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Prediabetes Is exercise helpful in people who are underweight

J

Jenna2

Member
Messages
17
Type of diabetes
Prediabetes
All the advise re exercise to control type 2 diabetes seems to be aimed at losing weight. What about those of us who are already too skinny and don't want to lose any - will exercise without weight loss (i.e. eating more to compensate) help improve insulin sensitivity in us? My BMI is 18 and my GP tells me I need to put on weight. I am unsure whether increased exercise without weight loss could be helpful.. Does anyone know if there is any evidence for or against this?
 
Excercise is about more than weight loss. It makes you feel good, lowers blood pressure, builds muscle (which can help you gain weight).
 
Yes it will help! Insulin sensitivity is determined by a number of factors. One of these is weight - generally fatter people have higher insulin resistance, and as many type 2's are overweight, exercise is recommended in order to reduce weight and therefore decrease their insulin resistance. However, exercise also causes increased insulin sensitivity for a time period after the exercise is finished - it varies depending on your body and the exercise you do, but the effects can last up to 24 hours. This is why people on insulin are advised to watch their blood sugars closely after exercise. From my personal experience as a type 1 diabetic with BMI 19.5, exercise definitely affects my insulin sensitivity even though I have maintained an almost constant weight.
 
Diakat said:
Excercise is about more than weight loss. It makes you feel good, lowers blood pressure, builds muscle (which can help you gain weight).
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Thanks Diakat, yes thats all very true and I'm sure more exercise would be overall very valuable. (And I will do!) I guess I'm also just interested whether or not its been shown to increase insulin sensitivity in the absence of weight loss.
 
Thanks phdiabetic - that's good to hear - it gives me more incentive to get out walking!
 
There are a number of pieces of work ongoing at the moment, looking at exercise and blood glucose. One such research piece is happening at Leicester where they were totally disinterested in weight gain/loss, purely blood glucose numbers.

The process of merely standing up for 5 minutes every hour had an impact on blood sugar results. That's standing up; not standing up and moving around or anything else. It appears that the trigger is utilising the large muscle groups required to get from a sitting, or lying position to vertical that does the trick. Any more than than is a bonus. I would add that to focus on exercise for weightloss never makes too much sense to me as so much effort can be required to utilise enough energy to make a difference, and then what happens if an injury occurs, or life gets in the way of that regular exercise regime.

If you enjoy your new exercise regime, I would certain not discourage you from doing it, but using it to gain or lose weight is a toughie, in my opinion.
 
Jenna2 said:
All the advise re exercise to control type 2 diabetes seems to be aimed at losing weight.
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It seems to have morphed into that but it isn't how the advice started. Controlling blood sugar levels was what all the advice was about. There were a number of shorthand ways of referring to the different perceptions of what they were doing. For example there was ETYM, LCHF etc. but all resulted in eating less carbs. It is true that some people lost weight while doing this and once this knowledge got out there the emphasis changed a little. People were now arriving asking how to lose weight because they didn't like being big. Now it seems from what you say that, "All the advise re exercise to control type 2 diabetes seems to be aimed at losing weight" when exercise is the most inefficient way to lose weight.
 
Think about your question as if you had type 1 and the answer becomes more clear.

Those of us with t1d are certainly not immune to insulin resistance and it's actually fairly common to develop IR after using artificial insulin for so many years.

Exercise offers so many benefits beyond potentially losing weight and there is a very strong corrrelation between exercise and increased insulin sensitivity.

If nothing else, you're effectively "training" your body to more effectively store and release gluclose during exercise as your body releases stored glycogen into your blood stream in the form of glucose.
 
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