Healthiest You Ever

“Eighty percent of weight loss comes as a result of wise food choices.”

Do you even know how much and when you eat during a typical day? Most people don’t. The best way to learn is to keep a food journal for at least a week. Using a notebook, your iPad, your smart phone, your running log, or a calendar (something you can keep a record in), write down everything you eat and when you eat it. Don’t cheat! List even the breath mints you chew on during meetings. It’s also helpful to note where your eating has taken place—at your desk? in the cafeteria? in front of the TV?—and how you were feeling at the time—super stressed? depressed? tipsy? This will help you identify your eating triggers and whatever bad habits you may have formed regarding eating.

After a full week you’ll have a good idea of the what, when, where, and why of your eating patterns. From the brief discussion here, you should be able to see from your food diary where you’re making your nutritional no-noes. How often have you skipped breakfast? How often have you eaten high-fat foods like junk food, desserts, and fried food? What are your snacking habits? How many fruits and vegetables do you eat in a typical week? How often do you eat because you’re feeling blue or stressed, rather than hungry? Which foods do you gravitate toward to elevate your moods?

“When you first start weight training, don’t be surprised if you actually gain weight. This is a normal reaction for many people. The average person starting an exercise program may gain 3 to 5 pounds. If you’re among these people, you’ve successfully gained lean body mass or muscles. Congratulate yourself. You deserve a pat on the back for all your hard work!”

—Shirley S. Archer, fitness professional, Stanford University School of Medicine

Your body composition refers to the percentage of fat and percentage of fat-free body mass that makes up your total body weight. Fat-free mass, also known as lean-body mass, consists primarily of muscle tissue, bones, and blood, essentially all the rest of your body that is not fat.

Research suggests that the ideal percentage of body fat for men is 15 to 18 percent. For women, the ideal range of body fat is 22 to 25 percent. It’s important to remember that these are suggested ranges. Some individuals with a higher percentage of body fat who are regularly active may still be considered at a healthy weight.

When you begin your improvement program, you might want to measure your body composition. This way, you’ll have a baseline against which to measure the effectiveness of your program over time. You can see how much muscle mass you have when you get started. Every six weeks or so, you can check to see how much more muscle mass you have developed. If you’re a person who is motivated by numbers, this is a concrete way to stay excited about your progress.

“Exercise doesn’t make you smarter, but what it does do is optimize the brain for learning.”

Regular exercise is essential if you’re looking to preserve your mental acuity. Aerobic exercise helps get the blood coursing through your system, carrying oxygen and glucose to your brain—two substances the brain needs in order to function. Regular exercise can also prod the brain into producing more molecules that help protect and produce the brain’s neurons. Though studies are still underway to establish the link between exercise and increased brain neurons, many researchers—including those involved with Alzheimer’s disease research—are studying the protective effects of regular physical exercise on the brain’s neural paths for transmitting signals.

The U.S. federal guidelines for exercise say that getting at least thirty minutes a day most days a week will help prevent heart disease, osteoporosis, diabetes, obesity, and now, perhaps, Alzheimer’s. If you do nothing else, a brisk thirty-minute walk every day will do wonders for your brain health.

IT ALSO KEEPS YOUR BRAIN YOUNG

As you get older, exercise becomes even better for your overall brain health. Neuroscientists have shown that in aging populations (usually those over age sixty-five), sustained, moderate exercise participation enhances learning and memory, improves the function of the neocortex, counteracts age-related and disease-related mental decline, and protects against age-related atrophy in brain areas crucial for thinking and learning. Exercise has been cited by several researchers, including those at UC Irvine, as being the number one factor in sustaining brain health and the ability to make new neurons in an aging brain.

“My attitude is that if you push me towards something that you think is a weakness, then I will turn that perceived weakness into a strength.”

Muscular strength and endurance are equally important, and they are closely related in that it requires a certain amount of strength to develop endurance. For example, in order to develop upper body muscular endurance through pushups, you must have the strength to do at least one pushup. The inability to do a pushup is a lack of strength, not a lack of endurance.

