Happy New Year! This is the time of year when many people make resolutions, with getting fit being amongst the most common. Of course, research shows that most people quit their new year’s resolutions by around March. So this year, I’d like to suggest you take a different approach: rather than giving yourself overly ambitious goals in the gym, instead learn to bake some very modest but high-yield habits into your life.
While this may not sound as sexy as committing to some kind of “beach body” program, the fact is that with exercise, a little goes a long way. A very long way. To this end, I’d like to highlight two threads of research for you.
I’ve been meaning to review this study for some time now. A few years ago, a cardiologist at the University of Texas by the name of Dr. Ben Levine conducted a study that ought to be on the minds of anybody who is interested in living a longer and healthier life.
Dr. Levine and his colleagues put middle aged adults (around age 50) who were previously sedentary but otherwise healthy on an exercise protocol for two years, and performed various tests on their hearts before and after the study. They found that after two years, the subject’s hearts had effectively reverted back to those of a 30 year old’s. In other words, exercise made these people’s hearts age in reverse by almost twenty years.
In today’s blog post, I will briefly review a fascinating study that was first published in 2005, and that should inform our approach to losing weight and improving our fitness and metabolic health.
In my last post, I touched on some factors other than diet and exercise that can impact your weight loss efforts.
Today I want to discuss three random studies. None of them have anything to do (at least not directly) with each other, and none of them represent “the” solution to weight loss. I highlight them rather to reinforce the point that, if you are paying attention to the ever expanding (no pun intended) science of obesity and weight loss, you should understand that eating more and moving less are only one part of the story.
One of my biggest interests – and one of the most common goals patients have – is weight loss. It’s also a common area of frustration. After all, it SHOULD be a simple thing. Change your diet and move more, right? What could be easier than that? And yet, millions of Americans try this approach every year, and most of the time it fails them. Why?
