Chapter 20

Ten Tips to Boost Your Overall Health

IN THIS CHAPTER

check Improving your mindset, both psychologically and physiologically

check Eliminating current and future excuses for inactivity

Your exercise (and any other lifestyle changes, like choosing more healthful foods) should be as uncomplicated as possible and geared toward your unique health needs, beliefs, and goals and the types of activities you most enjoy. One of the general tips for getting people more active is usually to get a dog to walk, but this approach doesn’t work for everyone for obvious reasons. Other avenues involve making your physical activity more social by involving your friends, family, and even coworkers. If you can make your physical activity more like a flash mob (where everyone participates willingly), just think how much fun and motivating it will be for you.

Regardless of how you get your activity, being active can improve your health beyond diabetes. Use the tips in this chapter to benefit the health of everyone you know.

Get Emotionally Fit with Activity

Emotional fitness can be loosely defined as “having a positive attitude and outlook.” To boost your mood, try to focus on keeping your emotions positive; positive emotions include feelings like happiness, pride, confidence, and high self-esteem (satisfaction in yourself). Honestly, a positive, healthy emotional outlook is key to success in all aspects of your life.

Here’s where physical activity comes in. It’s well established that doing physical activity gives your mood at least a short-term boost. When you adopt an active lifestyle day after day for a lifetime, you set yourself up to experience that mood lift day after day for a lifetime. In turn, improving your mood, and therefore your emotional fitness, through physical activity will help you stay active from this day forward.

Go for the Endorphin Release

One of the greatest emotional benefits of exercise comes from the release of brain hormones called endorphins. These mood-enhancing hormones bind to natural receptors in your brain and lead to feelings of euphoria and a lesser perception of pain, and your body can release them during exercise. This release usually happens after you’ve been exercising for a while and gives you a second wind. Some people are positively addicted to this release of endorphins and need to get their daily fix.

As far as your diabetes goes, endorphins can boost how well your insulin works and lower your body’s insulin resistance. Endorphin release is one of the main players in enhancing your insulin action through physical activity.

tip Try to get maximal endorphin release from doing daily exercise. You feel less depressed and anxious, maintain a better mood, and improve your health.

Enjoy Higher Dopamine Levels

Another hormone called dopamine activates the pleasure centers of the brain. Basically, it’s the brain hormone that allows you to have feelings of bliss, pleasure, euphoria, drive, motivation, focus, and concentration — and who doesn’t want to experience all those on a daily basis?

Many things you do release dopamine, but most of them — such as drinking caffeine or using cocaine — are bad for both your body and your diabetes. However, physical activity also leads to dopamine release.

It’s believed that brain dopamine release activating pleasurable feelings is the primary reaction that leads to addictions (see the nearby sidebar “The power of endorphins and brain hormones”).

remember Brain dopamine release during exercise is key to adopting an active lifestyle. When you release dopamine during exercise, you associate being active with an elevated sense of delight. That makes your brain recall pleasant feelings associated with training, which makes you more likely to want to continue doing that activity to get your boost of feel-good hormones.

tip Blood (and potentially brain) dopamine levels are apparently low in the morning in people with type 2 diabetes and are associated with lower insulin action. Getting active that time of day may boost dopamine and help lower any residual insulin resistance you have from fasting overnight, so get moving as soon as your feet hit the floor in the morning.

Drop Those Cortisol Levels

Another hormonal benefit of physical activity relates to levels of cortisol, which your body releases in reaction to stress. It responds to both physical and mental stress, going up when your blood glucose is high or you’re sick or have an infection but also when you have any mental stress, anxiety, or depression.

It’s a vicious cycle. If you’re sick or stressed out, your cortisol goes up. Having higher cortisol in your body increases insulin resistance, and your blood glucose management can worsen over time, leading to even higher cortisol. Check out the sidebar “Is an excess of cortisol the root of your problems?” in this chapter for more on the effects of cortisol.

tip The best way to reverse this cycle of excess cortisol release is to exercise regularly but moderately. Exercise improves your energy levels and your physical health, and feeling better physically helps you get rid of your depressive thought patterns. Exercising reduces your level of stress, anxiety, and depression, which also lowers your cortisol. But don’t overtrain because that can cause physical stress and raise cortisol on its own.

Boost Your Bodily Satisfaction

Being dissatisfied with your body size, shape, or weight can lead to having lower self-esteem and self-respect. If you perceive yourself as fat and out of shape, you’re particularly vulnerable to a negative self-image. More women than men have negative feelings about their bodies. Exercising more frequently makes you feel better about your body, regardless of how much you weigh or how you look. Being active can improve muscle tone, which can also raise your self-esteem and improve your self-image.

