Once an English teacher, always an English teacher.

After I retired, I happened to see a former student well into adulthood and we had a far-ranging conversation. I guess she remembered my tongue-in-cheek tirades about rap music because she sheepishly admitted to still liking that type of music before asking me what sorts of songs are my favorites.

“Songs that suggest redress,” I said.

Now I’m the one feeling sheepish. I actually did say “redress” during a hey-how’s-it-been-going conversation.

It’s a disease I tell you, and when it flares up, I go on English-teacher autopilot. But this self-inflicted sickness is certainly not as serious as the two featured in this column.

Besides, what you might simply call a “do-over” to avoid sounding like a snooty scholar is an often used theme in both music and literature that warms my heart. And when I find successful do-overs in reading research about health and fitness, it turns up the temperature of my ticker even more.

For a little bit of your own heart warming - and motivation possibly if you’ve been lacking it when it comes to your health - consider a study published in November in PLOS Medicine.

In 2019, researchers in Scotland accessed a national type-2 diabetes registry containing information on 99 percent of the people 30 years of age or older with the disease. Of these 162,000, they found 7,710 had been in remission for at least a year, meaning they had been off any sort of glucose-lowering medication for that long while still recording healthy hemoglobin A1c levels, the standard measure of the disease’s severity.

The researchers then searched for how these people had accomplished something that not so long ago was viewed as impossible.

Expectedly, those who had had bariatric surgery now tended to be disease free, but those who had opted for the medical procedure were few and far between. The two strongest tendencies detected were that those in remission had never taken any glucose-lowering medication and that they had lost weight after the diagnosis.

In other words - and to use a phrase the English teacher in me finds really clear but really coarse - these people screwed up. Ate bad foods. Really bad foods probably. Didn’t work out at all or nearly enough.

But sometime between the screw-ups and 2019 they felt regret, decided it was time for a do-over, and defeated the disease that’s the seventh leading cause of death in the U.S.

The power to provide a second chance: Why I love listening to and reading about redress.

Another recent study suggests there’s even a second chance available to those afflicted with CVD, the “umbrella term” according to Medical News Today for the blood-vessel and heart diseases that lead to stroke, coronary heart disease, heart valve problems, atypical heart rhythms, heart attacks, and heart failure. MNT also calls CVD “prevalent” and “serious” and for good reason: It’s present in nearly half of American adults and is responsible, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, for 1 in every 4 deaths in the U.S.

But the do-over here is not a drastic one. It’s just a little old something that helps you in a whole host of ways.

Exercise.

Researchers in the Netherlands rooted through the information in baseline questionnaires of over 140,000 participants to learn of their lifestyle, current health, health history, diet, and degree of physical activity. The physical-activity information shed light on its type, frequency, and intensity.

The participants were given a physical exam and then placed into one of three groups: those who currently did not have CVD or any risk factors, those who had one or more risk factors, and those who had CVD. About seven years later, all involved answered another questionnaire.

As expected, the researchers found those who engaged in moderate-to-vigorous physical activity - either through exercise or the demands of a job - were less likely to suffer from any form of CVD or die from any cause. What wasn’t expected is that those who had CVD at the onset of the study seemed to benefit the most from physical activity.

So much so that the first author of the study, Dr. Esmée Bakker, told Medical News Today “more exercise is better for [CVD] patients.”

That’s because for the healthy and even those with one or more CVD risk factor, the researchers found a point of diminishing return - a point where increasing either the time, frequency, or intensity of physical exercise didn’t increase health benefits. Yet for those with CVD, every type of increase lead to a further risk reduction of mortality and cardiovascular events.

Interestingly enough, the research also discovered that moderate-to-vigorous physical activity performed as leisure-time exercise rather than a part of work lead to greater health benefits.