Healthiest You Ever

Some foods are better for you than others. Fruits and vegetables, for example, are an important part of any health regimen because they are loaded with essential nutrients in their most natural and useful form—and the more fruits and vegetables you eat the more satiated you will feel and you will be able to avoid high-calorie foods and fat.

In fact, many vegetables will satisfy—or nearly satisfy—your daily requirements for several vitamins. From dark leafy greens rich in calcium, iron, and magnesium to the cruciferous vegetables like bok choy, broccoli, cabbage, turnips, and water cress that have cancer-preventing antioxidants to nutrient-rich vegetables like carrots, potatoes, yams, and tomatoes, vegetables are always a good thing to snack on and include with each meal.

The majority of Americans don’t consume nearly enough fruits and vegetables. Government health officials suggest a minimum of five servings of fruit and vegetables daily—twice the amount suggested for meat and dairy.

BUY LOCAL ORGANIC VEGETABLES

If you buy organic produce, you’ll also get more nutritional bang from your buck if you buy produce that was grown locally or regionally. Experts agree that fruits, vegetables, and greens provide peak nutrition when they are ripe. Unfortunately, more than 60 percent of the commercial produce in the United States is picked before it’s ripe, which means the produce you buy at traditional grocery stores doesn’t have its full nutritional component.

“Many advanced bodybuilders divide their body parts into two groups and exercise them alternately on consecutive days. This is known as working a ‘split routine.’”

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

The American College of Sports Medicine (ACSM) recommends that you train a minimum of two times a week. Why at least twice a week? You need to stimulate your muscles regularly to gain improvements. Why not more frequently? You can train more often, but research shows that increasing the frequency of training results in a minimal amount of additional improvement relative to the additional time investment.

In other words, the most bang for your buck comes from those first two days a week. More days of exercise will give you more bang, just not as big a bang. To quantify this difference, according to research studies, training two days a week may produce only 75 percent of the gains that a three-day-a-week program would. So it’s really up to you and what you want. The bottom line is that a minimum amount of strength training will result in significant health and fitness improvements.

WHY YOU NEED TO LIMIT WORKOUTS

As with many things in life, when it comes to weight training, more is not necessarily better. Muscles need at least forty-eight hours in between training sessions to recover and repair. If you’re training your entire body daily, your muscles will not have time to build new tissue.

“I am the one who got myself fat, who did all the eating. So I had to take full responsibility for it.”

Improperly stored oils and fats will go rancid, and that’s just what happens in your body when you eat a high-fat diet. Since the brain and nervous system are very high in fat, some researchers speculate that rancid fat may be damaging the brain by causing free radicals (unstable molecules that potentially cause cell damage). Scientists have discovered that eating a diet in which 40 percent of the calories come from fat raises the risk of Alzheimer’s in someone who has the ApoE4 gene an incredible twenty-nine times. Younger people aged twenty to thirty-nine with the ApoE4 gene are twenty-three times more likely to develop Alzheimer’s in later years than are healthy eaters.

Fat intake should not exceed 15 to 20 percent of your total calories, but the quality of the fat is even more important. Essentially, omega-3 fats are excellent; trans fats are damaging.

CUT WAY BACK ON THE BAD FATS

American diets tend to be overabundant in saturated, hydrogenated, and partially hydrogenated trans fats. Saturated fats tend to raise cholesterol levels and thus endanger your heart and your brain. Saturated fats are usually solid at room temperature and can be found in well-marbled meat, butter, whole milk cheese, ice cream, egg yolks, and fatty cuts of beef, pork, and lamb. Trans fats may be even more harmful than saturated and hydrogenated fats. They disrupt the production of energy in the mitochondria (the energy factories) of brain cells. When it comes to trans fats, just say no.

“I thought about how many preconceived prejudices would crumble when I trotted right along for 26 miles.”

You will come to depend on your running watch the way you depend on your wristwatch when you think you might be late for work. Your running watch will let you know how you’re doing at all times.

