Posts Tagged ‘exercise’

EATING SANELY MEANS MOVING, TOO

Wednesday, July 28th, 2010

Eating sanely is by definition about eating, right?  Well, yes, though it is also about moving.  We eat well, at least in part, to maintain good health and a satisfactory weight.  And you’re not likely to achieve either without moving your body.

People exercise much less often now than in earlier eras—in fact, many of us now lead lives in which it would be completely possible to not exercise at all.  Our bodies pay a steep price for not moving, though.   In terms of weight, exercise doesn’t necessarily prevent weight gain or cause automatic losses.  We have to eat right, too.  But exercise builds muscle and supports healthy metabolism in ways that scientists continue to analyze.
We hear and read about exercise in the news pretty regularly these days.  On June 4th I wrote “Stand Up to Keep Weight Down”, in response to findings about sitting vs. standing.  For it turns out that even just standing beats staying seated on cardiac and other measures.   Dr. Amos Oz puts his own spin on these studies in his latest O, the Oprah Magazine column (August 2010).  And a recent Sunday New York Times Magazine item notes that even men who work out regularly show cardiac worsening if they sit a lot when during the rest of the week.  (more…)

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STAND UP TO KEEP WEIGHT DOWN

Friday, June 4th, 2010

“Sitting = Death”. This headline delivers a bit of a jolt. The story that it introduced, though, simply reported another study of what I called “incidental exercise” in the EatSanely workbook course. Others have used the term “non-exercise activity”. What these studies show is that heavy-duty exercise is not the only factor in the exercise-weight equation. The relationship between exercise and weight, in fact, proves much more complicated than previously thought. How much you move, day in and day out, even without planned “exercise”, affects your weight in significant ways.

One of first reports on non-exercise activity came from the Mayo Clinic in 2005, where studies found differences in how much individuals are inclined to move around. Not surprisingly, those who move around more tend to struggle less with weight. And it wasn’t just that heavy people found it harder to move because of their weight—it seemed more of built-in preference. People who don’t naturally feel as compelled to move, though, could learn to incorporate more of this “every day” kind of movement into their lives. Those who did reaped benefits. (more…)

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