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Overview Healthy Diet Healthy Exercise Program Nutritional Supplement Program Glycemic Index Recommended Foods To Eat Phase 1 - Basic Meal Plan Phase 1 - Basic Meal Plan (Alternate) Phase 2 - Reversing Insulin Resistance Phase 2 - Reversing Insulin Resistance (Alternate) Healthy for Life Shakes

Healthy for Life
Learning Healthy Lifestyles
that have the side effect of fat loss.

HEALTHY EXERCISE PROGRAM

One of the curses of the modern world, however, is that the body rarely gets to function as it was designed. We have the unfortunate option of living very sedentary, stagnant lives, thanks to cars, escalators, elevators, Internet shopping, fast food, television (remote controls), running water, and even indoor toilets (that now even flush automatically). Major surveys estimate that between 22 percent and 30 percent of U.S. adults participate in no leisure-time physical activity whatsoever (including walking)! A study published recently in The New England Journal of Medicine indicated that physical inactivity might actually be more harmful to our health than other familiar risk factors, such as smoking, hypertension and cardiovascular disease. The leading author of this study, Jonathan Myers, PhD, stated in the July 2003 issue of Prevention magazine, "Our study showed that a person's exercise capacity, measured by their ability to perform on a treadmill, was a more powerful predictor of mortality than all other risk factors.”

As a physician, I meet daily with patients immobilized and suffering from the results of arthritis, chronic disease, and excessive weight. I become discouraged by the fact that many of my patients are weakened to the point of being unable to accomplish even simple daily tasks because of their long-term inactivity. Thankfully, most have the option to break free and begin using our bodies again—as they were intended—through vibrant, enjoyable, life-giving exercise.

Physical Benefits of Exercise

In the early 1980s, the U.S. Surgeon General issued a statement listing the following health benefits provided by a modest exercise program:

• Weight loss
• Lower blood pressure
• Stronger bones and decreased risk of osteoporosis
• Decreased risk of heart disease
• Improved sensitivity to insulin, which leads to a decreased risk of diabetes
• Increased strength and coordination, which lead to decreased falls and injuries
• Enhanced immune system
• Overall increase in the sense of well-being and greater ability to handle stress

Mental Benefits

Exercise can also do wonders for your mind; it’s a great excuse to “get away from it all”! A workout can be a wonderful opportunity to relax your brain, to let your thoughts calm down, and to think about things that have been in the back of your mind for a while. There is a natural relaxation response that follows a good, healthy workout. It is hard to think about the problems facing you at work or at home after a nice, brisk three-mile walk or run.

Emotional Benefits

Exercise stimulates your body to release natural chemicals called “endorphins”. Endorphins attach to special receptor sites in the brain that give you a “natural high.” Once you get used to a regular routine of exercise, you will look forward to the feelings you have afterwards. In fact, many people who are struggling with depression, anger and discouragement find that exercise helps noticeably. Consistent workouts often give them enough relief and hope to move on to better things.

Relational Benefits

Exercise can have a positive impact on relationships too. Time spent in the gym, riding bikes, or hiking are all are prime opportunities to spend quality time with family and friends. …or workouts can be a great time to be alone. Solitude is rare in life; exercise might be just the right excuse to find it. It may even be an opportunity to shut out the “noise” in our lives, even if it is just for a short period of time.

The benefits of exercise are numerous and can improve every area of our being. It’s not just an end in itself; exercise is a means to a lot of wonderful things.

Essential Principles for Successful Exercise

Although exercise can produce magical results, there is no magic involved. We are so fortunate to live in a time when clear and scientific principles are available to the one who wants to improve their fitness. Those who take a haphazard approach to exercise, however, quickly reach a plateau, and the awesome benefits of exercise are minimized. If you follow these general principles for effective exercise, you’ll be maximizing the lifetime benefits of a healthy, active life.

1. Check in with a physician

If you are over 40 years of age or have significant risk factors for coronary artery disease (high blood pressure, elevated cholesterol, diabetes), please see your physician before starting any type of exercise program. If you have any musculoskeletal problems (bad back, painful knees, etc.) you should consider having your physician refer you to a physical therapist or chiropractor who can guide you into an exercise program that will not aggravate your underlying condition.

