The Wellness Year

Fun Facts About Exercise

This is Week 4 of The Wellness Year Program

Exercise helps with:
• Weight control
Regular exercise not only burns calories (3500 calories equal 1 lb), but also encourages the body to lose fat instead of muscle. By preserving (and building) muscle, exercise also causes an increase in the rate calories are burned during exercise, thus resulting in a person being able to eat the same amount but lose weight. (Note: this assumes you keep at some aerobic exercise program, as well) .In contrast, a person who loses weight through dieting only may lose muscle, and thus get into a vicious cycle where they burn fewer calories and therefore need to consume even fewer calories to keep weight off.

• Cancer prevention
Moderately active people have lower rates of cancer. In the case of breast cancer, for example, exercise causes lower estrogen levels, which is beneficial for preventing breast cancer.

• Boosts immunity in moderate doses/decreases it in large doses
According to studies involving Olympic athletes, the benefits of moderate exercise on immunity decreases when one does strenuous exercise on a regular basis.

• Mortality prevention depends on how much exercise one is doing at any given time, not how much one did in the past

• Prevents osteoporosis: bones respond to demand by getting stronger, and to inactivity by getting thinner. After age 40, women will lose bone mass unless they do strength exercises (weight training) twice per week. Weight bearing exercise is most beneficial for this particular purpose (for example hiking is better than swimming). People who are thin, pale skinned, blond, blue-eyed and smokers are at highest risk of fractures from thin bones (osteoporotic fractures).

• Helps with osteoarthritis
In osteoarthritis, large joints ache after a day of regular activities. Paradoxically, regular exercise can improve symptoms by strengthening the muscles and tendons that surround the joint, thus preventing some of the inflammation and pain. In addition, of course, reducing one’s weight helps arthritic joints by decreasing the load they have to bear. It may prevent arthritis altogether.

• Helps with depression and anxiety
Studies of people with depression show that they can benefit from regular exercise.

How much is needed to see a difference:
The short answer is “quite a lot”, though it depends on your starting point and goals.
We were initially told that 30 minutes, 3 times per week was enough. This later became 5 times per week. But it was not based on research.

In September 2002. the Institute of Medicine reviewed the health habits of the people with the healthiest weights and found that most of them actually did an hour of moderate exercise every day. This is the basis for the latest recommendation.

A study of people who lost weight and kept it off revealed that on the average, they expended 2500 calories per week, which is the equivalent of about 90 minutes of exercise each day.

In another study, people with pre-diabetes reduced their odds of developing full-scale diabetes when they did 80 minutes per day of regular exercise.

Ways to fit it in to daily life:

- make it functional: walk or bike to work or running errands
- make it convenient – sign up for a gym near home or buy home equipment
- make it fun – find activities you like, go with a partner
- break it up into small portions – 15 minutes four times a day
- do more strenuous exercise for a shorter time
- stay active – walk to a co-worker instead of using e-mail, park a little further away when you can, walk up stairs

Action step for this week:

Answer the following questions:
1. On a scale of 1-10, how important is it to you to incorporate more regular exercise into your life?
2. Why not more, or less important?
3. On a scale of 1-10, how confident do you feel that you can meet this goal?
4. Why not more, or less confident?
What is it that I could do to support you in reaching your goal? E-mail me!

Exercise - Making it Work Harder for You

Let’s face it, many of us have busy lives. So in trying to lose weight and get fit, we want to get the best bang for our buck.

When it comes to weight loss, there is really one best strategy. There is a multitude of studies out there, and they really do come pretty much to the same conclusion.

People who have lost (and kept off) a substantial amount of weight have been engaging in lots (an hour or more) of exercise every day.

Most calories per minute are burned during strenuous aerobic exercise. So an effective goal might be to get fitter, so you can exercise as hard as possible (without getting injured or having to quit too soon) in the time that you do have to devote to exercise, however long that would be.

Ignore the “fat-burning zone” on your machine. It is based on a kernel of truth that doesn’t apply to people who don’t have all day to work out. If you want details, I can explain them to you personally.

Two more points: How do you “get fitter”? And what about weights?
By training in intervals, alternating 4-8 minutes of medium intensity exercise with 1 minute spurts at maximum intensity, your muscles get more efficient (see last WYP issue), and you can train harder and harder (and it doesn’t feel “harder”).
The point of weights, or strength training, is to help you avoid injury, and hopefully, to increase the calories you burn by increasing the amount of muscle you have. It is fair to say that you have to lift very seriously and probably with expert advice in order to really build muscle mass. However, even a single additional pound of muscle will burn extra calories for you while you exercise aerobically. (It will not, contrary to previous arguments, raise your resting metabolic rate much.)

