exercise?

Moderate weight-bearing exercise (walking, running, hiking) is good for the bones. Moderate weight-lifting is good to keep muscle tone and strength. Make sure to take enough calcium (esp, if taking prednisone) and protein. If all else fails and you can swim, that's one of the best overall exercises there is!

I was a marathon runner & moderate weight lifter before lupus (ages 18-44), a lazy bag of bones with no energy, prednisone weight gain, and total loss of muscle tone/strength while lupus was bad (44-52), and now my lupus is quiet and it's taken over a year to loose 10 lbs, work back to mild weight lifting, and be able to walk 30 minutes.

Especially if you've been previously fit, it's very easy to do more than you should and then be useless for a week. I finally found that if I did about 1/3rd of what I felt I could do, and increased by no more than 10% per week, I was able to make slow steady progress. And if I felt pains or fatigue coming on let yourself rest for a day or two -- it's better than pushing thru then going backward for 2-3 weeks. Just do *something* every day, with lots of water & rest.

I hope that my lupus remains quiet and that I'll be able to run again some day -- but lupus likes to attack one hip and that just may not be possible. I can run slowly for about 5 minutes but that's it -- and the hip will hurt 5-6 days. Not worth it!

My rheumy wants me to do water exercise before attempting "land exercise", They have written me out a RX to the YMCA for water exercises. You should talk this over with your doctor and get his/her opinion on it. You don't want to do more damage than good when just starting out exercising again.