Thursday, December 08, 2005

DARE to exercise - it could save your life!


Dr. Ron Sigal, from my hometown Ottawa, recently presented the largest study ever of its kind looking at the effect of exercise on type II diabetes (formerly known as adult onset diabetes until children as young as 8 began developing it due to our toxic food environment)at the Canadian Society for Exercise Physiology conference.

To summarize, Dr. Sigal's work proved that after 22 weeks of close to 200 minutes per week of exercise, that aerobic plus resistance strength training were as good as taking a medication for diabetes.

While this doesn't mean go off your drugs and go and exercise, you may well be able to reduce your diabetic medications by getting in shape.

If you want more reasons to exercise - Ron's work demonstrated that exercise translated for many patients into a 15-20% reduction in the risk of heart disease and up to a 30% reduction in the risk of diabetic complications such as blindness and kidney failure.

Exercise need not be brutal - you don't need the sweat bursting out of your brow for it to count. Start with a great pedometer and set the simplest of goals - more steps than yesterday.

You may just save your own life.