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Of course you know that eating right and exercising are good for you. But do you know that a healthy diet and regular physical activity are directly related to your ability to have normal sexual function? If you have diabetes, it’s even more important to pay close attention to your diet and exercise routine.
The benefits of exercise and healthy eating constantly reinforce each other.
First of all, good blood flow to the penis is essential for erections. High levels of cholesterol and fat in your bloodstream leave deposits in the walls of your blood vessels. This leads to atherosclerosis and contributes to high blood pressure, both of which can damage blood vessels and reduce blood flow. Exercise helps lower cholesterol and blood pressure. A diet low in fat and cholesterol also helps to prevent and reverse the buildup of fatty deposits in blood vessels.
Second, a high blood sugar level damages nerves as well as the blood vessels that are involved in getting an erection. A good diet and the right amount of exercise help keep your blood sugar level under control. Studies show that people who exercise are less likely to get diabetes, and people with diabetes who exercise have better control of their blood sugar levels. Exercise helps you use sugar more easily. That leaves less sugar in the blood.
Eating a diet low in calories — and burning calories through exercise helps you tone your body and lose weight. Studies have linked erectile dysfunction and being overweight. Many other studies have shown that exercise fights depression, which also has a major impact on sexual function. With a leaner, toned body and a better sense of well-being and self-esteem, you’re more likely to feel sexy and have normal erections.
But there’s a lot of confusing information out there. Maybe you’re wondering exactly what you should eat and what kind of exercise to choose.
Designing a Sexy Plate
For someone with diabetes, it’s important to have a meal plan approved by your doctor and a registered dietitian who is trained in diabetes nutrition.
In general, though, there are simple ways to make sure you’re eating the right things at each meal.
One good guideline to use is the food pyramid. It tells you how much of various foods should be in your diet. The things you should eat most are at the bottom and those that should be the least part of your diet are at the top. According to the food pyramid, every day you should eat:
* 2 cups of a variety of fruit
* 2.5 cups of richly colored vegetables
* 3 ounces of whole grains like whole-wheat bread, oatmeal, or brown rice
* Up to 3 ounces of refined grains like pasta, white rice, or white bread
* 3 servings of dairy foods (A serving = 1 cup of low-fat milk or yogurt, 1.5 ounces of cheese)
* 5 ounces of meat, fish, eggs, or legumes for protein
* 5 teaspoons of oils (including the oil found in nuts and fish)
* 130 to 295 discretionary calories such as sweets (about 1 cookie or cup of ice cream)
(*Note: These amounts are recommended for the average adult woman. Men can consume about one ounce more in each category.)
The diabetes “exchange” system is another way of figuring out how much of what foods to eat. An exchange list shows what portion size of a given food gives you the same amount of calories and nutrients. For example, one medium-sized peach is equivalent to 12 large cherries.
The American diabetes Association’s “Rate Your Plate” guide is a different way to look at what you’re eating. Following this guide, you divide your plate into imaginary quarters. One-quarter should contain starches, like potatoes or rice. One-quarter should contain meat. One half should contain vegetables.
Work Out Your Workout
When it comes to exercise, you don’t have to follow any “fad” workouts. Just find a way to get your body moving and your heart rate up. Here is the recommendation of the CDC:
* 30 minutes of moderate exercise five days a week; or
* 20 minutes of vigorous exercise three days a week.
But what do “moderate” and “vigorous” actually mean? You can tell how intense the activity you’re doing is by measuring your heart rate while you’re doing it.
First, figure out what your maximum heart rate is. That’s the number 220 minus your age. If you’re 40, your max heart rate is 180.
To measure your heart rate while exercising, pause briefly to take your pulse. Place your middle and index fingers on the artery of your neck or wrist where you can feel your pulse. Using a watch with a second hand, count the number of pulses, or beats, in 60 seconds. That’s your heart rate. (If you’d rather take less time to do it, you can count the number of beats in 30 seconds and multiply by two.)
When you’re doing moderate exercise, your heart rate will be 50% to 70% of your maximum heart rate — which is based on a person’s age. If your max heart rate is 180, your goal for moderate exercise is to get your heart rate up to 90 to 126 beats per minute (bpm).
Here’s that equation:
220 – age = max heart rate
180 x .50 (50%) = 90 bpm
180 x .70 (70%) = 126 bpm
For vigorous exercise, figure it the same way, but instead of 50% to 70% of your max heart rate, the range is 70% to 85%.
