The Value of Exercise

Exercise Can't Fix a Bad Diet

The idea that to keep our weight in check we need to exercise more if both wrong and foolish.

The Swedish Experts Committee in 1998 said that exercise was NOT an effective way to lose weight. All you do, is make yourself hungry, and you eat more. If your diet is poor you eat the wrong foods too.

So the first step to better health is to understand what a healthy diet is. Thanks to the Women's Health Initiative, we do know the a low-fat, low salt, and low cholesterol diet is NOT healthy. They said that this "recommended" diet "Has no health benefits."

That's a good place to begin. Now we can look back to the diet our grandparents ate. They didn't suffer obesity and type two diabetes like we do. There were hardly any fat kids in the 1950's. Or go further back and look at the diets of "primitive" peoples. Dentist Weston Price saw a decline in the American diet between 1900 and 1930.

Research in the last 20 years, feeding small groups of people all of their meals from a control kitchen for periods of longer than a month, have been very revealing. Expensive and hard to do, and impossible to do for very long periods. But these trials show conclusively that much of our supposed nutritional knowledge is wrong. Dr Jeff Volek is one of the leading researchers. Here is some of his work.

You Don't Need to be Feeble in Your Old Age

Modern lifestyles create lifestyle diseases we can avoid with a little understanding and care. High blood pressure, heart attacks, cancer and diabetes, for instance, were unknown in many "primitive" societies. This was reported by Dr Weston Price in the 1930s, and confirmed by many other physicians, in societies as diverse as the Inuit, the Masai, and the North American Indian.

We don't really understand how we're causing this problem for ourselves. It's clearly something to do with our "lifestyle" which is a catch-all for "lots of things" and "we don't know."

The Exercise that You Actually Do Counts

How you exercise is important. Enjoy yourself.

bubble You need to use weights, you need to puff a little and sweat a little, and you need exercise with other people.

Sitting for a long time is bad for you, so if you use the computer a lot, build yourself a standing desk.

I used to run marathons. Doing that teaches you a lot. One is the hard/easy principle, don't exercise the same muscle groups hard every day. It takes an enormous amount of exercise to run off a high-carbohydrate meal. It's simply not sensible to try to control your weight by exercise.

There are excellent reasons to exercise, and to keep exercising strenuously all your life. You need strong lung capacity, the ability to breathe deeply and process lots of air quickly. You need strong bones, and the easy way to get strong bones is to lift weights. You need strong muscles, that can do a lot of work, and you do that by doing enjoyable things, with other people, like playing sport, walking, dancing or tai chi.

The body is designed to be used.

I've seen in athletics, in Tai Chi, and in ballroom dancing, that people who are active in middle age, and who get to age 60 in good health and fitness, are likely to maintain that fitness until very close to the time of their death. People who live well, can be strongly involved with their families and the community, and actively contributing until the end of their lives.

Resistance Training

Our bodies are designed to spend time outdoors every day, and to walk considerable distances and to carry loads. We should be able to walk up stairs easily, and able to stand a lot, even if you are over 70 years old. Unless you are unfortunate, being healthy in old age is a choice you can make, much earlier in your life.

That should be your expectation for yourself. If you are strong, a strength developed by good exercise habits, good diet and an active working and social life, even if a cancer of some other problem comes along, your ability to deal with it is enhanced. We need to increase our health span more than our life span.

Exercise and effort

In "The triumphs of Experience", George Vaillant tells us that the evidence that people who exercise are more healthy is weak. On the other hand, the evidence that people who are healthy love to exercise and play games and strive to do their best. He describes physical and mental health as the "horse" that makes exercise and striving and effort possible.

The Center for Disease Control and Prevention (USA) also makes recommendations about exercise for everyone.

The American Heart Association has recently published, A New Standard for Exercise: It is Time to Move it to Make it a High-Level Priority.

Carolyn and myself recommend dancing and walking. Both activities are best done in a group setting; join a club. Carolyn is very involved in T'ai Chi Ch'uan, or Qigong. The people involved in all these activities are the sort of people who will help you build your life and your friendships.

The Government of Victoria (Australia) have a health site where they present several sensible pages about exercise.

For high quality science, this rather technical book is the best I know. The Art and Science of Low Carbohydrate Living: An Expert Guide to Making the Life-Saving Benefits of Carbohydrate Restriction Sustainable and Enjoyable. Written by Prof. Stephen Phinney and Dr. Jeff Volek (2011). Dr Volek is probably the world leading researcher on the use of low carbohydrate diets.

If you are interested in sports performance try this version; The Art and Science of Low Carbohydrate Performance. Written by Prof. Stephen Phinney and Dr. Jeff Volek (2012).