Experts do recommend a weekly schedule of exercising whereby you alternate days where you push yourself with days where you work out more gently. There is a science to this, as staying with it for the long haul is the key to success. But remember, if you don’t work out hard enough to lose any weight, even the long haul won’t get you there.

And finally, it’s not all about weight. Being fit and overweight is better for your health than being skinny and unfit.

What is your source of motivation? How do you keep yourself focused on your goal? I hope this newsletter helps. Please pass it on to your friends!

All the best,
Myrto

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Why sleeping better can help you lose weight

What is such a "gimmicky" topic doing on a serious online journal??

Well, it's apparently true. Sleeping poorly makes it hard to lose weight for several reasons.

First, it causes you to have less energy to exercise, which (see previous posts) can be the cornerstone of an effective weight loss strategy.

Second, it may change your mood, leaving you more easily frazzled and in need of something yummy to soothe your feelings of frustration or overwhelm.

Finally, and this is new, inadequate sleep increases the level of cortisol in your blood. It goes like this: sudden stress causes the release of adrenaline, your fight or flight hormone. Adrenaline makes it easier for your body to use up stored energy, among other things. When the stress becomes repeated, however, another hormone, called cortisol, takes over. Cortisol is a "replenishing" hormone. It prepares the body for repeated stress by storing calories in the form of fat.

Not sleeping enough is a form of repeated stress. And to make matters worse, many overweight people sleep poorly because they have sleep apnea - they snore loudly or even stop breathing several times a night, waking themselves up in the process. Some people don't even realize they are waking up so much, because they go back to sleep within seconds. But the body can tell the difference between that kind of sleep and the uninterrupted kind.

How many hours of sleep are enough?
Tune in tomorrow!
For those of you that read and did the exercises in the first week of the Wellness Year Program, there will also be a poll tomorrow.

What makes it easier to lose weight?

Many of us have tried to lose weight for years. Nationally, the statistics are not encouraging. Most of those who succeed in losing weight end up soon gaining it back. Why? What makes this so difficult? How can we be successful at weight loss?

First, the bad news. As we all know, our weight depends on how many calories we take in and how many we use up through our basic resting metabolism and our daily activities. This leads to the simplistic belief that all we have to do to lose weight is eat less and move more.

That would be easy indeed except that appetite and motivation depend on a variety of complex mechanisms. For example our metabolic rate slows down if we eat too little, making it impossible to lose weight. Dieters must understand that finding food and eating it is a very basic survival instinct that is not easily overcome. The animal’s survival depends on keeping eating behavior on auto pilot. Any attempt to tamper with the basic mechanism results in all sorts of alarms going off in the body.

It is very difficult to control eating, basic metabolic rate and activity level at the same time. For one thing, they all take some pre-planning, and it can be too time-consuming to orient one’s entire life around calories in and out. Nobody wants to live like that.

Moreover, stress itself causes weight gain, not only for those who cope through increasing what they eat, but also because it causes changes in metabolism, and changes in sleep patterns, which in turn result in more bad changes in metabolism and in daily activities.

Now for the good news...

Full text of this article, and more at www.myrtoashe.com/articles.shtml

Which diet works best?

Finally, researchers are comparing diets such as Atkins (low-carb), Ornish (extra-low-fat) and others. They took 160 overweight and obese people and randomly assigned them to one of 4 diets: Atkins, Ornish, Weight Watchers and The Zone. Then they followed them on the diet for one year.

The good news (though a little confusing) is that all the diets were similar in their effectiveness. People lost weight, and improved their cholesterol numbers.

That's it for the good news though. The bad news is that people lost only about 5% of their body weight in one year. For a 200 lbs person, that's about 10 lbs. The other bad news is that only 50-65% of participants were able to stay on the diet. The Weight Watchers and The Zone diets were easiest to stay on.

At this time, Stanford University is conducting a similar research project. We will definitely know more about losing weight in years to come. For now, the take-home lesson on all of this is:

Diet is not enough to attain your health goals!!

Check in tomorrow for other weight loss ideas.

This study was reported in Open Exchange magazine, and was excerpted from a report by The Washington Post and Reuters. It was conducted by the Tufts-New England Medical Center.