The causes of type 2 diabetes, or “adult-onset diabetes”, are more obscure than those of type 1, but that doesn’t make it any easier to live with. Patients are often ill, tired, hungry and thirsty and, as a consequence, their quality of life is lower. If you are overweight and you develop diabetes, the two are likely to be connected and the best thing you can do to combat the disorder is to lose weight. At the Leiden University Medical Centre, internists put obese diabetics on a diet containing very few calories, which helps them to lose weight very quickly.
In the European Journal of Internal Medicine, they write about a study among 27 seriously overweight diabetics, using two fat and two slim people as a control group for each diabetic. Thirteen of the 27 diabetics were also put on a stringent, five-hour-a-week exercise programme as well as the very strict diet.
For the first 16 weeks, the participants improved drastically: the kilos melted away, with an average of 25 kilograms per person. The quality of life – established by means of questionnaires – increased, more or less equivalently for both the ordinary dieters and the exercising dieters.
However, the problem of losing weight is never losing the weight; it’s staying at the right weight. And it was no difference in this case: around half the kilos had been gained again
after eighteen months. Those patients on the exercise programme had put on slightly less weight and their quality of life was better. In addition, the diabetes was more manageable for this group and accordingly, the scientists stress the importance of exercise for diabetics.