My short story about blood sugar levels
Exercise is probably the best way to increase the capacity of your ER (endoplasmic reticulum). With blood sugar levels chart you can start measuring your progress in controlling of blood sugar levels. Build up gradually, and plan to exercise for the rest of your life. Pick something you like to do, and that you can do rain or shine, winter or summer. Pick something that doesn’t depend on other people showing up. Always carry a blood sugar chart with you as blood sugar chart will be your best bet when assessing the numbers you measure.
Recommendations
I recommend exercising in the morning, before breakfast. From personal experience, I know it’s hard to exercise when you’re tired at the end of the day. And in the evening, something seems to always come up to interrupt the schedule. Also, the growth hormone boost caused by exercise is larger in the morning, before you’ve eaten.
I bought a recumbent Life Cycle, and worked up very gradually. Because the cellular energy available to diabetics is too small, exercise is not fun at all. It remained not fun as I worked up from “really dismal” performance, through “average”. When I got to “really good” I began to look forward to the blood-pumping feeling. It took years. And it took doing it every day. I started at level 3 for 6 minutes and now, five years later, I am at level 9 for 50 minutes. This means my cardio was not only high intensity but also progressive. I was later to learn this was important.
Now that I’m cured, I cycle two or three days a week and lift weights two or three. I don’t formally exercise of Sundays, and I allow myself one other day off if I feel like it. My exercise equipment is in the living room, where I can watch movies or TV programs while exercising – it makes the time spent interesting instead of aggravating.
I ran across a sports medicine article where they were studying the physiology of extreme sports conditioning. It turned out that high intensity cardio exercise has effects that lower intensity aerobic exercise does not have. One of those is to triple the size of the ER. It does this by activating Heat Shock Factor One, HSF-1, which increases the production of chaperones.
This allows the ER to structurally increase its own size to handle the increased workload high intensity exercise requires. This was the first I had heard of the ER and heat shock proteins which are mostly chaperones. The important thing for me was the fact that increasing the size of the ER would allow the cell to handle “insults” more easily – including inflammation.
HIIT exercise
If you want an example of high intensity exercise for obese people you need look no further than the TV program “The Biggest Loser”. I bought and read the book written by the doctor (Rob Huizenga) who designed the original workout program for the show. In his book he states that the workout on the show was too extreme and that better results could be obtained by working out twice a day, once first thing in the morning and again after work. When I tried his twice-a-day suggestion, my results improved dramatically, but I didn’t know why.
I began to look at what would activate HSF-1. Clearly high intensity cardio did. The way that works is that it activates the gene sirT1 producing deacetylative proteins. One of the proteins deacetylated was HSF-1 which is normally inactive due to acetylation. This action actually reaches a peak about 12-18 hours after the exercise.
Weight training also activates HSF-1, but in a completely different fashion. There is another heat shock protein, HSP-72. This protein usually has an unacetylated HSF-1 protein attached to it, but the HSF-1 cannot enter the nucleus while attached to HSP-72. HSP-72, among its many abilities, can detect “denatured” or partially unfolded proteins. When it does detect an unfolded protein, it releases HSF-1, which results in an increase in chaperones to fold proteins. The end result is the same as the high intensity cardio exercise, but the method differs.
I should add that weight training denatures proteins as a result of its intensity. So intense, progressive weight training is the key here.