Would you like to be less fat? This will help.
Welcome to our health & self help blog.
In it we post health commentary & reviews of books, eBooks, & other things that improve or protect your health or which enable you to live longer, to be more prosperous, & to be more effective.
Today's post: Tuesday, 7-18-2006
Would you like to be less fat? This will help.
Stress is a proven fattener.
Make it your highest priority to keep your perceived level of stress in the low to low moderate range most of the time.
Research shows that people who feel stressed tend to eat more & more often; eat more sugar; eat more fats; & eat more "treat" foods than people who enjoy lower stress levels.
(And, recent studies have been released showing that this is particularly true for women.)
People who lose fat & keep it off successfully know this & do something about it.
There are three ways to do this.:
1. Cut the amount of stress in your life:
Overcome the challenges that stress you that can be overcome; & take massive action to escape severe challenges that you cannot overcome.
Prevent new stresses.: Make prudent choices; & always take safety precautions to escape horrible stresses IN ADVANCE, when you possibly can.
2. Improve your stress tolerance.: Find & use everything you can to increase the level of challenge & hassle you can handle without feeling stressed.
3. Physically relieve & turn off your stress reactions even when you are stressed.
All the effective ways to do these three things would fill many books. And they do. Find some & read them.
But here’s a secret few know that will help you.
THE single most doable & effective method known to do parts 2 & 3 - increase your ability to throw off & endure stress -- & to physically relieve stress, is to do regular exercise every week.
This was one of the key findings of Dr Kenneth Cooper, when the U.S. Air Force commissioned him, as an MD with an expert knowledge of exercise its affect on physiology, to study why exercise benefits people.
He found that the people he studied who got regular exercise each week & who included a minimum of cardio exercise, or aerobic exercise (to use his term for it) each week, simply felt less stressed when stressful things happened & handled it better than those people who did not get the regular exercise.
And, this was true for both sudden stress & for chronic stress over longer periods of time.
There are several reasons for this.
1. Many people find that their mind gets unplugged from focusing on small & medium sized stress when they do an aerobic exercise like walking or running or swimming or exercising on a Nordic Track. And, they do these things long enough each time, this often turns off their physical stress reaction & temporarily relieves it.
(And, the people who don’t do the exercise, don’t get the stress relief.)
2. People who get this kind of exercise regularly have lower resting heart rates & have trained their hearts to recover from extra work much more quickly than people who don’t get the exercise.
So, when the people who exercise are stressed their heart rate goes up less or recovers to normal faster, likely both. And, these two things help the people who exercise to feel less stress & think better when stressed & also help them recover from stress more easily.
3. And, regular exercise also has two easy to miss but profound affects on your self- esteem.
If you exercise regularly, every week, then every week, you do something on purpose that you set yourself to do; & you usually do it successfully.
In addition, you always have recent memories that you have overcome mild or moderate difficulties successfully. And, in the case of cardio or aerobic exercise, you’ve often done so for a somewhat prolonged period of time & successfully persisted as long as the time or distance you set.
So, even without you realizing it, you are much more likely to see yourself as proactive, able, & able to persist in the face of difficulty.
This increases your self confidence at least somewhat that you can find solutions to, & succeed in overcoming, the stresses you face. So you see them as more manageable & feel less stress.
(And, it also helps that people who exercise regularly are more likely to remove or escape from the things that stress them since they are more likely to try solutions & persist in doing so than people who don’t exercise, precisely because of this shift in self-esteem.)
4. People who do a minimum of aerobic exercise each week have better blood flow to their brains. So, not only do they think better most of the time, when they are under stress, they tend to think a LOT better than people who don’t exercise.
Why? Because perceived stress tends to reduce blood flow to exactly the thinking & creative parts of your brain you most need to think clearly & overcome the challenges that are stressing you.
So what seems to happen is that in people who exercise regularly, they are more likely to have some ability to think clearly & solve problems even when under stress than people who don’t because they have enough better blood flow they can still think at least some while the people who don’t exercise, get enough less blood flow, they have less self-control & problem solving ability.
**************
In future posts, we’ll have information on ways to get into exercise, how exercise effectively & safely; & how to succeed in continuing to exercise regularly.
And, we’ll have a LOT more about how incredibly beneficial to you it is to exercise.
