MY LIFE IS devoted to taking care of people who are at risk for diabetes as well as those who already have diabetes. My patients come in all shapes and sizes, ethnicities, and ages. Some have been diagnosed recently; others have been dealing with their diabetes and its challenges for many years. I see people I can help and, sadly others whose complications from diabetes are too far advanced. Increasingly I see patients who are asking how to avoid getting diabetes and I rejoice in this trend. To be able to stop this disease before it begins is one of the joys of my life. I see overweight and sedentary middle-aged men and women who wrestle daily to change their diet and exercise habits so they won’t suffer from complications of diabetes, such as blindness or life on dialysis. On the same day that I see a fifty-six-year-old double amputee in a wheelchair, I may also see a seventy-six-year-old who’s had diabetes since the 1940s who never misses his daily four-mile walk with his dog. I know that for each and every one of these people, diabetes complications can be minimized or prevented altogether. I laid out the path to doing so in my own book, Conquering Diabetes (Hudson Street Press, 2005); now Dr. Colberg gives you a complementary route to succeeding in accomplishing these same worthy goals.
As an exercise physiologist, Dr. Colberg’s focus is more on physical activity than mine as a diabetes physician is. In fact, she is the person I turn to when I need to know more about how to treat an athlete. Having accompanied my swimmer, Gary Hall Jr., to the Sydney and Athens Olympics (and helping him win six medals, three of them gold!) I am often sought out as an expert on diabetes and exercise. But truth be told, Dr. Colberg is my expert, and now she can also be yours.
Personally, I dislike exercise. Every second I am exercising, I am thinking about how soon I can stop. My brain is engaged in a continuous conflict between my desire to quit and my commitment to stay fit. Since it is always a struggle, you’d think I’d give it up. But do you know what I hate even more than exercising? Being out of shape. I hate how I feel if I don’t exercise. And although I dislike the act of exercising, I am always glad that I’ve done it.
I am definitely not a saint about exercising regularly. There are weeks in which I can exercise only once or twice, and there are weeks, occasionally, when I go on strike because my body needs a break. But the following week I’m back to the routine. Perhaps the most valuable lesson about fitness that we can all learn from Dr. Colberg is how to fit more physical activity into our daily lives so naturally we don’t even realize we’re doing it. For example, on an average day at the clinic, I put in close to ten thousand steps just going from patient to patient—so I’m not doing as badly as I thought. When I do find time to fit in my more formal exercise routine, I’m just enhancing my fitness level that much more.
Diabetes is growing at an epidemic rate, in the United States and worldwide. According to the most recent statistics, from 2000, one out of every three children born in the United States will develop diabetes in their lifetime. This number increases to one in two if the child is Latino or African American. What’s traditionally been known as “adult-onset” diabetes is being diagnosed at younger and younger ages. If a person is diagnosed with diabetes at age twenty, that person can count on seventeen fewer years of life compared to a person without diabetes. Seventeen years. It could mean you won’t live long enough to retire, or play with your grandchildren, or celebrate your thirty-fifth wedding anniversary. Even if you get diabetes later in life, say at age sixty, nine years of your life will be lost. But the good news is that if you take good care of your diabetes, you don’t have to miss out on these and other wonderful experiences due to complications that are—and I can’t stress this enough—preventable.
So, why wait until you have diabetes—or irreversible health complications that limit your quality of life—before you do anything about it? It is no longer enough to sit back and let your physician tell you what to do. Each of us must become empowered health-care consumers. Medicine is changing rapidly, and sometimes even doctors have trouble keeping up. Many people take their health for granted until they become ill, when it is often too late for doctors to make a big difference anyway Dr. Colberg’s 7 Step Diabetes Fitness Plan will not only help those who have diabetes to live well with it, it will help those who don’t have it from developing it in the first place. It’s never too soon to take your life (and your health) into your own hands and to live well, become fit, and enjoy a longer, healthier life.
Anne Peters, MD, one of the top twenty physicians treating diabetes in America, is director of the University of Southern California clinical diabetes programs and professor at the USC Keck School of Medicine. She is also currently the physician in charge of developing the nation’s largest outreach program for community-based diabetes prevention and treatment. Her research has been published in such leading medical journals as the Journal of the American Medical Association, the Annals of Internal Medicine, the American Journal of Medicine, and Diabetes Care.