For the most part, the same exercises are used to increase muscular strength and endurance. The only difference is the amount of resistance and the number of repetitions one completes in a set. In general, muscular strength is best developed by high resistance (heavy weight) and low repetition (short time period) exercises, while muscular endurance is improved by using less resistance (low weight) and higher repetitions (or a longer time period).

You can have strength without endurance. However, it is nearly impossible to develop muscular endurance without also developing strength. There are weightlifters who can bench press over 500 pounds, as long as they only have to push it up one time. However, some of these lifters are unable to do twenty pushups. So endurance training supplemented with a weight program is beneficial.

“Flexibility falls under the ‘use it or lose it’ rule. You have to practice consistently, and the one thing people tend to forget is that strength and flexibility go hand in hand.”

Exercise books and videos offer differing advice on what stretch to do, how long to hold a stretch, how often you need to stretch, and so on. The answer to all of these questions is different from person to person and every expert will give different advice. What is important is that you make sure to take the time to lengthen your muscles in some way. It helps to know the four types of stretches:

• Active: This type of stretching is usually used within the warm-up of a training session. You can take almost any stretch and make it active by moving in and out of the stretch using your breath.

• Dynamic: This is another efficient technique within the warm-up. It involves momentum and muscular effort in order to move primary joints that are going to be used during activity. Big shoulder circles, leg swings, hip circles, and standing spinal rotations are all considered dynamic stretches.

• Passive: A passive stretch is considered a relaxing, cooling, and calming type of stretch. Passive stretches do not require you to hold your body weight while lengthening a muscle. These are mostly done in the seated or lying down position, and exhaling is emphasized to recruit the relaxation response.

• Static: A static stretch is one that has no movement involved but muscles are recruited to hold the position. These exercises are usually, but not always, weight bearing in nature. Holding a High Lunge with your arms over your head, a Downward Facing Dog pose, and a Kneeling Hamstring Stretch are all considered static stretches.

“You can’t get rid of it [fat] with exercise alone. You can do the most vigorous exercise and only burn up 300 calories in an hour. If you’ve got fat on your body, the exercise firms and tones the muscles. But when you use that tape measure, what makes it bigger? It’s the fat!”

Sustaining a brisk pace and steady heart rate is not the only important form of exercise. Increasing your strength is important, too. By increasing your muscle mass, not only do you convert the calories of protein into muscle, but your new muscle gets the calories it needs to function, increasing your metabolism.

In fact, more and more research suggests lifting weights may be one of the most efficient forms of losing weight. Not only are calories required to perform the exercise, but calories are also needed to build muscle. In addition, muscle has a higher metabolism than fat, so when you bulk up your muscles, you will have a higher metabolism and burn more calories, even at rest.

START SLOWLY, BUILD STEADILY

Sports stores sell hand-weights or weighted balls that you can buy. Start there and slowly build toward a more intensive weight-lifting program, at which point you might want to join a gym. Start out by lifting 2- or 5-pound weights, and slowly build your ability to do more and more repetitions. You don’t have to lift heavy weights for the activity to have an impact.

“A person who has good thoughts cannot ever be ugly. You can have a wonky nose and a crooked mouth and a double chin and stick-out teeth, but if you have good thoughts they will shine out of your face like sunbeams and you will always look lovely.”

If you want to find happiness and add years to your life, think happy thoughts. When you choose positive thoughts over negative ones, you are more likely to develop an optimistic outlook on life. According to happiness researchers such as Martin E. P. Seligman, director of the Positive Psychology Center at the University of Pennsylvania, and Barbara Fredrickson, PhD, professor of psychology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, positive people generally have higher levels of optimism and life satisfaction and live longer. In a BBC News report, Dr. Seligman was quoted as saying that he believed that “we have compelling evidence that optimists and pessimists will differ markedly in how long they live.” Dr. Fredrickson has counseled that changing your mindset can change your body chemistry. She has stated that positive feelings literally can open the heart and mind. And there’s more good news. Even if you aren’t normally a happy person, thinking happy thoughts is a skill that can be learned. Work on being open, being an optimist, choosing to think positive thoughts, and seeing the proverbial glass half full rather than half empty.