Diabetes And Exercise

What is diabetes

Diabetes is a medical condition in which your body doesn’t produce enough insulin. Insulin is the hormone that tells your body to use the glucose that is floating around in your blood. To be clear, blood sugar and blood glucose are the same thing.

So people with diabetes have higher blood sugar. Why is that an issue? High blood sugar can lead to severe health problems such as eye damage, strokes, kidney damage, cardiovascular complications amongst the most common.

The shitty thing is that having LOW blood sugar can also have complication if done improperly. If you recall this post about the keto diet, you remember that low blood sugar can be safe if done the right way.

There are two type of diabetes: type 1 and type 2.

Type 1 is hereditary and stems from you autoimmune system wrongly attacking the insulin producing system. Type 2 is the development of insulin resistance through unhealthy lifestyle. Insulin resistance means that your body doesn’t recognize insulin cells anymore. This leads to your body's inability to use the glucose in your blood.

Having diabetes is most often not an extreme problem, you simply have to pay a lot more attention to controlling your blood sugar than people without diabetes do.

There are 3 main ways of controlling it:

1. Taking medication, such as insulin.

2. Diet. Watching what you eat becomes extremely important

3. Exercise. This post will focus on exercise’s role with blood sugar

Exercise and hormones

When you exercise, your body needs to produce a molecule called ATP. We have a very, very limited store of ATP in our body so we are constantly in need to make ATP. And boom what do we use to fabricate ATP in our bodies? You guessed it: GLUCOSE! We have glucose in our muscles, blood and liver.