2. Have fun!

Research shows that almost any type of exercise is beneficial, so pick something you like! What gets you excited? Fresh air? Friendships? The park? Nature? Gadgets? Speed? Competition? Solitude? Music? Machines? Books? Think about what you like and build your exercise plan around it. I would recommend checking out “the gym scene” before you drop a lot of money on a membership. Gyms might be a great fit for you. You might like the relationships, the mirrors, the music...or, they might make you feel uncomfortable and self-conscious. Most gyms will give you a free trial pass. Try it out before you give them your credit card!

3. Start easy

Whatever you do, take it very easy at first and slowly build up. Your goal is to work up to five balanced workouts per week, each taking about 30 to 40 minutes each. For the first several weeks, just relax and enjoy yourself. Don’t overdue it at first! There is no such thing as “fast track fitness” (regardless of what they are trying to sell you on TV). If you’ve been struggling with weight or have been in poor condition or health for years, it’s easy to get excited and determined to get into shape and attempt to do so too quickly. This is not a race. Each workout is just a short-term goal on the way to a long-term vision. There is no need to get there soon, and trying to do it too fast will lead to burnout, pain, and possible injury that potentially could end your workouts instantly.

4. Gradually push your workouts

It will be amazing how quickly your body will adapt to physical activity if you are wise. When you are feeling stronger and in better condition, you should consider being a little more aggressive with your workouts. Challenging yourself physically will only enhance your health benefits, whether it is allowing your heart to beat a little faster during a burst of aerobic activity or pushing your muscles to near exhaustion during weight resistant exercise. However, remember that over exercise can actually be harmful to your health. Simply keep challenging yourself as you see your overall physical strength and cardiovascular condition improving.

5. Adequate rest

Oddly enough, rest is an essential element of successful exercise. Effective exercise actually tears you down. It stresses your body beyond normal limits causing microdamage in your muscles. Your muscles and cardiovascular system heal and become stronger during the rest phase more than during the actual workout! If you are continually working the muscle and cardiovascular system and breaking it down without giving enough time to rest and rebuild, you can actually lose ground. This leads to a common condition called “overtraining,” which can lead to fatigue, weakness, decrease in your immune system, and potentially lead to injuries. It’s also very discouraging because when you are overtraining, your progress stops even as you are trying harder. Adequate rest for our muscles and bodies is critical for an effective exercise program. For this reason, we recommend no more than five workouts a week, giving your body two days to strengthen and recover.

6. Vary your routine

If you are involved in a weight resistance program, a concept called “muscle memory” will seriously limit any gains you may expect from your workout program. If you simply repeat the same exercise over and over, month after month, the muscle “remembers” and adjusts to the exercise. This will not allow for the breakdown of the muscle that is required for increased strengthening and building up of the muscle.

Mixing up your exercise routine maximizes both effectiveness and enjoyment. If you are a walker, take to the sidewalks, the parks, or to the trails on a regular basis. If you swim, try out different pools or try an open water swim in a lake. In your weight training, it’s always a good idea to vary the types of exercises, the kinds of machines you might use, and the amount of weight you lift. No matter what kind of plan you develop, have alternative options handy in case your circumstances change. For instance, if the weather turns bad, you might want to take your walk inside the local mall. (But leave your wallet behind or it could cause stress to your financial health!)

Always remember that any kind of exercise is better than none, so spice it up with some variety!

7. Stay hydrated

Your body needs water. In fact, most of our body and muscle is made up of water. When you exercise it needs even more water than normal. As part of a healthy lifestyle, you will want to start drinking more water throughout your regular day. When you exercise, drink before you get thirsty. If you are planning a long bike ride or a hike on a hot day, drink a couple extra glasses of water several hours before you begin and then keep drinking throughout the activity. Plenty of purified or distilled water ensures that you get the most out of your efforts and prevents dehydration.

8. Make it a priority

Very few of us feel like we have extra time. Even if we had a 48-hour day, we still wouldn’t have enough time for everything. That’s why we need to take charge and fill our lives with what matters—with what’s important. Otherwise, the world and those around us will determine our schedules.

Scheduling for exercise really isn’t that difficult. With our goal of five 30 to 40 minute workouts, we only need two-and-a-half to four hours per week. That’s not much considering that the average adult male watches 29 hours of TV and the average female watches 34 hours!  If you really can’t pry yourself away from the tube, then exercise while you are watching television! Many gyms are equipped with TVs, or you can move your stair-stepper into the living room. All you need to do is make life-giving exercise a priority and other things on the to-do list will begin fit in around it. Be creative and be persistent. Exercise is a very, very good investment of your time.

