For millions of years, physical exertion was essential for survival. Humans had to roam, forage, and chase to live. Hunter-gatherers scrambled endlessly over rough terrain to forage for food and pursue game. Survival depended on their ability to ambulate from one place to another. Even as recently as a hundred years ago, people had to walk several miles a day just to accomplish what they needed to do to live. Then came the Machine Age, which introduced the use of coal, gasoline, and electric power and helped to reduce our physical workload. Mass agricultural production freed us from farm work. Mechanized transportation eliminated the need to walk anywhere but short distances.
For the first time in history, inactivity became an option, and today, large portions of the population rarely exert themselves more than walking a block or two or climbing a flight of stairs. Many of us ride to work in a car or bus, sit at a desk all day, and then come home and station ourselves in front of a television or computer screen.
If high cholesterol and diabetes are diseases, then so is sedentary living. Inactivity sets us up for obesity, diabetes, high blood pressure, heart disease, anxiety, and depression. Today, the number-one cause of disability in senior Americans is leg weakness caused by disuse. Many elderly people have to use canes and walkers or live in nursing homes simply because chronic inactivity has weakened their leg muscles.
Although the rising rates of obesity and diabetes of recent decades correlate best with a rise in starch and sugar consumption, the gradual decline in physical activity set the stage. Living a completely sedentary existence makes your muscle mass decline, your carbohydrate metabolism fall out of whack, and your body lose its natural ability to regulate energy balance. You get fat, weak, and diabetic.
Aversion to exercise is a detrimental psychological quirk rather than a rational preference, which means you may want to take a close look at this universal human foible. As a child, you loved physical activity, but with maturity, you lost some of that unrestrained enthusiasm for running and jumping. Once you’re grown, you decide that there must be a purpose for exertion—winning in competition, mastery of a skill, seeking adventure, earning a living, or improving health. You may still enjoy exercise, but you need motivation to do it.
Also, in midlife, some stumbling blocks to exercise crop up: your joints lose elasticity, and the bounce in your stride becomes more of a thud. Speed, balance, and coordination, though still serviceable, aren’t as good as when you were younger. This decline in physicality may be hard for you to accept, which leads to focusing more on the intellectual and social sides of life—areas in which your skills are rising—and less on the physical side, where your prowess is waning.
When you want to avoid something, you become an expert at coming up with great excuses for not doing it. That’s why, in my twenty-five years of medical practice, I personally have heard several thousand excuses for not exercising. The most common reason is lack of time. But if that’s legitimate, how come younger people who are working their way up in careers and raising small children are more likely to set aside time for exercise than older, more established folks whose children are grown?
Clearly, a conscious or subconscious aversion to exertion, rather than a genuine lack of time, keeps some people from exercising. What’s unfortunate is that this perceived lack of time seems to get worse exactly when people need exercise the most, as they age.
Another common excuse for not exercising has to do with aches and pains. One sore spot often provides an excuse for not exercising the others. Backaches and stiff knees head the list. In most cases, exercise is exactly what’s needed.
The trick is to suppress your aversion to exercise long enough to initiate physical activity, and you’ll find that a natural affinity for action takes over. And don’t get discouraged just because you’re sometimes hit with pangs of laziness when it’s time to work out or walk. A world-class triathlete once told me that when he didn’t feel like exercising but made himself do it anyway, he had the greatest surges of energy.
Pre-exercise lethargy and postexercise exhilaration probably result from hormonal fluctuations. Mild versions of the same body-chemistry downswings that cause depression are responsible for many of the sluggish moods we experience, and that is when the hormone-stimulating, antidepressant effects of exercise provide the greatest boosts.
My own reversal of attitude before and after exercise often astonishes me. A pang of lassitude—even resentment that I have to exercise to stay healthy—descends upon me before starting. But this dissipates immediately after I begin, and within a few minutes my mood brightens. Afterward, I regard the experience as a gift and look forward to my next workout.
The trick is in taking the first step. Just putting on your sweats and sneakers can improve your attitude. Once you decide to go work out, you will find that the lethargy, negativity, and uncertainty dissipate, and energy and confidence flow.
Seventeen years ago, I watched my wife take her first step into the realm of exercise. Kathy was disheartened because she had gained weight and gotten out of shape when she was pregnant with our second child. About three months after delivery, her exasperation grew, and one day, in frustration, she asked me what she could do to get back in shape.
Kathy had been a couch potato for all of her thirty-five years. Raised in the southern tradition that girls weren’t supposed to engage in sweaty sports, she had never exercised in her adult life and was disdainful of the whole idea. I told her that she might want to leave the house and go for a short jog—something she had never done in her life. She took my advice.
When she returned, her attitude brightened, and I never saw her so discouraged again. She discovered that exercise was the key to feeling good physically and mentally. After a few more jogs, she looked for a form of exercise she would find more enjoyable. She enrolled in an aerobics class, and now she has been doing high-intensity aerobics three times a week for seventeen years. It shows. She regained and kept her youthful figure, and she did it without dieting.
I was thirty when I took my first step. In the last years of medical training, I had let myself get pudgy and out of shape. One day, I was so disgusted with myself I decided to go for a run (in my street clothes since I didn’t own a pair of jogging shorts). I could barely run a half mile—pretty bad for a thirty-year-old. But afterward I felt better, and I kept it up.
Running put me back in touch with the physical side of life. Later, I installed a chinning bar in a doorway and started supplementing the running with calisthenics. Eventually, I joined a gym. I do more walking than running now, but I have exercised regularly ever since. There have been periods, a few months or so, when other interests distracted me and I let exercise go. But each time I drifted away, I knew what I had to do to get back: take the first step.
You’re the one who has to decide to take that first step.
Regular exercise can relax you, invigorate you, and help you control your weight. In fact, there are numerous reasons that exercise (even walking just 30 minutes, four times a week) is a great contributor to good health. Here are some of them:
Exercise is the only way known to lower your body’s fatness set point. Unlike dieting, which slows your metabolism, exercise raises the rate your body burns fat even while you are resting. It literally makes you lose weight as you sleep.
Before age forty, you can maintain muscle strength and endurance with minimal exercise. That’s why younger people often appear muscular and capable of vigorous physical activity even if they don’t exercise much. But as you reach middle age, things change. If you make no effort to maintain your strength, your muscles shrivel up and your endurance fades, and by age fifty, much of your muscle will have turned to flab. Exercise prevents or reverses that decline. If you engage in regular physical exertion, you can maintain muscle strength and endurance well into your nineties.
Antidepressant? Pain killer? Tranquilizer? You would think we would all be addicted to exercise. Exercise—like religious conversions, falling in love, or kicking addictions—changes people’s lives. Not only does it improve your health and your looks, it restores energy and optimism. Some people are hooked on exercise, and they’re healthier for it.
Simply put, your metabolism won’t work right if you’re a couch potato. Your body won’t handle carbohydrates properly, your insulin levels will go up, and you will be at increased risk of developing diabetes and heart disease. And, no matter how good your diet is, you will have trouble losing weight. Lack of exercise is, indeed, a disease in itself
If you cut out the refined carbs and get off the couch, you may be surprised at how your body starts cooperating. And, it doesn’t take much exercise to make a difference. Research studies show that twenty minutes of walking four times a week markedly improves carbohydrate metabolism. Men and women who walk regularly are significantly less likely to gain weight or develop diabetes than those who are completely sedentary.