johnpalmer

Remember how I talked about how blood sugar is amazing, you can drink 35 grams of sugar in carbonated water (a Coke) and it can find a place to stuff 29 grams of it almost as quickly as it gets into your bloodstream?

I hadn't realized the other side of that.

What if your body couldn't handle that, and your blood sugar *shot* up to 200?

How much would you have to exercise, how much wearying toil would you have to perform, to bring your blood sugar back to, say, 120?

Let's see... 200 mg/dl, 5 liters, 10 grams... - 120 mg/dl, 5 liters, 6 grams...

Enough to burn four grams of carbohydrate.

Wait... what? That's a lousy 16 calories!

Okay, sure, but when you exercise at low intensity, your body probably only burns 30% of your calories as sugar, the rest are from fat. That would mean you'd need 3 1/3 times as much, which is... a little over 50 calories.

Really?

Okay, now, note one thing: if you drink 140 calories of soda, and only burn 60 calories in exercise, you're still getting 80 calories of fat (that's what your body does to sugar, after all). But your blood sugar might be back in balance.

That can't be right - can it?

If it was, hyperactivity would be a fine treatment for type II diabetes. Is that really going to work?

(Edited: I accidentally deleted this paragraph) I do know that my sugar rose high when I tested my favorite quick-meal of breaded chicken strips, but that I found I could control it with a ten minute walk taken about a half hour after I'd finished eating. It wasn't enough to burn off the calories, or the sugar, but it was enough to burn just a bit of extra sugar, and thereby reduce my blood sugar level.

So it can work, sometimes, for some people, with certain sugar control issues. And it's widely acknowledged that any exercise is good for folks with blood sugar issues. Timing one's exercise, when possible, might help a great deal.

I'm now trying to take a 5 minute walk every hour, which is good for anyone who sits at a desk much of the day anyway.