Healthy Tips Video: Diabetes Prevention and Insulin Resistance

Video Transcript

Hi, my name is Sarah Renschler, and I am a dietitian and diabetes care and education specialist here at the Healthpark. And today, I'm going to talk about how exercise can help us to prevent type 2 diabetes. So we know that exercise has a lot of really great health benefits, but to understand how it can help us to prevent type 2 diabetes, first, we need to know a little bit about insulin resistance and what that means.

So normally, what's going on in your body when you eat foods that's going to raise your blood sugar and you've got your sugar molecules here in your blood that need to get into your cells to be used for energy or stored for later use. So in response to that rise in blood sugars, our bodies produce, by the pancreas, insulin. And that insulin is going to act like a key to unlock our cell so that this sugar can flow into it.

Now, with insulin resistance, we've still got that blood sugar that we need to get into our cells, we've still got that insulin, but that insulin just isn't working the way that it should. So it's not unlocking that cell to let that sugar flow into the cell there. So exercise helps to decrease that insulin resistance and also make our bodies more insulin sensitive, meaning that it's going to help our bodies use that insulin more efficiently.

In addition, exercise can help our bodies use that sugar more efficiently without the need of that insulin. It's also important to note that fat is more insulin-resistant and muscle is more insulin-sensitive. So when we're thinking about the types of exercise that we want to do, we want to take that into consideration. We want to try and choose types of exercise that are going to help to build muscle, which in turn is going to help our bodies use that insulin more efficiently, and also help to burn fat to help us decrease that insulin resistance.

So our goal when it comes to exercise is to try and get 150 minutes of moderate activity each week. So what does that mean? That can look like whatever it's going to look like for you. So that could be typically maybe 30 minutes, 5 days a week. It could be 20 minutes a couple times a day, throughout the week. Whatever's going to fit into your schedule.

And when we talk about moderate activity, that means that you're exercising hard enough to where you're getting your heart rate up and you're still able to talk and hold a conversation, but you wouldn't be able to sing a song. That's what we would consider that moderate intensity activity. We also want to incorporate that strength training at least twice a week to try and build that muscle to help with that insulin sensitivity. And that doesn't mean that you have to go to the gym and lift weights for an hour. That could be something as simple as some bodyweight exercises at home or maybe some chair exercises with some resistance bands.

Now, we want exercise to be enjoyable, so when trying to decide what type of exercise you want to do, you want to do something that you enjoy, because that's going to make it more sustainable and you're more likely to stick to your exercise goals. So try a variety of exercise. Maybe you like walking, maybe you like classes, maybe you like swimming. Try it a little bit of everything and see what you enjoy the most.

We do offer a bunch of classes here at the Healthpark, if you're interested in getting started with exercise. We have our exercise medicine program and we've also got our Pre-diabetes Education and Exercise Program, or PEEP for short, if you are looking for a great way to get started with some exercise. We also offer diabetes education and nutrition counseling here as well. So if you're interested in more information on any of these programs, you can call us at the Health Resource Center at 270-688-4804.