Alright, back again, week 13 of our Diabetes Prevention
Program, physical activity.
The classes that are part of the
National Diabetes Prevention Program work
because they have been studied and tested.
We have known for some time now based on really
well done research studies that you can prevent or
postpone type 2 diabetes.
This is the opportunity for us to implement
those findings in a way that the population can experience it.
(voice of instructor) Tim, looking at how far you have
come, I mean what else is out there?
Where else do you want to go?
In their core 16 weeks of this program participants
will come in and meet once a week with
their facilitator in their small group.
We'll sit down and we'll discuss one of our 16
lifestyle topics for that day.
I've been pre-diabetic for over two and a half years.
And I've just kind of ignored it because that word
"pre" was there.
I knew that my blood sugar was high
and I would watch my diet a little bit and then I
would stop but I didn't do anything consistently on a
consistent basis.
There's an issue with the patients
not realizing the problem is as bad as it is
or as bad as it may become.
The first few weeks of the program we're talking
all about fat gram intake behavior modification,
your level of activity and how physically active
that you are during the day and stress management.
Stress management is a very important piece
when it comes to lifestyle change.
It affects people's eating,
it affects people's physical activity.
It affects everything that has to do with lifestyle change.
A lot of people think you have to have machines and
tracks and things like that to constitute exercise.
But what we look at in the class is how active are
you, really, throughout the day.
I like to walk early in the morning
it gets your day started and it's a good little
power walk and it's free.
It doesn't cost anything to walk here.
Initially, I was in denial that there's
a higher percentage of African Americans affected
by diabetes than other ethnic groups.
But, all around me friends, family,
church members I was seeing younger
and younger people affected by the disease.
One of the things we were required to do was
to set a goal of weight loss,
set a nutritional goal because we established
what our fat gram content had to be for the day.
We were to set in our books exactly how many
minutes we were going to exercise every day.
The real success is that people are working
together to try to find a solution
and to support each other.
Without the class I would have never done this
on my own because I had tried.
I had done every single thing out there that I could think of.
My hope for this program is that many physicians
across our community will use this resource as
their first line of defense against type 2 diabetes.
That's what our program is here for.
This is really the example of what we wish would
happen in many fronts.
Is that the government, the private sector
and the community sector would really join forces
and come together to solve these problems.
My patients love the idea of being able to
have a program to be healthier going forwards.
My patients really love that.
They are surprised that they can actually get
older and be on fewer medications.
I am so excited because I went to the doctor last week,
all of my numbers were down
and I am officially no longer pre-diabetic.
There are almost 80 million people that have pre-diabetes.
My dream is that in the next few years
it will be easy for people to get access to this program
and, ultimately we will be able to say,
fewer people are developing type 2 diabetes.