From the first moment my wife discovered she
had breast cancer in March of 2011, there was a deafening silence from the men
I knew. Even ones whose wives, mothers or girlfriends had breast cancer seemed
to have received a gag order from some Central Cancer Command and did little
more than mumble about the experience. Not one to shut up for any known reason,
I started this blog…That was four years ago – as time passed, people searching
for answers stumbled across my blog and checked out what I had to say. The following
entry first appeared in May of 2012.
Doctors harp on
exercise.
Despite the harping
– or in my case, perversely because
of it – I avoid exercise like the plague.
Even so, as I read
more and more sites promoting the “exercise makes you better if you have breast
cancer” meme, I found that almost none of them give any kind of evidence as to
WHY exercise fights cancer and promotes healing.
So I dug into the
sites and finally found some evidence supporting this wild, “Do this one weird
thing…” kind of meme. This week, it’s number
1)
Insulin
resistance, hyperinsulinaemia, hyperglycaemia and type 2 diabetes have been
linked to increased risk of breast, colon, pancreas and endometrial cancers.
Physical activity decreases insulin resistance, reduces hyperinsulinaemia and
reduces risk for diabetes, which could explain the link between increased
physical activity and reduced risk for these cancers
I talked about the
connection between insulin and breast cancer earlier (http://breastcancerreaper.blogspot.com/2012/03/exercise-reduces-estrogen-in-blood-and.html),
so I’ll talk more about EXERCISE here.
But before I go
on, I’d like to say something about “non-exercise exercise”. My wife and hero
works with kindergartners all day long: teaching reading, going out to recess,
going to lunch, chasing down stragglers and generally corralling the little
munchkins so much that she comes home with aching feet.
My question has
always been: at what point does what I DO in everyday life become exercise?
There are
advocates of daily exercise that explain: “We don't expend energy
doing anything. We've actually engineered regular daily physical activity out
of our lives…He says a lot of things stop us from burning calories…We come to
work in almost any vocation and we sit. And we sit for eight hours and then we
get up and we sit in the motorcar, you know, in automobile and we go home. When
we arrive at home, we sit in front of the television. We have frozen TV
dinners. We have pre-prepared, prepackaged food that doesn't require energy to
collect it. We don't hunt, cook it. It's mostly just put in microwaves and
simple systems…We don't even chop vegetables anymore. Bauman says that's very
different from the way life used to be. He cites research by a colleague who
studied people living and working in a historical Australian village, recreating
life in the 19th century…Their energy expenditures were three to five times the
amount that people spend today. And that was just a regular person going to and
from work. It wasn't a lumberjack or someone who was working on the land or
someone who had a huge heavily physical job…And, of course, three to five times
more energy expenditure burns a lot more calories… Physical inactivity is a major risk
factor for death and for illness. It contributes to about one-sixth of heart
disease, cardiovascular disease, about the same for diabetes, about 12 percent
for falls in the elderly, and about a tenth of all breast cancer and colon
cancer are attributable to being physically inactive.” (Interview,
Bauman/Silberner)
But what if my
wife isn’t DOING that? Is what she DOES every day considered “exercise”?
YES!
“Even if you don’t
have a 15 or 30 minute window to dedicate to yoga or a bike ride, that doesn’t
mean you can’t add physical activity to your day. If you're not ready to commit
to a structured exercise program, think about physical activity as a lifestyle
choice rather than a single task to check off your to-do list. Look at your
daily routine and consider ways to sneak in activity here and there. Even very
small activities can add up over the course of a day: Clean the house, wash the
car, tend to the yard and garden, mow the lawn with a push mower, sweep the sidewalk
or patio with a broom; bike or walk to an appointment rather than drive, banish
all elevators and use the stairs, briskly walk to the bus stop then get off one
stop early, park at the back of the lot and walk into the store or office, take
a vigorous walk during your coffee break. Walk while you’re talking on your
cell phone; walk or jog around the soccer field during your kid’s practice,
make a neighborhood bike ride part of weekend routine, play tag with your
children in the yard or play exercise video games. Walk the dog together as a
family, or if you don’t have your own dog, volunteer to walk a dog from a
shelter. Organize an office bowling team, take a class in martial arts, dance,
or yoga with a friend or spouse; gently stretch while watching your favorite
show, do push-ups, sit-ups or lift light weights during the commercial
breaks—you'll be amazed at how many repetitions you can fit in during the
commercials of a half hour show! Better still, once a week turn off the TV and
take a walk outside instead”
And the benefit of
all they movement?
The very same ones
as ANY form of exercise provides, and in this particular case, it results in an
increased effectiveness of insulin in those who are insulin resistant!
So MOVE! If we can
do it, so can you!
Resources: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=127525702, http://www.helpguide.org/life/exercise.htm
