We all know that diabetes means having a higher blood sugar level than the normal. Here it is important to understand the sequence of events occurring in the body which causes the sugars to rise.
- When you eat food, it gets broken down in the stomach. The food then travels from your stomach into your intestine.
- Some of the food that you eat gets broken down into glucose (sugar) and then goes into your blood.
- The increase in blood sugar in your blood triggers the pancreas to release insulin.
- Insulin helps to move the sugar from the blood into the cells of your body. The insulin acts like a key to let the sugar into the cells of the body. The cells need sugar for energy.
- When there is too much sugar, it is stored in the liver or changed into fat. The liver releases some of the sugar into your blood when you are sleeping. In people with insulin resistance, cells don’t respond to insulin as well as they should, and blood sugar has more trouble entering the cells. The pancreas reacts by producing more and more insulin to help sugar get into the cells.
The pancreas can only produce extra insulin for a certain length of time, and then it tires out or cannot keep up to the demand. It is at this point; the blood sugar levels start to rise.
Now what we have understood is cells need energy to work, energy is supplied by glucose, glucose from blood is pushed into cells by insulin and when this does not happen it causes insulin resistance.
Jor lagake haishya- The concept is to push this sugar into the cells with all your mighty effort to have a better blood glucose control and this can be achieved by taking a first step towards exercise………this first step then becomes 2,3,4,5 .and then a walk. So as to say take a walk. Keep walking, take your fried for a walk to come to the terms with it.
Regular walk with your friend
Walking is an aerobic activity which improves your cardiac endurance as well as puts your muscles to work. Theses contracting muscles by a different mechanism other than insulin enhances pushing of blood sugar into the cells.
Resistance/weight training –
Graduated weight training increases the muscle contractility and causes the same effect. One needs to understand that these exercises are meant to be with low weights and higher number of repetitions.
Ideally- to gain benefits one must exercise for minimum 3 days a week. Gradually should be increased to 6 days a week with a rest day. Starting with about 30 min per day excluding the warmup and stretching should be increased to 60 min.
The distribution of aerobic training to resistance training should be 4:2 meaning 4 days of cardio and 2 days of resistance training.
This will help you.
- Better sugar controls
- Good emotional state
- Better HbA1c levels
- Control your blood pressure
- Will reduce the dose of anti-diabetic agents
To conclude your friend diabetes has come to stay with you for ever. Entertain him by taking for a walk every day, negotiate the benefits of walking with your dear friend, get motivated, start walking, convert them to long walks and if you are otherwise fit, convert to light jogs, increase the number of steps every day, follow a routine…. most importantly exercise on regular basis. This, I am sure you would do for your friend to keep him happy and you FIGHTING FIT.
If you fail in your duties towards your friend, he is going to trouble you with complications. So be in a perfect friendly bond with your best friend, for you to be, yes! FIT, FITTER AND FIGHTING FIT.
