Back to top page
Send me email

Honey Syphon:
Exercise

It's well over a year now since I was diagnosed with diabetes, and so far I've avoided writing about one aspect of it because I've been an utter failure at it.

I'm talking about exercise.

Why Exercise?

Exercise is important for a number of reasons:

• I need to lose weight. In order to do that, I need to take in less calories than I burn up. Unless I want to starve myself, that means I need to increase the amount of exercise I do, in order to burn up more energy.

• Exercise is good for the body. It increases the heart rate, and makes the lungs work harder, all of which have long-term effects in reducing the risk of heart disease, and generally improving health.

• Exercise increases the metabolism. That improves the efficiency of the insulin that my body produces. Therefore, my blood sugar level is lower after exercise. The effect can last all day, too.

So there's three excellent reasons why I should be taking lots of exercise.

Bad Attitude

But, sad to say, I haven't been. I've tried... a bit... but when it comes down to it, I find exercise boring, hard work, and a waste of time.

This attitude isn't anything new. As a child, I was always happiest sat in a corner with my nose in a book. I loved reading, and I resented anything that took me away from reading. While my brother was rushing around playing football and climbing trees, I was sitting under a tree reading.

My parents would drag me out, unwilling, on family walks. While I actually quite enjoyed the walks once I was doing them, I would far rather have been reading.

That's been my attitude to exercise throughout my life. Now I am an adult, there are many calls on my time - work, shopping, friends and so on - and the last thing I need is yet one more thing to drag me away from my beloved books. Yet now I am expected to find the time to exercise regularly. What a bore!

What Kind of Exercise?

Actually, it doesn't matter what I do, so long as it has the right effect. It needs to be mildly aerobic - which means it needs to make me a little out of breath, without making me wheeze too much. It needs to be about half an hour at least four times a week.

When I started to think about exercise, I immediately ruled out a whole class of what I call "useless" exercise. Getting an exercise bike, for example, would be a waste of money because I would never use it. Going to the gym or to a swimming pool would embarrass me too much.* Until I'm a lot thinner, I'd feel totally out of place doing my stuff with other people. So I settled on the simplest form of exercise: walking.

A half-hour's brisk walk can be just as good as jogging, weight training, aerobics and so on - and not so unpleasant, or risky. It's something that can be combined with daily life - walking to the shops, or walking to work, makes it feel as if the exercise has some purpose. Walking, you get to see interesting things that you miss when whizzing by in a car.

So, how did I get on?

It started well. Most of last summer, I diligently went for walks two or three times a week. The first week, I felt exhausted after 5 minutes walking. The second week, I could manage 10 minutes before wanting to die. After a month, the full half-hour wasn't too hard. I felt a big improvement in my general health, too. Here's a couple of examples:

• When I visit the hospital to go to the diabetes clinic, parking spaces are scarce, so I have to park the car in a residential street some way away, and walk the rest of the way. When I first started going, the walk used to take me 20 minutes, and I would arrive exhausted, grumbling about having to park so far away. Suddenly, I found the walk took 10 minutes, and I couldn't understand why I had thought it was such a long way.

• Sometimes when I go shopping in central London, I park my car in an underground carpark. On occasion, the lift is broken, and in order to get up to street level, I have to walk up six flights of stairs. Before I started to exercise, this used to leave me a wheezing wreck, incapable of further movement without a long rest. After I started exercising, I was amazed to discover that those stairs left me just slightly out of breath.

But walking is still so boring! I don't live in a particularly attractive area, and it didn't take me long to exhaust the possibilities of the neighborhood. On the other hand, there is one place I do love walking - Greenwich Park, one of the great Royal parks of London. It's about 15-minutes drive away, and there's lots to look at in the park. But that's the trouble. I keep stopping to look at things, which means I'm not getting the exercise!

Last summer, the novelty kept me going for several months. Then came autumn and winter, with bad weather giving me a good excuse not to walk. I am a fair weather walker, in both the literal and the metaphorical meaning of the word. It doesn't take much to persuade me not to bother today. A spot of rain... a busy day that won't leave me time for a walk... a crisis that has to be dealt with... there's always some reason to put it off.

Intellectually, I know I have to do it. And like those childhood walks, once I goose myself into doing it, I quite enjoy it. But forcing myself to get out there and do it, that's not easy.

So far, this year hasn't been successful either. The weather has been against me... apart from the first few weeks of May, when we had a mini-heatwave and it was far too hot for me to leave the comfort of my air-conditioned home, it's rained all the time.

Finally, this weekend, it looks like the weather has improved. This year, I have a new type of exercise to try. I've bought myself a bicycle. We'll see how I get on!

More Honey Syphon