Man's Best Friend Led Her Back to Health
Losing weight is an important step in fighting diabetes--and walking the dog is a great way to get started.
Written by Vera Tweed
Walking the dog was the turning point in Lola McIntyre’s recovery.
When Lola McIntyre was diagnosed with type 2 diabetes last year, her first reaction was that the lab had made a mistake. But once reality sank in, she decided to prove the diagnosis wrong. To improve her odds, she stopped eating sugar; two weeks later, she used a glucose meter to test her fasting blood glucose. She was stunned to see that it was 150, way above the normal level of 99 or less.
With a firm resolve to take control, Lola began methodically limiting her intake of starches and sugars, and taking medication. However, her blood sugar levels refused to drop below 130—until a chance encounter with the family dog.
Hating exercise, Lola usually left dog-walking to her husband and son. But one day, home alone, she couldn’t resist the pet’s pleas to be taken out. Curiosity prompted her to check her blood sugar levels before and after the excursion.
Again, the glucose meter surprised her, but this time for a different reason. After the walk, her blood glucose level had dropped dramatically, even though she had only taken the dog around the block. “This told me I had to exercise,” she recalls.
On her first visit to a local gym, swollen and painful feet limited her treadmill time to
10 minutes. So for the first two weeks, she conditioned her feet, stretching her Achilles tendon by standing with her toes on the edge of a step, and doing heel raises on the floor. With some help from a trainer, she started getting stronger and losing weight.
To learn more about nutrition, Lola enrolled in the Clarian Diabetes Centers Educational Program in her hometown of Carmel, Ind. “I didn’t know I was eating hidden carbs and sugar in salad dressings, chicken breasts rolled in bread crumbs, and veggie burgers,” she says. “Plus, I learned how to read my body’s signals.” As a result, she now keeps her blood sugar stable at around 99 and is working on a plan, with her doctor, to eliminate medication.
As she regained her health, “Fear turned to joy, and everything else in my life came into focus,” Lola says. She stopped having hot flashes, gained physical strength, lost more than 40 lb, regained hair that was thinning, and her real estate business has boomed.
Last Christmas, less than three months after beginning to eat the right way and exercise regularly, Lola went skiing in Utah with her family for the first time in many years. “When I was on the mountain, I could really see the benefits,” she says. “I didn’t know it was possible for me to enjoy recreational sports like I would at 35.” She is 52.