In it we post health commentary & reviews of books, eBooks, & other things that improve or protect your health or which enable you to live longer, to be more prosperous, & to be more effective.
Today's post: Tuesday, 7-18-2006
Would you like to be less fat? This will help.
Stress is a proven fattener.
Make it your highest priority to keep your perceived level of stress in the low to low moderate range most of the time.
Research shows that people who feel stressed tend to eat more & more often; eat more sugar; eat more fats; & eat more "treat" foods than people who enjoy lower stress levels.
(And, recent studies have been released showing that this is particularly true for women.)
People who lose fat & keep it off successfully know this & do something about it.
There are three ways to do this.:
1. Cut the amount of stress in your life:
Overcome the challenges that stress you that can be overcome; & take massive action to escape severe challenges that you cannot overcome.
Prevent new stresses.: Make prudent choices; & always take safety precautions to escape horrible stresses IN ADVANCE, when you possibly can.
2. Improve your stress tolerance.: Find & use everything you can to increase the level of challenge & hassle you can handle without feeling stressed.
3. Physically relieve & turn off your stress reactions even when you are stressed.
All the effective ways to do these three things would fill many books. And they do. Find some & read them.
But here’s a secret few know that will help you.
THE single most doable & effective method known to do parts 2 & 3 - increase your ability to throw off & endure stress -- & to physically relieve stress, is to do regular exercise every week.
This was one of the key findings of Dr Kenneth Cooper, when the U.S. Air Force commissioned him, as an MD with an expert knowledge of exercise its affect on physiology, to study why exercise benefits people.
He found that the people he studied who got regular exercise each week & who included a minimum of cardio exercise, or aerobic exercise (to use his term for it) each week, simply felt less stressed when stressful things happened & handled it better than those people who did not get the regular exercise.
And, this was true for both sudden stress & for chronic stress over longer periods of time.
There are several reasons for this.
1. Many people find that their mind gets unplugged from focusing on small & medium sized stress when they do an aerobic exercise like walking or running or swimming or exercising on a Nordic Track. And, they do these things long enough each time, this often turns off their physical stress reaction & temporarily relieves it.
(And, the people who don’t do the exercise, don’t get the stress relief.)
2. People who get this kind of exercise regularly have lower resting heart rates & have trained their hearts to recover from extra work much more quickly than people who don’t get the exercise.
So, when the people who exercise are stressed their heart rate goes up less or recovers to normal faster, likely both. And, these two things help the people who exercise to feel less stress & think better when stressed & also help them recover from stress more easily.
3. And, regular exercise also has two easy to miss but profound affects on your self- esteem.
If you exercise regularly, every week, then every week, you do something on purpose that you set yourself to do; & you usually do it successfully.
In addition, you always have recent memories that you have overcome mild or moderate difficulties successfully. And, in the case of cardio or aerobic exercise, you’ve often done so for a somewhat prolonged period of time & successfully persisted as long as the time or distance you set.
So, even without you realizing it, you are much more likely to see yourself as proactive, able, & able to persist in the face of difficulty.
This increases your self confidence at least somewhat that you can find solutions to, & succeed in overcoming, the stresses you face. So you see them as more manageable & feel less stress.
(And, it also helps that people who exercise regularly are more likely to remove or escape from the things that stress them since they are more likely to try solutions & persist in doing so than people who don’t exercise, precisely because of this shift in self-esteem.)
4. People who do a minimum of aerobic exercise each week have better blood flow to their brains. So, not only do they think better most of the time, when they are under stress, they tend to think a LOT better than people who don’t exercise.
Why? Because perceived stress tends to reduce blood flow to exactly the thinking & creative parts of your brain you most need to think clearly & overcome the challenges that are stressing you.
So what seems to happen is that in people who exercise regularly, they are more likely to have some ability to think clearly & solve problems even when under stress than people who don’t because they have enough better blood flow they can still think at least some while the people who don’t exercise, get enough less blood flow, they have less self-control & problem solving ability.
**************
In future posts, we’ll have information on ways to get into exercise, how exercise effectively & safely; & how to succeed in continuing to exercise regularly.
And, we’ll have a LOT more about how incredibly beneficial to you it is to exercise.
posted by David at 12:41 PM
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