The growing number of people who have obesity can be attributed to mainly two things. The first thing is consuming processed foods, which we’ve pinned above. While the other thing is a sedentary lifestyle, which, simply put, is the lack of movement and physical activity.
For my patients and clients, I usually recommend walking daily or HIIT. HIIT is a methodology that I prescribe to all my patients, but more especially for those who are pre-diabetic or have type 2 Diabetes. For my patients who choose to implement it, it does wonders for their health.
So what is HIIT? Well, it's something that we all use to do at some point in our life. Whether we were playing hide and go seek, freeze tag or riding our bikes playing chase, we all at some point habitually did HIIT. In fact, doing HIIT seemed to come so natural to us that is was baked into our play. It was never something that had to be taught.
HIIT is Going TOP SPEED for a short burst followed by a short rest period in between followed by several more rounds of going all out. Essentially, this is fancy talk for being a kid again! Although a very popular method among kids, the health effects of HIIT are anything but child’s play.
You see, type 2 diabetes and HIIT are inherently natural enemies. HIIT gives the pathology of diabetes extreme difficulty when trying to persist as a disease. High-intensity interval training has been shown to override this insulin resistance momentarily, thus making the muscle cells very much sensitive to the glucose present in the bloodstream, without the use of insulin, which in turn done consistently, will increase insulin sensitivity, while also improving uncontrolled blood sugar levels.
The reason this happens has been well documented. Each cell has glucose transporters (GLUT4) which are usually activated by insulin to allow glucose into the cell. However, HIIT sends your muscles into beast mode, because the INTENSE contraction of the muscles, will now simulate the GLUT4 transporters, absorbing glucose whether insulin is available or not. Why, because in order for your cells to participate in this intense workout, it will use the glucose that it already had, while needing more to continue.
Clinically, I have seen this work multiple times with my own patients who have been diagnosed with type 2 diabetes. When I give them a prescribed workout plan of HIIT, along with these other strategies, their HA1c and several other markers for diabetes improve.