Episode: 2665
Title: HPR2665: Exercise and Diet
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr2665/hpr2665.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-19 07:11:35

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This is HPR Episode 2665 entitled Exercise and Diet and in part of the series, Health and Health Care.
It is hosted by AYUKA and in about 17 minutes long and carrying a clean flag.
The summary is Exercise and Diet our primary to health.
This episode of HPR is brought to you by archive.org.
Support universal access to all knowledge by heading over to archive.org forward slash donate.
Support universal access to all knowledge by heading over to archive.org.
Hello, this is AYUKA, welcoming you to Hacker Public Radio and another exciting episode
in my series on health and taking care of yourself.
And now I'm going to go from the problem to the solution.
And the solution, there's a number of pieces of it, but what I want to talk about today
is the importance of exercise and diet.
Now, to sum up the previous things that we've talked about, I am 67 years old.
I am diabetic. I'm a cancer survivor, prostate cancer.
I have a family history of colon cancer.
I have macular degeneration. I have sleep apnea and atrial fibrillation.
So, you may be waiting for the news that I've keeled over for many combination of the above,
but the funny thing is that I am not.
At my six months check up a few weeks ago, as I write this, I was talking about my retirement plans
with my doctor. I planned a retired age 70 and then my wife and I will get an RV and do some
traveling. And my doctor said I could probably expect 20 to 30 good years in retirement.
So, why would he say that? Well, let's look at the data. I'm a great believer in data as a way
of making decisions. Now, as a diabetic, I get a complete blood workup every six months before
I go in for my check up. And we had these results to look at. HBA1C of 5.7.
Now, HBA1C is a measure of your average blood glucose level over the two to three previous months.
And 5.7 is within the upper part, but within the range of normal results for a healthy non-diabetic.
I've talked to a lot of diabetic people who just find it hard to believe I could have an A1C that
is that low. Then there's something called an HSCRP, which is a measure of my risk of cardiac
disease. That's 1.58. This is in the average range. Ah, cholesterol. Overall, my cholesterol is 185.
And the preferred range is under 200. Now, for HDL, which is what's called the good cholesterol,
my number was 42. They want it to be above 40. LDL, which is the bad cholesterol, was 119. They want
it under 129. Triglycerides was 118, and they want it under 150. Now, there were a bunch of other
measurements, but let's just say that none of them was in a range indicating danger or risk.
This is pretty good stuff. So my doctor gets this report from the lab, and basically writes back
to me, says, hey, everything looks good. Now, it wasn't always like this. At one time, I was someone
who rarely exercised. I ate a lot of junk food and was packing on the pounds. And there's a lot
to do with how I got the diabetes and probably contributed to many of the other issues I have faced.
And as I have said previously, the turning point came when I decided to take my diabetes seriously.
My blood sugar kept staying high. My medications were increasing, and daily insulin injections were
coming up when I made a decision to turn my life around. The key was diet and exercise as it
usually is. And what additional factor is that I have involved my wife in all of my health measures.
She is, after all, my biggest ally in support, and I would be stupid not to involve her.
So let's start with exercise. Exercise is important for all kinds of reasons, of course.
Good heart health begins with exercise. Weight control is crucial to dealing with diabetes and
sleep apnea. And exercise is important to that for its effects on metabolism, but it is important
not to go too far in that regard. Many people think exercise by itself will cause weight loss,
but the studies I have seen say that that's not quite the way it works. Exercise by itself does
not cause weight loss. It has to be combined with diet changes. But I have a suspicion that exercise
has good psychological effects. It makes you feel good about yourself, and that can aid in
maintaining discipline and eating. Now, you are always advised to check with your doctor first
before starting an exercise program. And in my case, my doctor encouraged me to get right to it.
I think the most important thing is to find an exercise program you can continue to do.
I got a membership at our local county recreation facility. They have strength machines,
classes in various things, a pool, basketball courts, walking and running paths.
It's really a fabulous resource that I love. My wife, on the other hand, prefers planet fitness,
which is a chain in the United States. It doesn't matter. The key point is you have to do it.
A tons of people have bought a membership, used it a few times, and then given up.
A good example of that is something that I have noticed at my county rec,
and that is it tends to get really crowded in January, because of all the people who make
New Year's resolutions. Yeah, this is the year I'm really going to get in a shape,
and that lasts a few weeks. By the beginning of March, they're gone, and then it's just all of the
regulars again. That's something that happens a lot. Making a resolution doesn't mean anything,
unless you actually do it. One thing we have both found handy, my wife and I both, is to have a
buddy you exercise with, who will keep you honest. Now, one of the exercises that I do is water
aerobics, and when I got started, I had a buddy for it, and many times I decided it was easier to
just go than explain to her why I couldn't make it. Accountability is a wonderful thing that way.
Now, I now have a schedule that has me going three to four times a week for an hour.
