Fighting Parkinson’s Disease with Exercise and Diet

For everyone with Parkinson's disease, staying strong and well is essential. According to research, adopting specific lifestyle changes can assist you in achieving two crucial objectives:

• improved symptom management.
• gradual worsening of the illness.
• Changes in diet and an emphasis on exercise can:
• maintain your health for longer.
• assist you in avoiding Parkinson's disease side effects including constipation.
• Boost your balance and range of motion.
• Boost your life's overall quality.

The Role of Diet

Maintaining a balanced diet enhances overall health and increases your capacity to manage disease symptoms. The key to last energized and commonly healthful is to consume an abundance of nutritious ingredients, together with culmination and veggies, lean protein, beans and lentils, and complete grains, and to stay hydrated. Having stated that, there are a few unique factors to recollect.

• Constipation: A slowed digestive device is a not unusual reason of constipation in Parkinson's sickness patients. Constipation can be traumatic at high-quality, but at worst it can reason troubles on your large intestine. A eating regimen high in fiber, which include that determined in clean produce, complete grains, legumes, vegetables, and whole-grain breads and cereals, can assist save you constipation.Constipation can also be avoided by exercising and consuming lots of fluids.
• Dehydration: Parkinson's disease medications can cause you to get dehydrated. Dehydration not only makes you feel more exhausted over time, but it can also cause dizziness, imbalance, weakness, and kidney difficulties. Throughout the day, make sure to consume an ample amount of water and other liquids.
• Medication interaction: Your small intestine absorbs carbidopa-levodopa, the medication most frequently used to treat Parkinson's disease. Since that prescription and food go through the same process, taking it soon after a high-protein meal may cause problems with absorption. Eat high-protein foods at different times of the day to assist optimize the benefits of the drug. If you take your medication in the morning, keep your protein intake for later in the day and have oatmeal for breakfast instead of scrambled eggs.

The Role of Exercise

Denise Padilla-Davidson, a physical therapist at Johns Hopkins who treats patients with Parkinson's disease, believes that exercise has the biggest influence on the progression of the condition. "Movement can actually slow the progression of the disease," she explains, emphasizing exercises that promote balance and reciprocal patterns, which call for cooperation of both sides of the body. What you should know is as follows:

• Activate your heart: Regular cardiovascular exercise improves a number of Parkinson's disease symptoms that impede physical abilities, including impaired walking, balance and strength issues, grip strength issues, and motor coordination issues. For instance, a review of research on treadmill training discovered that consistent walking exercises helped lengthen strides, which tend to shorten with Parkinson's disease, and increase normal walking speed.
• Move it or lose it: When the motor signs of Parkinson's disease, such as a tremor or slower gait, become noticeable, patients may experience anxiety about falling or losing their balance. This dread and extreme caution can then result in an even more sedentary lifestyle. Formal exercise is known to keep patients active and healthy, but regular physical activity may be just as important—if not more so—than excursions to the gym, according to studies. Maintaining daily routines that involve getting and staying on your feet, such as grocery shopping, yard maintenance, dishwashing, and folding clothes, will help postpone the onset of motor symptom deterioration.
• Work out your brain: Physical activity, or anything that makes your heart race, can aid in the brain's preservation of neuroplasticity, or the capacity to create new connections between neurons. According to Padilla-Davidson, "in patients with Parkinson's disease, the neuroplasticity created by exercise may actually outweigh the effects of neurodegeneration."