Dear friends, have you ever encountered such a situation: you insist on exercising every day, but your blood sugar level cannot be well controlled, and sometimes your blood sugar rises after exercise.
As a therapeutic health professional, today I would like to share with you some knowledge about the relationship between exercise and blood sugar control.
I have a friend Amin, who is a type 2 diabetic. In order to control his blood sugar, he goes for a walk in the park downstairs every morning after waking up.
But what made him wonder and disappointed was that when he came back from exercise several times to measure his blood sugar, the number was higher than the fasting blood sugar in bed.
This led him to question whether exercise really helped control blood sugar levels.
I understand this confusion of Amin. In fact, the relationship between exercise and blood sugar control is not as simple as we think.
Exercise can help deplete blood sugar, but exercise can also lead to reactive hyperglycemia if the timing and intensity of exercise is inappropriate.
The reason for this is that the body needs to continuously synthesize glucose to maintain normal levels, and exercise will accelerate the consumption of sugar, and it will also stimulate the body's glycemic mechanism.
If you exercise too vigorously and exceed the limit of your body's ability to regulate your blood sugar, you are prone to reactive hyperglycemia.
Therefore, exercise is a double-edged sword for diabetics. Only by mastering the time, intensity and other aspects of exercise can we play a positive role in helping to control sugar.
Let me share with you the two most common mistakes that diabetics make during exercise.
The first mistake is fasting exercise. When you first wake up in the morning, your body's blood sugar levels are maintained by the release of glycogen from the liver and muscle sugar from the muscles.
At this time, fasting exercise will increase the burden on the body to synthesize blood sugar, which can easily lead to reactive hyperglycemia.
I recommend that you do your morning exercise after breakfast to avoid reactive hyperglycemia on a fasting state.
The second mistake is that the exercise after a meal is too long or too intense. We all know that exercising after meals can help burn off excess blood sugar.
But postprandial exercise also has a moderate time frame and intensity. If you exercise too much, your body will use up more sugar than your blood sugar can synthesize, and once you exceed your body's limit, it will also trigger intense reactive hyperglycemia.
So how can we use exercise to help us control our blood sugar? I have the following suggestions:
To quantitatively record your movements, observe the impact of different times and intensities on blood sugar control. Step by step to find a suitable sport mode.
Avoid exercising for too long when your blood sugar is too low, which can worsen the hypoglycemic reaction.
In terms of exercise form, I suggest that you don't just stop at simple aerobic exercises such as walking and jogging, but also add some strength training to build muscle mass. Because the more muscle, the more efficient the body will be at absorbing and utilizing blood sugar, which helps with blood sugar control.
These are some of my insights on the relationship between exercise and blood sugar control in diabetics. Hope it helps.
Here, I would also like to share with you some of my dietary and health tips.
First and foremost, a healthy diet is essential for people with diabetes. I recommend a sugar-controlled diet based on whole grains, vegetables, legumes, moderate intake of high-quality protein, and low consumption of refined carbohydrates.
It is best to choose low-sugar varieties for vegetables and fruits, and at the same time enrich the intake of dietary fiber.
Second, it's important to stick to a regular routine. Get enough sleep, go to bed early and wake up early, and avoid an unhealthy lifestyle of sleeping late at night.
At the same time, it is necessary to control the meal time, not overeating or fasting.
Finally, we need to learn to use the wisdom of TCM diet. Traditional Chinese medicine pays attention to the "homology of medicine and food", and many foods themselves have the function of ** disease.
List of high-quality authors such as soybeans, wheat, oats, amaranth, carrots, etc., can all be used to help control blood sugar. You can learn more about TCM diet therapy and apply it to your daily diet reasonably.
In addition, I would recommend that you use some traditional regimen regimens. For example, ginseng tonic kidney can improve insulin sensitivity; Poria cocos can promote carbohydrate metabolism; Ginger food** can reduce the end product of glycation, prevent complications and so on.
Although these methods are simple, they contain the wisdom of traditional Chinese civilization.
Healthy diet, moderate exercise, regular work and rest, as well as the use of traditional Chinese medicine diet therapy and traditional health regimen are important ways for diabetic patients to manage diabetes in an all-round way and prevent complications.
I would also like to remind everyone to regularly check the fundus, kidney function, neuropathy, etc., to detect and prevent complications in time.