Listen to Your Body

You’ll have days when you want to forget about your diabetes or prediabetes and chuck your lifestyle changes out the window. When everything else in your life feels like a struggle, the last thing you need to do is add to it with physical activity that stresses you out mentally or physically. But that doesn’t mean you should always skip your workout then, either. The best thing to do on those days is to pay attention to your physical and emotional cues:

  • Know when to take time off from exercise to avoid injuries.
  • Don’t try to push yourself more than you need to on any given day.
  • Exercise at a moderate intensity some days, not intensely all the time.
  • Work out harder on some days and easier on others to stay motivated and injury-free.
  • Record your exercise, along with blood glucose responses and how you felt, what worked, and what didn’t.
  • Figure out what to try next time to get the most from your activities.

Don’t Use Poor Health or Age as an Excuse Not to Exercise

Poor health and increasing age are often major barriers to getting more active, but luckily you can overcome them in most cases.

Everyone is aging and losing some muscle mass as time marches on. Most of the diseases that people assume are inevitable with aging are caused by living a sedentary lifestyle, not advancing age. But you can fight and slow the decline by being physically active. Just making sure you can stay steady on your feet is important if you’re dealing with health issues and getting weaker by being inactive. The chapters in Part 3 offer a variety of activities older or ailing folks can easily incorporate into their days.

The creation of new brain connections slows down dramatically with age. Starting at about age 40, you start to lose about 5 percent of your overall brain volume per decade until you reach 70 years old, when any number of conditions can accelerate the decline. Staying active and involved can slow the degeneration. Exercise slows down the natural decline in handling stress and helps maintain blood flow and blood supply to the brain, so use your poor health or advancing age as an excuse to exercise.

tip If you find structured exercise too overwhelming, focus on practicing doing the basic activities of daily living to maintain your function as you age. That approach may be even more effective for increasing your ability to take care of yourself than doing a structured resistance exercise program.

Tackle Health Problems Early On

Aging itself causes bodily changes, many of which are independent of disease. Such changes occur even if you stay active throughout your life, but being active can slow them down.

The aging process involves a gradual decline in the physiological function of your body’s systems. The highest your heart rate can reach declines with time, your energy systems work less efficiently, and your reflexes get slower — even if you’re working out all the time. But you’ll have a higher maximal heart rate and better reflexes if you stay active compared with being a couch potato.

Human cells apparently can split and reproduce only a limited number of times before dying. After your cells get to the point that they’re not turning over and renewing as fast, the aging process picks up speed. Things like weight gain around your middle (the so-called middle age spread) are often viewed as inseparable from aging, but they aren’t inevitable as you get older — if you exercise regularly.

remember Even if humans could find a way to prevent all diseases, hospitals and nursing homes would be full of people dying of just old age. If you stay active until you reach that point, at least you’ll have a much higher quality of life while you are alive.

Prevention of early death or impairment from treatable problems is an essential part of longevity with and without diabetes. For example, physical activity can offset declining muscle mass (at least to a point) and keep you stronger to deal with daily living activities. And having more insulin-sensitive muscle mass where carbohydrates you eat can be stored helps to keep your blood glucose lower overall.

tip To live long and well, be vigilant about all aspects of your health and get problems treated earlier rather than later. Follow these guidelines to stay on top of your health:

  • Never assume that your health will be static.
  • Do what you can to prevent problems in the first place.
  • Do regular preventive care, like having mammograms (women) and prostate gland checks (men).
  • Get the recommended annual tests for people with diabetes, such as a dilated eye exam from an ophthalmologist and a foot check from a podiatrist.
  • Don’t hesitate to seek out additional doctors and specialists you need to stay healthy.
  • Use the new monitoring tools and medications to better manage the peaks and valleys in your blood glucose.
  • Address your mental health as well; the stress of diabetes and life in general can affect your care and your blood glucose.

Plan Ahead for Exercise Success

One thing that can help you achieve your exercise goals is planning ahead. Look at your calendar, see exactly what your schedule looks like and how you can fit exercise into it, and then schedule it in. So maybe Monday you’ll exercise in the morning but Tuesday in the evening. Treat it like any other appointment or meeting that you have to keep in your calendar, and you have an easier time staying on track and being consistent.

remember If you take insulin, planning ahead is even more helpful in case you need to cut back on your doses to avoid low blood glucose. Plan exactly when you’re going to exercise and what you’re going to do, and have a backup activity plan in case something keeps you from doing your scheduled one.

After a short break from your routine because of a vacation, illness, or athletic injury, start scheduling your physical activity back in again. During any break — whether it’s long or short — try to keep up all your movement during the day even if you can’t do anything taxing. Just staying in motion helps keep your fitness level higher and makes getting back into regular exercise as quickly as possible easier.

Know It’s Never Too Late to Start Being Active

Whether you’ve been a couch potato or just recently slipped out of your exercise habit, it’s not too late to change course. Even if you haven’t had much success with managing your blood glucose up to this point, it’s not too late to reap some of the health benefits now. You can still improve your health and your fitness by starting to be more active and by making other healthful lifestyle changes.

remember Even if you haven’t been on top of your diabetes recently, you may be able to slow the progression of some of your complications or reverse them with a little more diligence — starting with being more active now.

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