Being consistently active helps you to live longer, have a better quality of life, improve your mental health, and improve your self-image. Take charge of your mental and physical health in only a few minutes a day. Movement in patients with diabetes is even more important, especially for patients with type 2 diabetes as it can help decrease blood sugars and improve insulin sensitivity.
Being active is not just about losing weight; Exercise is medicine. It has many health benefits like lowering cholesterol, improving blood pressure, lowering stress and anxiety, and improving your mood. If you have diabetes, physical activity can also help keep your blood sugar levels closer to normal and help you keep your diabetes in control.
It can be difficult to find the time or motivation to start an exercise program. Everyone’s physical abilities and schedules are different. Choose the best ways to fit physical activity into your daily life—whether it’s walking to work, doing chair exercises, or working out at the gym.
The important thing to remember is to choose activities that you enjoy doing and to set goals that are realistic. You can make big improvements to your health and energy levels by making small and deliberate healthy lifestyle choices that involve moving more every day
key tips to be successful:
Emphasize fun– What is something you love? Whether that’s music, birds, friends, trampolines, or books, you can shape your activity plan around the things you love. Walk to and from a spot where you can listen to the birds every day; explore local libraries from top to bottom; take the stairs when you visit friends; take a dance class that incorporates music you love.
Attach activity to habits-Taking a walk after dinner is a time-honored way to get moving. What is something you do regularly? Whether it’s going to work, cooking dinner, getting the mail, or brushing your teeth, any habit can be an opportunity to move.
Try doing a one-minute wall-sit every time you brush your teeth; or practice dance steps while cooking dinner, or lift your bag over your head every time you go into your house. Any routine behavior can have a small activity bonus built-in.
Involve others- Chances are, your friends, family, and co-workers want to be more active, too. Set active living goals together, see if you can aim for incremental advancements and variety in your routines. You could walk an extra two miles a week—or three more flights of stairs.
When you meet someone, who shares your activity goals, keep moving. Swap sitting at the coffeeshop for walks and go around the block while catching up.
Add Audio- Most phones can play music or podcasts, so challenge yourself to walk for at least one song or one podcast. Having pleasant audio input can make exercise more fun and rewarding.
Be inventive- Rather than thinking of movement as calisthenics or a workout, challenge yourself to be inventive with your active living. Do an extra lap around the grocery store. Stand while watching a television show, instead of sitting. At work, think about how you can add a few minutes of movement by parking further away or getting off the bus early.
Whenever you text someone, stretch one part of your body. When you open the door at home, do a little dance. When you talk on the phone, stand up for part of the call or go for a walk and cover some miles with the company.
“Walking: the most ancient exercise and still the best modern exercise.”
— Carrie Latet
Be forgiving- If you have a sedentary day, let it go. Don’t overwork the next day or punish yourself—just try to be active every day!
Track your progress- Consider using a pedometer app on your phone or purchasing a simple pedometer and have fun with it. How many steps do you take on an average workday? How many do you take on the weekend? Striving for 10,000 steps a day is recommended.
“Lack of activity destroys the good condition of every human being, while movement and methodical physical exercise save it and preserve it.”
— Plato
Appropriate Body Composition
While exercise or movement offers benefits to reduce blood sugars, the overall goal is to be healthy. For those of us who have “too much fat”, part of the goal is to reduce that fat and increase muscle and possibly lose weight. An excessive amount of fat has been shown to be a major cause of several diseases, including diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and several cancers.
While there a several ways to measure body composition, the easiest way is to do a circumference measure at certain sites like waist, hips, etc. Use your waist to hip ratio, a cut-off ratio of 0.80 for men, and 0.95 for women, above this ratio the risk for heart disease is very high. Waist circumference should be below 40 inches for men and 35 inches for women.
Set Fitness Goals
Use SMART goals to set you fitness goals, they should be specific and measurable in order to access progress.
Click here to download our SMART goal worksheet
How to Prioritize and Achieve your goals
Once you set your SMART goals, make sure to break that goal down to smaller steps. Once you set small steps and a timeline, you need to prioritize your goal. Find your “why”, why is this goal important to you, why do you want to get fit now? Make sure you keep your why present, visible so it can help you stay focus and motivated in the goal.
Mindful Movement
Mindfulness brings a new dimension to the movement. Rather than moving for the sake of moving, or to accomplish a goal, mindful movement is practiced anchoring the body in the present moment. Many people feel more harmonious, relaxed, and calm after practicing mindful movement.
If you would like a structured mindful movement program, many forms of yoga, qi gong, and tai chi are wonderful ways to learn a series of movements that are connected to breathing and mental practices. Many health benefits are associated with this kind of mindful movement, ranging from improved lung function to better mental health.
Obstacles
Obstacles range from time, to feeling judged in classes for being a large person, finding appropriate clothing in your size to not having a clear “Why” or reason for your goal. Your why should be personal and internal rather than exercise to lose weight because of external reasons.
Overcome your obstacles by first and for most keeping your “why” present as your problem-solve whatever obstacle is keeping you from achieving your goal. If time is one of your obstacles, you may want to try HIIT, a 7-minute workout, etc. There are also four exercises we all should be doing to help us get or stay fit.
If you are a couch potato and are not sure where to start, try FITT (this is how I prescribe exercise for my patients) to make your smaller goals more specific:
Frequency of exercise– twice a week
Intensity of exercise- Low (work your way to moderate and high intensity exercises)
Time for exercise- Start with 10 minutes (slowly increase time up to 30-minute intervals)
Type of exercise– Walking or could be stationary bike
The goal is to do 150 minutes of moderate-intensity exercise. As always before you start any type of exercise program, check with your Doctor.
The key take-away is that even small steps can collectively have a major impact on a person’s health. The most important thing to do is to be less sedentary.
