Exercise and Breast Cancer Recurrence

In the last couple of blog posts we have focused on how important lifestyle changes like following a good diet and maintaining a normal weight can be in reducing your risk of breast cancer recurrence. 

It probably shouldn’t surprise you that doing a little exercise will also decrease your risk of recurrence.  But what may indeed surprise you is how little activity it takes and how big the impact is.

So here is the good news.  First of all, the activity that you choose doesn’t have to involve a gym.  Any sort of purposeful activity like gardening, house cleaning, or washing the car counts as activity.  You need to do something to be active every day.  And when you know that you don’t have to go out and run 5 miles or spend an hour on the elliptical machine in order to make a difference, then being active can seem manageable. 

Research shows that if a breast cancer survivor walks just 30 minutes a day for 6 days a week, she can reduce her risk of cancer recurrence by half.  30 minutes, 6days a week, reduce your risk of breast cancer recurrence by half.  It doesn’t take much for you to be able to check this box off.  Add some walking to your day.  If you don’t have 30 minutes at a stretch then break it up into three smaller walks of 10 minutes each.  It is that important that you just move.  In my THRIVE Beyond Breast Cancer Program, I teach you how to take any activity and measure how much you will have to do to equal 30 minutes of walking each day.

Starting an exercise program can be a challenge but walking is something that almost everyone can do.  This is such a simple thing that will make a big difference.