The Number One Priority: A Solid Aerobic Base

An aerobic exercise causes you to breathe heavier than normal for ten to 30 minutes. Classic examples of aerobic exercise would be walking briskly, jogging, biking, swimming, hiking, tennis, and racquetball; but really, anything will do. Aerobic exercise is the most effective kind of exercise for increasing the health of your heart and lungs and to help reverse insulin resistance, which allows you to decrease your risk of developing heart disease or diabetes.  For those of you who have evidence of the metabolic syndrome, it is critical that some kind of aerobic exercise by the main aspect of your exercise program.  Certainly weight resistant training and stretching are great additions to an aerobic exercise program; however, they should not replace the aerobic aspect of your exercise program.

All types of aerobic exercise have been found to be beneficial in improving insulin sensitivity, especially for those who have been inactive, overweight, and those with type 2 diabetes mellitus. The more aggressive and vigorous the exercise, the greater the effectiveness will be in improving insulin resistance.  However, even moderate exercise, is very effective.   

Contrary to other diet/exercise programs based on the premise of “calories in, calories out,” the reason to exercise is entirely different. The amount of calories used during exercise is insignificant compared to the entire metabolic changes that occur by improving insulin sensitivity. Once you have corrected insulin resistance, your body is finally able to use calories normally and you literally begin releasing fat from those abdominal fat cells. I detail this concept in my book, Healthy for Life, (Real Life Press 2005).

Aerobic activities are definitely the place to start for maximum exercise results. Your first goal is to “go aerobic” five times a week, in any kind of activity you desire. Because of the unlimited options available, aerobic exercise can be very enjoyable. Start with very easy, short sessions. (It is more advantageous to go out for a ten-minute walk five times a week than it is to try to walk five miles once a week.) Over the first month or two, build to the point where you are breathing a little harder for 20 to 30 minutes. Once you are able to walk for 30 minutes five times a week, begin pushing yourself by walking more briskly or walking up some hills. To get even more out of your aerobic workout, add several bursts of effort for just a minute or two that take you right to the edge of your capacity; then back off again.

That’s really all there is to it. Choose any activities you want from the huge smorgasbord of recreational opportunities, and then go out there and have fun! Don’t forget to drink your water and take time off in between sessions for rest.

Building Strength on the Base

While you are building your aerobic base five times a week, you can start adding anaerobic elements to your exercise. Anaerobic exercises create a warm, slow-burning sensation in your muscles and they add wonderful benefits to your aerobic base.

Benefits of Anaerobic Strength Training:

• Increased muscular strength

• Larger muscles that burn more calories

• Increased flexibility and balance

• Decreased risk of heart attack

• Prevention of muscle loss and falls during aging

• Improved bone density and decreased risk of osteoporosis

Essential Principles of Strength Training

1. Resistance.

Resistance can come in many forms. It might be from a coiled spring or an elastic cord. It might be from a metal weight or some sort of mechanical brake. Or it can be as simple as gravity as you do a push-up or sit-up. Even doing heavy yard work or cutting wood will give you some resistance exercise. Regardless of the source, strength training applies resistance to your movements, causing your muscles to work extra hard. Simply “going through the motions” is not going to help much.

A certain amount of stress handled properly is good for the body and it is also good for your muscles. When a muscle is stressed appropriately, there is a break down of the muscle fibers (microdamage), which stimulates muscle growth. Therefore, it is essential that you break down the muscle you are working during your workout and then allow enough time for the muscle to adequately repair itself.

2. “Reps”

When you are exercising a particular muscle, there are two phases of the exercise that must be defined. When you are contracting the muscle, it is called the concentric phase.  When you are relaxing the muscle and allowing to return to the starting position, it is called the eccentric phase. When you work out, the concentric phase should last a full two to three seconds. The eccentric phase should take even longer, about three to four seconds. During the eccentric or relaxation phase, the microdamage to the muscle occurs. It is this particular stress on the muscle that stimulates muscle growth. A slow controlled contraction and relaxation of the muscle will not only protect you from injury but also will maximize the effects of your exercise.

Each time you complete one full contraction and one relaxation of the muscle, it’s called a “repetition” or a “rep.” The number of reps a person performs really varies on what their individual goals really are. However, I personally believe that doing eight to 12 reps for an individual exercise is the safest recommendation. This way you do not have too much or too little weight.

3. Sets

Sets are just clusters of reps with a rest in between. Let’s say you do ten reps, three times, with two one-minute rests in between. That would be three “sets.”

