Moving your muscles revs the body's engine, boosting its fuel consumption. Result: Glucose levels tend to drop when you're physically active. Overall, this is a good thing, and monitoring can provide insight into ways in which you can strategically use exercise to lower your blood sugar. Be sure to work with your doctor to figure out how exercise should factor into your approach to diabetes management.
- Adjust your drug regimen. Strenuous exercise can sometimes lower blood sugar for hours after your workout—even for as long as one or two days. If you're tightly controlling your glucose with insulin or medication, your post-exercise monitoring may suggest that you lower your dosages to avoid hypoglycemia. Ask your doctor for specific advice with regard to your condition and activity levels in order to adjust your drug regimen accordingly.
- Tank up ahead of time. If you're planning to exercise vigorously, you may want to eat more food earlier in the day or take less insulin to make sure you have enough glucose readily available to fuel working muscles. Aim to work out an hour or two after eating, when blood sugar will be naturally high.
- Keep well fueled afterward. Depending on how strenuous your workout has been, it might be a good idea to increase your food intake for up to 24 hours after exercising to make sure blood-sugar levels don't fall too low.
- Use exercise as medicine. If you're taking insulin and understand through monitoring how exercise affects your blood sugar, you may find that it's possible to use a workout essentially as an insulin substitute—specifically intended as a way to bring blood sugar down at certain times. (Talk to your doctor before adjusting your drug regimen.)
- Be alert to the unexpected. Certain types of vigorous exercises—weight lifting, for example—that unlock glucose stored in muscles can make blood sugar go up rather than down. Your doctor can suggest how you might adjust insulin or drug treatments accordingly.
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