Consistently lower your blood sugar with regular exercise

Beware of mixed messages

Here’s supposedly great news for the diabetics in the room–you don’t need to exercise everyday in order to see an effect on your blood sugar level.

But is this really the right message to send out to people who probably don’t exercise or if they do exercise, not nearly enough?

It’s all thanks to a new study from the Netherlands. In a small group of men with type 2 diabetes, they found that exercising for 30 minutes daily or an hour every two days were equally effective.

According to the lead researcher, “Our findings suggest that frequent short bouts of moderate exercise can be substituted for less frequent exercise bouts of a longer duration in people with type 2 diabetes, or vice versa.” And your point is…?

Since most of us are resistant to exercise, what would you rather do: more in one day or less every day? It’s an interesting question but not one that I feel needed an urgent answer.

The real answer to this question is that you can consistently lower your blood sugar with regular exercise and I would encourage people to exercise daily.

I am not suggesting that you move into the gym, but it is important to move around every day and to do something that gets your heart rate up. At the very least, you need to do something that gets you off the couch.

I consider myself lucky to live in New York City for many reasons–winter not being one of them. But we have to walk everywhere and go up and down stairs to get to and from the subway, so we are often moving around. And except in the parts of the city affected by lower socio-economic realities, New Yorkers have a lower rate of diabetes than the rest of the nation.

We all know exercise is good for us. And by incorporating it into your daily regimen, it ceases being an “activity” and just becomes what you do.

That is my goal for how you eat and it’s my goal for how you exercise. We need to be convincing people how important it is to maintain a healthy lifestyle–period–not how to cut corners.


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