If you have started to exhibit signs of type two diabetes, and your doctor has given you a grim diagnosis, then there are things you should know before worrying yourself too much. After making certain that a common symptom like diabetic nuropathy is really nothing more than a pinched nerve in your lower back that your chiropractor cannot fix for you, then it might be time to start looking into what the right kind of exercise can do to improve or even reverse your condition of type two diabetes before things get worse.
Even if you follow the latest dietary advice for diabetics, eliminating sugar, soft drinks, and too many bad carbs from your diet, there is still more that you need to do to actually help your body to return to normal. With a little effort, engaging in what some term moving like your ancestors, you can begin to use exercise to reduce your weight and get your type two diabetes well under control.
What Exercise Does for Diabetes
When a person has eaten wrong for many years or even decades and has not exercised much either, the end result is usually obesity and type two diabetes. At this point in the progression of the disease, the cells of the body have become insulin resistent. By reducing the sugar load in your diet, you are helping matters by not overloading your body with more sugar than it knows what to do with.
But, even when you have low levels of sugar intake, if your cells continue to remain insulin resistent, this can still be a huge problem. As your cells reject sugar, due to insulin resistence, this can dramatically lower your energy levels, since your cells are not taking in sugar for energy. What exercise does for a diabetic is that it starts to turn this problem around, causing your cells to become more insulin sensitive, helping them to uptake more sugar for energy. In essence, regular exercise is absolutely critical for reversing a condition like type two diabetes.
Types of Exercise That Help
There are generally two types of exercise regiments that help with controling and reversing type two diabetes. The first regiment is walking after each meal. A brisk fifteen or twenty minute walk after you eat can significantly help your body deal with the glucose load that a normal meal will place on your body, helping to improve your insulin sensitivity. However, if your goal is to really kick type two diabetes and get your life back, it is important to introduce high intensity interval training into your treatment plan. While this type of exercise may seem difficult, it is actually rather easy for most people to do, requiring only around 20-minutes two or three times a week.
Basically, what you are doing is a few seconds of high intensity workout followed by a longer period of relaxation or recovery. This would be like working out really fast and intensely for 30-seconds, and then resting for 90-seconds, repeating these intervals 8 times or so. Over time, just high intensity exercise alone, without any other dietary changes, has shown significant improvements in many type two diabetic patients, making exercise one of the best approaches to dealing with type two diabetes for a lot of people who suffer with this condition.