Understanding how resistance, reps, and sets work together will allow you to customize your strength training to fit your goals. Quite simply, if you want to build big muscles, you want to exercise with more resistance, at fewer reps and sets. If you want to tone your body with muscles that are lean and clean, you will want to have less resistance and do more reps and sets.

Again, for strength training, lift enough weight so that you are not able to exceed 12 reps but can do at least eight reps. If you are doing more than 12 reps, you are essentially doing an aerobic exercise. If you are not able to do eight reps with the weight you have chosen, you have too much resistance and may be vulnerable to injury.

When you are first beginning, it is wise to do between ten and 15 reps. As you improve, you should try to do between eight and 12 reps. Advanced training may involve six to eight reps.

Adjust your resistance so you can do three sets of these reps for each exercise. It is critical that you are just barely able to complete the final rep of each set. In other words, you should be lifting enough weight to completely exhaust and fatigue the muscle you are working somewhere between the eighth and 12th rep, depending on your conditioning level. If you are not able to fatigue the muscle until the 18th rep, you need to increase the amount of resistance (by adding more weight). If you are fatiguing the muscle in the third rep, you are lifting too much weight and you need to lower the resistance (by decreasing the weight).

When you get the hang of this, you might want to inject “supersets” into your routine. In a superset, you exercise different muscles during the same set. (For example, you might do a bicep exercise, then a particular leg exercise, and then an abdominal exercise before taking a rest.) This adds variety and also brings in an element of aerobic exercise (increased pulse rate) into the workout. However, it must be stressed that this should involve working two or three totally different muscle groups to avoid injury.

Keys to Successful Strength Training:

• Go slow. Stay in constant control as you carefully move through each rep.

• Don’t fully extend your joints. Always keep a little bend to avoid the chance of hyperextending or damaging a joint.

• Stop at the first moment of pain. Remember, you want to go for the burn, not a break.

• Start easy and build steadily. Begin with very easy resistance, always targeting 12 reps and two to three sets for each muscle. Slowly add resistance over a couple of weeks until you are maxed out at the end the third set, feeling a steady burn, and unable to lift any more.

• Rest. Take at least a minute in between sets to rest and take a drink of water. Make sure that you take off at least a day in between your strength building exercises for an aerobic workout or a day of complete relaxation.

• Mix it up. Your muscles respond best to variety, so as you begin to develop a healthy habit of strength training, you must inject some diversity into your plan. You might want to try a different machine or hold your hands differently. You can alter the position of your body slightly too. Try a few more reps at less resistance or fewer sets at more resistance.

• Exercise every muscle once a week. Authorities say that a muscle needs four to seven days to recover from a good strength workout. If you alternate the muscles you exercise, it brings safety and balance to your workouts. I recommend exercising your chest/triceps/abdomen during one work out, legs/shoulders/abdomen the next, and then exercising your back/biceps/abdomen during your final anaerobic strength work out.

A Word about Exercise Equipment.

There are some amazing machines that have been invented to help you exercise. Some work great, some are okay, and many are next to worthless. I recommend starting simply, inexpensively, and then adding equipment as your plan evolves.

It’s actually possible to start your strength training without any equipment at all! I call it the “Weightless Workout”. It uses gravity as your only resistance and makes use of simple exercises such as push-ups, sit-ups, chair dips, knee bends, wall sits, and stair climbing to give you an effective anaerobic workout.

If you decide to head to the gym, you will find everything you need there, and usually pretty good advice from the trainers.

If you want to begin creating your own home gym, start simply with some dumbbells, which can be bought for 50 cents a pound at most sports stores. Don’t buy anything massive or expensive until you are absolutely sure it fits your taste—and check the newspaper before buying new. The classifieds are full of people trying to get rid of “barely used” exercise equipment that they bought on a whim as part of their last New Year’s resolution.

Putting It All Together.

Your weekly plan will reflect your priorities, your goals, and your preferences. It will reasonably fit into your schedule and build slowly over time until you have an awesome, life-enhancing new experience as a regular part of your life.

In its simplest form your weekly plan will include:

* Slowly building up to five aerobic activities that get you breathing fairly hard for at least 30 minutes.

* Once you have built up to five aerobic workouts of at least 30 minutes each, then add two or three strength building workouts that get your major muscles burning once a week. (This can actually be a part of your aerobic exercise or be done at the beginning or end of an aerobic workout.)

A typical, balanced plan might look something like this: