Health Benefits of Exercise: What You Should Know Before You Start
Exercise is not just important for weight control — it also brings immense general health benefits. The facts are startling:
1. Studies have shown that inactivity is as great a risk factor for heart disease as a 20-a-day cigarette habit and is as bad as having hypertension or raised cholesterol.
2. The unfit have two and a half times more risk of early cardiac death than the fit.
3. Taking sufficient exercise can override or neutralize bad eating habits.
4. Regular exercise lowers blood pressure and improves blood sugar control in diabetics.
5. Exercise lowers the level of ‘bad’ cholesterol and raises the level of ‘good’ cholesterol.
6. Exercise boosts the body’s production of its own antioxidant enzymes.
How Much Exercise
We know roughly how much exercise is needed to reduce the risk of illness. Doing 2,500 calories worth of exercise per week reduces the risk of a heart attack, 1 mile of brisk walking per day reduces the risk of developing Type 2 diabetes by up to 58%, and 2,900 calories of exercise per week is sufficient in most cases to maintain a healthy body weight. That may sound like a lot of calories but it is achievable.
Thirty minutes a day of brisk walking gets you into a healthier and leaner condition; an hour a day is even better. For example you could take a half hour walk at lunchtime and, by getting off the bus a stop earlier on the way to and from work, walk 15 minutes in the morning and another 15 minutes in the evening. You will be burning 300 calories per day — that’s 2,100 calories each week. Ring the changes by substituting every other day’s walk with an hour of heavy gardening, heavy housework (such as high energy hoovering), dancing or jogging, enough in all cases to work up a sweat, and you have already carved out a new lifestyle which will change your body shape and your health prospects.
For those unable or unwilling to incorporate exercise into the daily routine, the Zenique bath may provide a more acceptable alternative. This system uses muscle stimulation to provide a 10 minute work-out in the bath which preliminary results show to be sufficiently intense to lower blood pressure and blood glucose, if used regularly.
This sort of exercise regime is strongly linked to a reduced risk of Type 2 diabetes, heart disease and colon cancer. In fact, leaner is healthier all over. At the Harvard University School of Public Health, Professors Walter Willett and Meir Stampfer showed that the risk of death increases by 1 % for every one pound overweight between the ages of 30 and 49, and by 2% per pound thereafter. In other words, stay lean; getting comfortably fatter as we get older is not natural, and it is not healthy.
But of course there is a lot more that can be done to improve your looks and your health, and much of it requires no effort at all.
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