text: If you have discovered, either via your GP or a finger-prick test from your chemist, that you have raised blood sugars, then do something about it.
  Having raised blood-sugar levels, even if you are on medication, is almost as bad for your heart as being a smoker.
  When I ticked the box marked ‘diabetes’ in the Heart Age calculator, it added nine years to my Heart Age.
  When I ticked both boxes, the calculator told me my risk of having a heart attack had increased four-fold.
  The best way to cure yourself of pre-diabetes and to reverse type 2 diabetes is to shed visceral fat – that’s the fat that gathers around and inside your gut.
  I’ll be showing you how diet could play an integral role in doing that next week, but for now, exercise will also be key… so read on.
  It is no understatement to say that if it could be packaged in pill form, exercise would be hailed as a miracle drug – not least because of how good for the heart it is.
  And, following a heart attack, patients who stick to an exercise-based rehabilitation programme can reduce the likelihood of dying from heart disease by a third.
  It could be running, walking, swimming or taking the stairs rather than the lift. Three brisk, ten-minute walks a day is enough to improve heart strength. Try to find ways to build this into your day.
  Studies suggest doing 20 minutes of moderate exercise a day could add a couple of years to your life.
  However doing a lot more will have less dramatic effect – an hour a day will only add a further year to life expectancy – so it seems the critical thing is that first 20 minutes.
  And it’s never too late to start: one recent study found that every extra half-hour of light activity undertaken by men aged 71 to 92, was associated with 17 per cent lower odds of death over a six-year period.
  Those that did 150 minutes of moderate activity a week were almost twice as likely to survive at least six years.
  You may also need to sit down less. As someone who makes documentaries for a living, I regret having to tell you this, but television kills. It has been estimated that every hour spent sitting down watching TV cuts your life expectancy by about 22 minutes, according to a recent study.
  That means a person who spends six hours a day in front of the box is at risk of dying five years sooner than those who are more active.
  Sedentary behaviour is linked to obesity, high levels of unhealthy cholesterol and other heart-disease risk factors, and more opportunities for snacking on junk food.
  One way to get around this is to go on watching TV, but do so standing up (perhaps doing the ironing, which burns about 80 calories an hour) or while on an exercise bike.
  For me this means very short bursts on a bike or just running up a flight of stairs – anywhere where I can really push myself. Doing so seems to be a particularly efficient way of building up the strength of your heart and lungs in just a few minutes a week.
  Understandably, there is anxiety about the risks associated with pushing yourself hard, particularly if you haven’t exercised for a while. So I was pleased when I saw the title of a recent study: ‘Extremely short duration high-intensity training substantially improves the physical function and self-reported health status of an elderly population.’
  In this study, scientists from Abertay University in Scotland put a group of unfit volunteers aged 61 to 74 through an exercise regime where they were expected to do two minutes of HIIT a week.
  The volunteers, who had done no regular exercise over the previous year, were randomly allocated into an exercise or control group.