CHAPTER 14

Practicing Exercise Reality Therapy

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.

SEDENTARY BEHAVIOR WILL SHORTEN YOUR LIFE

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.

ACCEPTING YOUR LOVE-HATE RELATIONSHIP WITH EXERCISE

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.

UNLEASHING YOUR NATURAL AFFINITY FOR EXERCISE

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.

Ratcheting Up Your Health

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 relieves insulin resistance. Exercise offsets the adverse effects of dietary carbohydrates. When you exercise, your muscles burn glucose before it turns to fat. Insulin resistance improves for forty-eight hours after a single session of aerobic exercise. In addition, if you exercise regularly, the increased muscle mass and improved cardiovascular conditioning permanently reduce insulin resistance, promote weight loss, and reduce the risk of diabetes.
  • Exercise lowers your fatness set point. Your body has several mechanisms that match your dietary intake to your energy output, and the higher the activity level, the better these balancing systems work. Regular physical exercise restores your body’s ability to regulate your weight. When experimental subjects lose weight by reducing their dietary intake, their metabolisms slow, their appetites increase, and they gain the weight back. Conversely, when subjects are made to gain weight by being purposefully overfed for a while, once they go back to their normal eating habits, they usually return to their previous weight without trying.

    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.

  • Exercise reduces triglycerides and raises good cholesterol levels. Because exercise burns off glucose before it has a chance to turn to fat, blood levels of triglyceride—which is simply fat in the blood—fall abruptly and remain low for several days after exercising. High triglyceride levels “wash away” HDL, the good cholesterol. By lowering triglyceride, exercise restores HDL and helps prevent atherosclerosis.
  • Exercise lifts your spirits. It produces the same chemical changes in your brain that an antidepressant drug such as Prozac does, raising levels of a natural body chemical called serotonin that relieves depression. According to research studies, exercise cures mild depression as effectively as medication.
  • Exercise stimulates your endorphins, the body’s natural painkillers. These chemicals are responsible for the feeling of calmness and well-being that exercise promotes.

    The Older You Are, the More Important Exercise Is

    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.

  • Exercise gives you energy. It causes your nerve endings and adrenal glands to discharge adrenaline, which wakes you up, heightens your alertness, and gives you a boost of energy.
  • Exercise is a natural tranquilizer. Because physical exertion discharges excess adrenaline, which accumulates with stress, you will feel calmer and concentrate better if you exercise regularly.

    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.

KEY IDEAS FOR TAKEOUT

  • ■ The past one hundred years is the first time in history that most humans have not had to exert themselves physically to survive.
  • ■ The lack of exercise that characterizes modern life is a physiological aberration that predisposes us to insulin resistance, obesity, diabetes, and a number of other medical problems.
  • ■ Exercise is a natural antidepressant, tranquilizer, stimulant, and painkiller.
  • ■ Most of us have a love–hate relationship with exercise. There is a natural aversion to it, but paradoxically, also an affinity.
  • ■ Inactivity worsens our aversion to exercise. Activity brings out our affinity for it.
  • ■ The way to overcome an aversion to exercise is to take the first step. Once you initiate activity, the antidepressant and stimulant effects of exercise overcome the lethargy-producing influence of inactivity.