180 x .70 (70%) = 126 bpm
180 x .85 (85%) = 153 bpm
Democrats at the Feb. 25 health summit argued that under their proposal, 31 million of the 47 million uninsured Americans would receive coverage.
CNN’s "American Morning" co-host Kiran Chetry repeated that claim Feb. 26 and asked one of her guests: Kenneth Thorpe, Prof. at the Rollins School of Public Health, about its validity and the debate surrounding the statistic.
"I mean there’s 47 million uninsured Americans they [Senate Democrats] argue. And when you talk to Republicans, we talked to Sen. John Cornyn yesterday – ‘No, no, no – that’s a wildly inflated number," Chetry said.
"If you can’t even necessarily agree on who wants and needs health insurance at various stages of their lives, how can you move forward on who is going to get it under the plan?" Chetry asked.
"Going to the facts are really important as we just have been talking about," Thorpe replied. "According to the Census Bureau, about 46 million Americans on a typical day lack health insurance coverage – so that’s a fact."
Actually, it’s not a fact even though people from President Obama to filmmaker Michael Moore have claimed it was so.
The Census Bureau reported 45.6 million uninsured people in 2007, but the numbers include nearly 10 million non-citizens and millions who may choose not to have insurance, and millions more who should be able to afford insurance without government assistance.
The Business & Media Institute broke down the uninsured statistics in 2007 and found details from the Census Bureau commonly ignored by the news media:
Another segment of the uninsured, 25 percent, according to the liberal Urban Institute already qualifies for government health insurance programs. Other groups have also found that many of the uninsured are temporarily without coverage due to job changes.
Even the liberal Kaiser Family Foundation puts the number of chronically uninsured between 8.2 and 13.9 million people.
Chetry should have set the record straight after the health care summit instead of turning to a guest to confirm inaccurate statistics.
Poor Joe Klein. The Time magazine writer missed yesterday’s epic health care lecturefest summit. I can’t blame him. Olympic curling is much more fascinating.
Anyway, he’s catching up and he’s come to the conclusion that Professor Obama totally schooled the GOP.
Why? Because the president talked a lot but observers found the event boring, ergo proving both Obama’s brilliance and the dimwittedness and poor statesmanship of the GOP opposition.
Yes, that really is the gist of his argument from a February 26 Swampland blog (emphasis mine):
Shame on me. I was elsewhere yesterday and missed the health care summit. I’m catching up now, and the tea leaves seem to indicate that Obama came out well ahead of the Republicans. How do I know that? From Matt Drudge, of course. I mean, Drudge’s takeaway from the summit is that the President talked a lot--actually, the President, the Congressional Democrats and Republicans each spoke an equal amount–the Times of London found it boring and the networks turned to other programming.
Reading between the lines, you can conclude that the Republicans had nothing very interesting, or clever, to say (and were never able to get the President’s goat). And that the President was his usual, unflappable, well-informed self. You can also conclude that not much progress was made at the summit, as Karen reports here–but that’s a huge surprise, right?
Reading further, in the New York Times, I can’t find any indications that the Congressional Democrats were actually present at this meeting. Certainly, they had nothing notable to say, no new compromises to propose–which leads to another obvious conclusion: the Republicans have been absolutely recalcitrant in this process, but the Dems are no bargain, either.
I remain convinced that if the Republicans actually wanted to deal with this issue, they might have gotten some major concessions from the President–malpractice reform, for sure; perhaps a greater use of insurance polices that emphasize catastrophic coverage (as the Republicans wanted), maybe even a system–as John McCain proposed during the campaign and health wonks everywhere favor–that truly limited the deductability of corporate health care benefits. To get these things, however, the Republicans would have had to say yes at some point. As in, YES, I’ll vote for the bill if you throw in malpractice and pay for it with the money you get from limiting deductability. That is what happens in a negotiation. That is what is supposed to happen in a democracy.
But the obvious truth here is that the Republicans do not want any sort of health care bill to pass at all because they do not want to hand President Obama a victory. Shame on them.
To Klein, the possibility that Republicans want to kill ObamaCare because they genuinely are concerned that it will be harmful to the country is out of the question, although he paints Democrats as well-intentioned but feckless in handling the legislative process.