I am signed up for two classes of water aerobics each week, one yoga class to help with flexibility,
and one slot that could be a number of things, it could be another water aerobics, or strength
machines, depending on time of the year, my mood, etc. I think right now I'm really focused on
strength machines, because I've been reading about how strength workouts are important for
controlling diabetes, and that's one of the things that I do. I get a magazine each month called
diabetes, not every two months, I think, called diabetes self-management, and I read through the
articles. One of the reasons that I take seriously, what it says is that all of the articles are
written by people who usually have a whole bunch of letters after their name, if you know what I
mean. They're people with solid medical training and good backgrounds. When it says I should be
doing more strength training, well, okay, that's fine, so I think now my Wednesdays are going to be
strength training days. Now, I say three to four times a week, I'm still working, I've got about
three more years before I plan to retire, and I go to the rec center after work. Sometimes other
things conflict, so I may miss one on any given week, but usually I make it, and if I don't, I have
to explain it to my wife, as I said, accountability is a wonderful thing. Another activity my wife and I
do is ride bicycles. We have great parks around here that have paths that are safe for cycling,
and we like nothing more than getting out on a Sunday afternoon for a 15 to 20 mile ride when
the weather permits. And we've also started doing hiking. There are a lot of great parks with hiking
trails around here, and we'd love to do that as well. And we've started building in activity in
other ways. So a couple of weeks ago, we rented an RV trailer for a week in the northern part of
the state, and had some activity every day. We'd get up in the morning, have breakfast and coffee,
then get out while it was still cool. On four of those days, we went for a bike ride. We were
averaging 15 miles, or 24 kilometers per day. And on the two other days, we went hiking.
Now we installed a trailer hitch on my car that lets us put in a bike rack that makes it easy
to haul our bikes around. One of the things we like to do is go to music festivals. So we take
our bikes with us when we go to a music festival, and we found we can get up in the morning and go
for a ride, because in my experience, nothing happens at music festivals until noon anyway.
So there's plenty of time to get up, have breakfast, to cup a coffee, you know, get in a nice bike
ride before you go to the festival. Now last year for our vacation, we went out to western part of
the United States to visit a number of our national parks, including Grand Canyon, Zion Canyon,
Bryce Canyon, Arches, and the Rocky Mountain National Park. Each day included hiking
at altitude. I don't think in the course of that week we ever got much below 10,000 feet
of above sea level for altitude, altitude. And the hiking we did every day was, you know, a few
miles, all right. It was not the baton death march, but the thing is we were out and we were going
up and down hills and doing these paths. And I talked to my cardiologist and he said, great,
if you can do that, you've got to be in pretty good shape. How about the year before, all right?
In 2016, for our vacation, we went on something called a boat and bike tour that started in Amsterdam
and ended in Bruges. Each day we would get up, have breakfast, and get on the bikes.
Most days we rode for about 35 miles, 56 kilometers, which we've decided is more than we want to do
for a future vacation. But if we can get it down to the 20 to 25 mile or 32 to 40 kilometer range,
we might do it again. And when we retire, our plan is to get away from our Michigan winners
and go out in an RV to visit some of the national parks and other sites of this country.
And we will take our bikes and our hiking shoes. We may not go out every day like we did on our
vacation this year, but I would expect we would do a ride or a hike three to four days a week.
In other words, we've turned this into a lifestyle choice by now.
So that's the exercise part. What about diet?
That's the other important part. As I mentioned, my change began with reading a book by
Dr. Richard Bernstein, Diabetes Solution, which explained to me that if I ate foods that raised my
blood sugar, my blood sugar would keep rising. Pretty radical, huh? On the converse side,
if I cut those foods out, my blood sugar would stabilize. Now, that made good sense to me,
so I gave it a try. Now, my doctor was fine with that. I cut out all starches.
So no more potatoes for this Irishman. No rice. No all greens, basically. All sugars,
in short, anything that would raise my blood sugar, that does not necessarily mean that I get
no carbohydrates in my diet at all, since the vegetables I eat still have some carbohydrate,
but at a level that causes me no problems.
Lightly, it seems like this kind of diet has been a bit of a fad and a backlash has come
telling people, oh no, you need to eat those carbohydrate rich foods. Well, I'm not doing,
you know, a ketogenic diet or paleo diet to be hip. I'm trying to control my diabetes.
I am examined by doctors very regularly. I get frequent blood tests. I have discussed my
diet with all of my doctors. Now, I myself am not a doctor, but I make use of the doctors. I am
fortunate enough to have. In my case, I have a lot of evidence that this is a good diet for me.
I've had three different doctors take a look at my blood numbers and say, Kevin, you don't look
like a diabetic. You look like a normal non-diabetic adult. And you know, that's exactly what I want.
Now, of course, if you take out those foods, you have to substitute something else. So what does my
diet look like? Monday through Friday, I go to work. So what I do is I start out each morning
by weighing out three ounces. It's about 85 grams of meat. And this is usually cold cuts that I
get from the deli sections. So it might be some sliced ham or chicken or roast beef or whatever.
So I weigh out those 85 grams, then two ounces. It's about 57 grams of cheese.
Then I get a large coffee with cream and an artificial sweetener. That's my breakfast.
Lunch comes from the salad bar at the company cafeteria and is generally about 16 ounces,
which would be 454 grams of vegetables. Well, mostly vegetables, there's some cheese on there as
well. Dinner is usually a salad as well, but I usually eat out and don't know exactly how much.
But let's assume it is the same as lunch. Dessert is generally a sugar-free gelatin with a little
heavy cream on it. The heavy cream has some fat, but no carbs. On weekends, I go to a local restaurant
for brunch and you know what that consists of a large salad with a little fresh fruit and some
meat, mostly bacon or sausage. Dinner may be another salad or it might be meat and vegetables of
some kind or maybe vegetables with hummus, all stuff that I love. The point is that diet and exercise
have produced these results that got those three doctors to say you don't look like a diabetic.
And I think that is fantastic. That's exactly the way I want it. And so despite the list of problems
that I have presented in the preceding several episodes, I'm actually in pretty good shape.
And this is a big part of how I do it. Now, the other thing I want to get into is understanding
what the medical literature is saying. And so I want to get into that a little bit in some upcoming
episodes because that's another place where you know people often fall victim to fads and
ill-advised strategies. So with that, this is Ahuka at Hacker Public Radio signing off and as always
reminding you to support free software. Bye bye.
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