The Post-Meal Walk
Reviewed by CDE Mehandi Sharma · Updated
If you take one thing from GDM advice, take this: walk after your meals.
The mechanism is straightforward. When you walk, your working muscles draw glucose out of your blood. After a meal is when there is the most glucose there to draw on, so the same ten minutes of walking does more then than at any other time of day.
And your after-meal reading is exactly the number you are being judged on. A short walk between eating and testing genuinely changes it.
Ten to fifteen minutes is enough to matter. You do not need to change clothes, leave the house, or work up a sweat — walking around the house, on a terrace, or up and down a corridor all count.
This also fits the general guidance that activity does not have to be done in one long session. Broken into small amounts through the day, it still counts towards your weekly total.
Do it after all three main meals and you have built the single most effective habit in GDM management, at close to zero cost.
One caution: this is walking, not exertion. If you have been advised to limit activity, or you get contractions, bleeding, dizziness or breathlessness, stop and speak to your doctor.