Consume an amount of calories appropriate for your level of activity

The largest cause of being overweight in this country is from eating a diet too high in calories coupled with a lifestyle that does not include enough exercise. The most successful strategy for staying at ideal body weight involves two things:

1- Remove the junk fats and carbs from the diet, instead eating a large variety of healthful, nutrient rich foods. Get adequate and appropriate exercise.

2- Seems really simple, but most Americans don’t do this.

First, a few words on calories in the diet. Following a calorie restricted diet seldom results in permanent weight loss. By calorie restricted we mean a diet that contains fewer calories than are being burned up in daily activity. The reason that this doesn’t work is that the body is made to survive periods of not getting enough to eat. If the number of calories eaten fall below those being used up, the body slows down the metabolism to avoid starvation. It does this by several methods, including suppressing the production of thyroid hormone, and increasing the efficiency of the fat cells to store fat. When the level of calories go above those needed for daily activity, the metabolism speeds up again. In fact, the most significant regulator for metabolic rate is calories eaten. That’s why we don’t recommend caloric restriction, but instead recommend eliminating from the diet those useless foods that do nothing but muck up the metabolism.

Next, a few words about exercise. The current official government recommendations on exercise are one hour per day of vigorous exercise for everyone. Obviously, there are some modifiers to this proclamation! Your level of exercise must be based on general health as well as recent injuries and illness. One hour a day is an excellent goal, especially when apportioned into different types of exercise.

A well balanced program of exercise includes 5 things:

1- cardiovascular

2- strength

3- endurance

4- flexibility

5- balance

Cardiovascular exercise is any kind of activity that raises the heart rate to an optimum level and sustains it there for at least 12 minutes. The optimum level is defined in terms of percentage of the maximum heart rate that can be achieved. As a general rule, it is possible to get the heart rate up to a maximum of 220 beats per minute minus your age. So if you are 60 years old, it would be expected that 160 beats per minute is the fastest that your heart can pump.

If you are accustomed to exercise and have no gaskets that are about to blow, exercise at 80% of max. So, if you are 60 years old, your target heart rate for cardiovascular exercise would be 128.

If you are totally new to exercise or have a serious health condition like a recent heart attack, exercise at 60% of max. So, if you are 60 years old and seriously out of shape, your target heart rate would be 96.

If you are a total fiend about exercise and have been exercising properly for years and find the 80°k number too wimpy for you, exercise at 85°k of max. Here, at age 60 the target rate would be 136.

Here’s a table to help select your target heart rate:

The rule is to take 5 minutes to warm up to the target heart rate, maintain the target rate for at least 12 minutes, then cool down for another 5 minutes.

The warm-up time is important because if you bolt straight to the target rate immediately, your body will get the message that there is some emergency as if you are being chased by a predator. The body responds by shunting all of the blood to the muscles and heart, and shutting down circulation to the liver, kidneys, and other organs. This is ultimately a stress to the body rather than a health promoting exercise.

The reason to take a few minutes of less intense activity before becoming sedentary is to prevent stagnation of blood in the muscles. Perhaps of greatest importance, going above the target rate does not do nearly as much good for the health because it is again partially endurance training but partially a stress that breaks down the body. To go above the target heart rate for your age and general health condition regularly will actually create hormonal and stress chemistry types of injuries that far outweigh any training benefits. It is essential to pace aerobic exercise to not trigger a stress response when you are healing from illness, chronic fatigue or injury.

If you have recently been ill, have asthma or congestive lung disease, have undergone chemotherapy, radiation or had a surgical intervention of any type, you may find that your heart rate shoots above the targeted zone immediately upon starting to warm up for cardiovascular exercise. Stop! Revert to Chi Kung ( properly named Qi Gong) and other breathing practices to exercise your lungs without being over the target range of heart rate. Over time, the elasticity of the lungs will recover and you can slowly move into more aggressive cardiovascular exercise safely.

Cardiovascular exercise done 0-2 times per week is not enough to maintain health. 3 times per week does lots of good, and will tend to maintain an average level of fitness. 4-5 times per week brings rapid improvement in fitness and overall health. 6 times a week is the maximum benefit, and the recommended goal for everybody. 7 times per week is not as good as 6 times, because bodies need rest.

It doesn’t really matter so much how you choose to get the cardiovascular exercise, as that you get it. You will tend to stick with exercise in the long run only if you find a form of exercise that you really enjoy. Consider mapping out a beautiful walk or run with dogs, a dance set in your own home, an exercise video that appeals to your sense of fun, etc. rather than automatically imagining a smelly gym that is costly and far from home. Lots of people enjoy the social nature of belonging to a club or gym, or signing up for a group class, while others want the privacy of their own home and thoughts while exercising. Choose whatever format helps to keep exercise as an integrated part of your life.

We do recommend that if you are going for the most serious health benefits, that you get a heart monitor to ensue that you are staying in your target zone. Most modern pieces of exercise equipment have a heart monitor built in. You can also get a monitor inexpensively at any sporting goods store. This will give you some sort of signal if your heart rate is too high or too low.

Having just said all this about cardiovascular exercise, newer research suggests that clinically meaningful cardiovascular benefits can be obtained with much shorter intervals of much more intense exercise. For instance, going into absolutely full-tilt maximum intensity exercise for a duration as short as 1 minute per day can have all of the benefits of Y2 hour or more of traditionally paced cardiovascular exercise. Maximum intensity exercise means exercising full blast, keeping up the most intense pace that you are capable of. Most people cannot sustain a full minute of full blast exercise, and must break it up into 3 sets of 20 seconds. The full blast exercise creates such a load on the muscles and such oxygen debt, that the physiological changes that occur during the recovery period use up more calories than lengthy paced exercise. Beware that this type of exercise may require some period of conditioning to avoid injury.

Strength training is maybe even more important than cardiovascular as you get older. Most injuries are preventable by simply getting stronger. Most of the frailty associated with aging is really just a matter of poor fitness, rather than intrinsic to aging.

A good rule of thumb regarding strength training is to decide how much weight you may need to lift and move, and train so that you can easily handle 15-20% more weight than that. So, if you think you may need to occasionally move and lift things that weight 20 pounds, get very comfortable lifting 25 pounds in any position or from any angle. If you can easily handle 15-20% above the weight you will have to move, you will never get injured moving it. Most people do not have adequate lean muscle mass, and this gets worse with age. The medical name for this condition is sarcopenia, which means deficiency of muscle tissue. It results in progressive frailty with frequent painful injuries. This is totally preventable.

Weight lifting is the most efficient method of gaining strength, but muscle resistance training can also be incorporated into a system of exercise like yoga or martial arts. Building strength is very effective in maintaining optimum body weight. Muscle tissue takes a lot of calories to maintain, and the more lean muscle mass you put on your body, the more calories you will need to maintain it. Serious body builders have difficulty managing to eat enough food to avoid weight loss.

Endurance exercise means any activity that will train the body to withstand prolonged periods of physical activity without breaking down. This could be done by things like weekly long hikes, or increasing the length of some of your cardiovascular sessions, or doing lots of repetitions on some sessions of weight lifting.

Flexibility is both important and somewhat over-rated. You want to have a body that is free of stiffness, and moves easily and gracefully. You do not want to have the flexibility of a Gumby doll unless that flexibility is supported by strength all through the range of motion. Excessive flexibility, without the strength to support it, results in unstable joints that can be more easily injured. For that reason, we recommend functional flexibility training by methods like yoga, workouts with free weights using low weight and full range of motion, and methods like Nomadics, Somatics, or circular strength training.

Balance is a very important component of exercise to prevent falls and other injuries like sprained ankles. Balance training can reduce the incidence of fractures by as much as 95%.

Overall, getting junk empty calories out of the diet and doing balanced exercise of appropriate type, intensity, and duration will give you a body that is of ideal body weight and relatively immune to minor injuries. It will also ensure a better than average recovery from major injuries.