The watch you use doesn’t have to be expensive (though it can be). Before purchasing a watch for running, decide what functions you think you’ll really use. Most include a stopwatch, an alarm, lap settings (also called split timing), a glow light for seeing your time at night, and a regular watch. Make sure the model you choose isn’t too complicated or intimidating. The stopwatch will be the part you use most, so make sure it’s easy to start, stop, and reset, and is also waterproof.

But why simply monitor your overall time and distance when you can learn so much more about your performance during a run? There are a variety of models that enable you to continuously monitor your speed, distance, pace, calories burned, and heart rate throughout the various phases of your workout. You can even make your workouts more challenging with a virtual partner feature, enabling you to train alongside a digital competitor with programmable specified time, distance, and pace goals. Some devices feature the capability of downloading information to a computer so you can both store the data and keep an online running log (see Week Eight).

“Gymnastics uses every single part of your body, every little tiny muscle that you never even knew.”

You’ve likely seen ads for books or DVDs about strengthening your “core.” It sounds like marketing hype, but don’t be misled by your natural skepticism. The core is very important to your athletic career. Your body’s core is essentially made up of the muscles of your trunk—the area between the shoulder “girdle” and the legs. This includes, of course, your abdominal muscles. Here’s why it’s so important: Your core is essential to all body movement. Everything you do comes from your core.

Strengthening the core is part of the program for getting stronger and more flexible overall. In fact, you can do most of the core-strengthening exercises in twenty minutes two times a week. Yoga and Pilates are both great for strengthening your core, but the simple pushup is also a great core-strengthening exercise. You can do this at home at your convenience. Boxing, gymnastics, dancing, and basketball are good core-strengthening activities. What’s important to know is that time invested in strengthening your core will pay off big time—no matter what sport or workout you prefer.

A WEAK CORE CAN HAMPER THE WAY YOU RUN

When you run with a weak core, your abdominal muscles, which support your spine, sag, and your pelvis does not stay level. You tilt forward into an inefficient running position. Your stride becomes labored and you begin to struggle. A strong core keeps you running efficiently with little or no wasted effort.

“If I ever opened a trampoline store, I don’t think I’d call it Trampo-Land, because you might think it was a store for tramps, which is not the impression we are trying to convey with our store. On the other hand, we would not prohibit tramps from browsing, or testing the trampolines, unless a tramp’s gyrations seemed to be getting out of control.”

Bouncing on a trampoline strengthens your legs, increasing their ability to serve as an auxiliary pump for your cardiovascular system, while increasing your pulse for a cardio workout. It also strengthens your voluntary and involuntary muscular system, which helps the entire system work more efficiently and burn more calories. It’s also low-impact and spares wear and tear on your joints, feet, knees, and hips. Buy a mini-trampoline to use when you’re watching TV. So, if you’ve got the room in your yard, splurge on a trampoline that you and the kids can enjoy, but if space is limited, a mini-trampoline will give you a workout and there’s no reason you can’t make it fun, as well.

“Sleep is when all the unsorted stuff comes flying out as from a dustbin upset in a high wind.”

Indigestion can strike at any time of day, but can be especially uncomfortable at night and can lead to painful discomfort, interrupted sleep, and moodiness. Taking a two-step approach to relieving your indigestion may help: 1) Use fruit and vegetable combinations shown to regulate stomach acid and promote more alkaline levels of the digestive tract, and 2) drink chamomile tea before bed. Chamomile tea has been shown to ease indigestion by soothing the esophageal muscles and those of the large and small intestine.

On the uncomfortable nights that indigestion creeps up, turn to your blender for quick relief. This delightfully sweet fruit and veggie combination provides indigestion relief in one sweet treat you can enjoy as dessert or right when the burn hits!

1. Combine romaine, apples, carrots, cucumber, lemon, and 1 cup of tea in a blender and blend until thoroughly combined.

2. Add remaining 1 cup of tea as needed while blending until desired consistency is achieved.