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If you scored four or more, you are pre-diabetic. You’re on your way to getting it, but you are not yet there. The good news is that at this stage you can still ward off diabetes. If you scored five or more you are at risk of full-blown diabetes. Diabetes is incurable and must be managed for the rest of your life.
Whenever you exercise, your body has the ability to absorb sugar from the blood stream through its separate mechanism, independent of insulin, for the next 24 hours. In other words, irrespective of whether we have insulin or not, our body is able to absorb sugar from our blood stream so we can use it and get it out of our systems in 24 hours. This is one of the best life hacks ever that, on its own, should get you exercising every single day.
There is another condition that the World Health Organisation describes as capable of robbing adults of more productive years than any other disease.
Anxiety and depression.
One in six South Africans battle with depression. As rife and widespread as it is, stigma still surrounds it and we avoid this subject. Why?
If you have an inflamed or infected appendix, you say I have appendicitis. But if you are battling with depression, do you say, I have depression or do you say, I am depressed? We say I am depressed. We let the disease define us. We shouldn’t. It’s a disease that can be managed.
A study conducted by scientists in New Zealand almost 20 years ago asked people only two questions which were found to be about 97% accurate when it came to detecting whether they were at risk for anxiety or depression. They were:
- In the past month have you often been bothered by
feeling down or depressed or hopeless?
- In the past month have you often had little interest or
pleasure in doing things?
Those who answered ‘yes’ to both questions were at risk of depression. How can we curb and manage depression? Yes, exercise. You’ve heard of happy hormones? Endorphins? Those exercise hormones we get when we exercise. The runner’s high, they call it. Our bodies produce these wonderful hormones that are painkillers; they make us feel good and the more intensely you exercise, the more you get. The question is how effective are they.
Every individual cell in your body, and you’ve got more than a trillion, has a million little structures called mitochondria that produce something called adenosine tri-phosphate which is the biological currency of life. Those are like little fuel cells, and mitochondria are your factories. When you exercise, your body naturally produces more factories, so it produces more energy.
So, if you or someone close feels depressed, then exercise. However, advising someone who is depressed to exercise might not go down well. You might feel that you do not have the energy to go to gym or exercise. That’s a convenient excuse. You don’t have to go to the gym. Exercise anyway and you will build more factories and more energy. As Nike says, ‘just do it’!
A study that compared exercise to Prozac to manage depression found that exercise was as effective as Prozac in managing mild to moderate depression. Moderate depression is the kind of depression most people suffer from. Prozac takes about 6 – 8 weeks to kick in; exercise is instantaneous. Isn’t that amazing?
Lastly, if you have a scale at home, I’m happy for you; just take it out of the bathroom. It doesn’t tell you much, particularly when it comes to fat, because fat is an issue, and if we look at those magazines that line supermarket shelves, and we look at ourselves, we often find lumps and bumps in all the wrong places and we just want to hide.
The only lump or bump you need to be concerned about is belly fat. The executive overhang, the beer-
boep, muffin-top, or whatever you want to call it; that’s the dangerous fat. Anything anywhere else in your body is not a problem. The reason belly fat is dangerous is not because it’s underneath your skin, but the fat around your belly is visceral fat or fat that’s in between your organs. That’s dangerous fat and is almost an organ in itself and is busy churning out hormones, messing with your insulin metabolism and increasing cholesterol; it is the enemy within.
I don’t know if you ever saw that movie Aliens where the alien is coming out of the person’s chest? This is worse. This is like sleeping with the enemy inside. You want to get rid of belly fat.
The question is, do you know if you have too much or not?
The answer is not a scale. It’s a piece of string about 1.5 metres in length and a credit or debit card. The best way to do this test is when you are naked. Stand up, ideally in front of a mirror. Midway between the highest point of your hip and your lowest rib, run the string around your waist parallel to the floor and just above your naval. When you get back to the point where you started, you have your waist circumference. Keep your hand at that spot on the piece of string.
Now take your credit card and start winding the string around the card lengthways. Every time your string crosses one face of your card, count 1 until you’ve wound it right around.
For men, the maximum number of times you should be able to wind your string around your credit card is 11. Anything more and you have too much belly fat. For women, it’s 9 1⁄2 times.
If you have too much belly fat, don’t do 300 sit-ups; your body doesn’t lose fat in a spot reduction kind of way. Rather do the exercise that you love to do at the highest intensity possible.
The other thing to remember is that when you start