A little incentive to try a little fitness in your life

Hello again.

After much thought about what to say next I went back to when I was first told I was on the brink of being Type 2 Diabetic. I had two choices….. a major lifestyle change with diet and exercise…. or medication. As I have an abhorrence for taking medication… (another story for another day) my first choice had to be to try the 'lifestyle change'. But as I hadn't 'exercised' for many years, and as pretty much my whole diet was 'diabetic unfriendly' (according to the dietician they sent me to) I knew it would be a significant challenge for me.

The Dietician put me on a strict eating plan (which I'll talk about another day), and sent me away with instructions that I must do 45 minutes a day of 'heart pumping' exercise…. not just a stroll along the beach, but active, sweaty, heavy breathing stuff!!! This plan was to save my body from diabetes. The diet change was to stop bombarding my pancreas with heavy doses of carbohydrate and give it a chance to recover (or at least to not stop working altogether) and the exercise change was to burn carbohydrates with exercise which would also save my pancreas from having to do all the hard work. (this is my simple understanding of it all).

So all this diet and exercise was not with the intention of making me lose weight but rather, to improve my health!! But the dietician did say to me that weight loss would be a side effect of this new lifestyle.

I had weighed in at 109kg, so losing a bit of weight did have a certain appeal. The negative health issues associated with diabetes did not have any appeal.  Avoiding those negative health issues had all the appeal in the world.

And so my journey began.

But before you get put off by that 45 minutes, before you start thinking "this is extreme and just not for me" just remember that any reasonable exercise that your body can sustain is good for you. If you set yourself a goal of 15 minutes, and if all you can manage is a 'stroll'. Do it. After a while you'll notice that 15 minutes getting a little easier, you'll go a little further or a little faster. It will happen. Better to pick a sustainable goal and then build on it, than to make yourself so miserable that you give up.

Without a significant health issue to kick start my move towards a healthier lifestyle I probably wouldn't have gone there….!!! But how much better to set up that routine before you need something so extreme. Perhaps if I'd been doing 15 minutes a day, or an hour two days a week…. perhaps then I wouldn't have these health issues!!

Starting small is vastly underrated.

Remember that saying. "How do you eat an elephant?…. One bite at a time!"