Living a healthy lifestyle

Transcript:

Matthew Leibowitz
Member, Arthritis Australia National Consumer Reference Group (ankylosing spondylitis)

It’s a whole approach; in terms of managing my AS I need to make sure that I’m active. For me I try to just have a general rule: I try to do something every day. Right at the beginning I went for a swim a lot. I try to ride my bike to work. Just use excuses to get out and be active. Pre-diagnosis you’ve pretty much tied up; you can’t do as much as you’d like to. You’re sort of freed once you get that diagnosis to go do the things you couldn’t do beforehand and I’ve really taken that on and I try to do something every day. So that it’s a ride, go for a run, just if I have 30 minutes I’ll just run from the train station home. Just try and make sure it’s part of my every day life and then to complement that I try to keep my weight down because it’s less load on my back, where most of my AS symptoms are and were.

So it’s just about trying to eat a little bit less, trying to stay away from the things you want but probably shouldn’t have. Just try having a basic rule of one thing every day and I find that once you start worrying about your exercise and trying to stay healthy the rest of it follows as well. You get motivated to eat better and you feel like you’re just building momentum; it doesn’t happen straight away. You have to take those initial steps and they’re not easy but you put the effort in and you’ll start seeing the impact a little bit later on.