I'm Roy Taylor, I'm a doctor looking after people with diabetes and also a Professor of Medicine and Metabolism at Newcastle University.
If we could say to someone: 'How would you like to feel 10 years younger? And how would you like have plenty of energy to go about your daily life? Well there’s a simple way of getting about that.
Once a person has decided to make a substantial difference to themselves, to lose substantial weight, they need to plan it very carefully. But they need to have a goal to work towards and that goal might be an event that they are taking part in, in might be a wedding that they want to slim down for or it might be a numerical goal of getting under a certain weight.
Having established a goal we then need small milestones to be identified to allow people to see that they're achieving those step by step.
For people approaching retirement I think the first thing to do is to take a good look at their body. Can they fit into the trousers they wore when they were 21? If they can't, the first thing that they must do is to shed some pounds. Certainly setting about losing a proportion of body weight, maybe 5-10 kilograms in that sense, would be a very good start. And then to see about actually spending time on activity.
And with regards to cycling as a form of exercise, it’s a near perfect form of exercise. It is low stress on the joints, it's enjoyable, bicycles are relatively inexpensive. We've got to be very careful that we don't cause any health di-benefits.
When people who've already become over-weight try and start exercise, they tend to have compensatory over-eating so we’ve got to learn that weight loss first, by calorie restriction then we can do anything with the exercise.
The critical thing to do is to get back to your healthy weight. It might be the weight that you were in your early twenties.