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Ask the Expert
May 10, 2003
Question:
Is it possible to reverse type 2 diabetes through diet and exercise?
Answer:
More than16 million Americans have diabetes, and another 17 million Americans have "pre-diabetes," which is literally months to years away from progressing into full-blown diabetes.
Fortunately, diabetes, especially in children, is tremendously easy to treat by restricting all grains and sugars from the diet and increasing exercise.
Making these changes in your lifestyle will help to optimize your insulin levels. As some people may know, blood sugar is only the symptom in most diabetics; the real challenge is to control your insulin levels. Once the insulin levels are stabilized it is common for the blood sugar to come back to normal levels.
Exercise works by increasing the sensitivity of insulin receptors so the insulin that is present works much more effectively and your body doesn’t need to produce as much.
Most people, especially doctors, tend to not appreciate how powerful exercise is. However, I believe it needs to be viewed like a drug--you have to be very careful with the dose. If the dose is not high enough, it will not work.
One of the keys in using exercise to normalize insulin levels with secondary benefits of weight loss and normalization of blood sugars is to make certain minimum thresholds are met. It is my experience that most people are not exercising enough.
There are three important variables with exercise:
- Length of time
- Frequency
- Intensity
Assuming people can exercise, I encourage my patients to gradually increase the amount of time they are exercising to one hour per day.
Initially the frequency is daily. This is a treatment dose until they normalize their weight or insulin levels. Once normalized, they will only need exercise three to four times per week.
In terms of intensity, you should exercise hard enough so that it is very difficult to talk to someone next to you. However, if you cannot carry on a conversation at all, then you have gone too far and need to decrease the intensity slightly. However, most people don’t exercise at the appropriate intensity and as a result aren’t able to obtain the benefits.
