Hiya everyone. I've never been a one for exercise. Diagnosed 7 days ago with type2. Don't mind walking but don't don't enough,
Structured exercise is so much of and effort.
Does it need to be structured?
If walking is something you ‘don’t mind’ why not just slowly start building it into your day. That’s effectively what I did on diagnosis and now I’m obsessed with it! To give background, I don’t drive and live in London and had a commute, so a degree of walking was always part of my routine - I estimate that my baseline - just going to work and back - would have been about 5k steps a day. I was close to morbidly obese, so moving wasn’t that comfortable.
I started by just slightly increasing my pace on my standard routes. As that got easier, I slightly increased the length of the route from the station to the office, then added a short (5 mins) walk at lunchtime. From there I found I enjoyed it, and the walking was stress busting so I just kept building to the point where I actively looked for opportunities to walk places instead of taking transport. Then I started looking for ways to ‘join up’ green spaces or waterside routes to form more pleasant walks. My main hobby is now walking.
So as others have said, if you start with something you either enjoy or can imagine enjoying if you get better at it, you never know where it might lead.
And to be honest, what and when you eat will have a far bigger direct impact on your blood sugars, exercise just adds a little extra to that. For me it’s the other benefits of exercise that are the driver for me - and to be honest I’ve come to love walking so much I don’t view it as ‘exercise’ in that sense. It’s something I love doing and get irritated when things stop me doing as much of it as I’d like.
Good luck!