Exercise is a key to good health and permanent fat loss....

Today's Post: Thursday, 10-28-2010

The health benefits of regular exercise are almost unbelievably valuable and large in number.

Here’s just a few of the big ones.

1. Vigorous exercise on several days a week every week prevents heart disease. It causes your blood to have less of the small particle LDL that is one of the biggest causes of heart disease. As a result, and a way you can see this effect is that your HDL goes up and your triglycerides go down or even better, both things happen.

It’s also just been discovered that every year you keep doing regular, vigorous exercise this effect increases!

2. Vigorous exercise also slows aging & literally cuts your risk of dying from all causes. So people who do regular, vigorous exercise look younger because they actually are younger physically since they have aged less. And, they not only live longer, they have many more years of life with good health.

This has been found in study after study of people who get regular vigorous exercise.

Recently, we found out one of the several reasons why this happens. When your cells divide, if they do it error free you keep living and age little. If there are errors in this process, you may get cancer or cells that don’t work or cells that stop making new copies. That, it seems, is the underlying cause of aging. And, your cells have error free copy protectors at the ends of your DNA similar to shoe lace caps called telomeres. When your telomeres are long enough, the copying is error free. If your telomeres get short, errors begin to happen.

It’s been recently found that regular, vigorous exercise is one of the most effective things you can do to keep your telomeres long.

There’s even more to exercise slowing aging. Exercise causes your body to make growth hormones so needed repair s all over your body happen right away instead of becoming a permanent problem.

3. Exercise also helps you think better AND to keep your thinking and memory skills and the core of what makes you, you that’s in your brain intact as you get older.

Exercise, particularly vigorous exercises, grows new brain cells and increases and maintains robust blood circulation to your brain cells. This prevents brain shrinkage, and helps prevent both vascular dementia AND Alzheimer’s disease.

In addition, regular exercise helps you recover from stress and be less impaired by stress as it happens so you stay more capable when you are stressed. This effect may be a key way exercise keeps your telomeres long. That’s because severe stress tends to shorten your telomeres. If you exercise , the same stress causes far less damage to every part of you.

3. Exercise lowers chronic inflammation. This seems almost counter to common perception since your muscles can feel tired and sore when you exercise them really well. Apparently that triggers the repair process so well when it happens that your chronic inflammation goes down as a result.

Lowering chronic inflammation is a very big benefit. It’s been shown to prevent both heart disease AND almost all cancers.

4. Exercise makes you feel better.

People who exercise virtually always have better self esteem than people who don’t. This seems to be particularly true for people who do strength training. They know they can do certain things physically and can successfully persist to achieve goals even when it is difficult.

Vigorous exercise relieves stress since you have to stop over-thinking about your problems if only for a few seconds to do the vigorous exercise. In that way, it provides you a mini-break from the stress. But it does even more to make you feel better because it gives your brain a lot better oxygen supply and more energy from the powerful increase in your circulation you get from doing such vigorous exercises.

Few things can turn down stress and depression in a few days. Vigorous exercise does it routinely in a few seconds! That’s FAST!

It’s not saying much to report the studies showing that regular exercise relieve depression as much as effective anti-depressant drugs do since they aren’t very effective. But the studies do find that to be the case. And, exercise even moderately slow walking, begins to work in days. Unlike the few week wait with the drugs before you see if it’s going to work at all, with less vigorous exercise it always helps at least some and begins to help within a few days.

Lastly, if you also eat better and do the right exercises and keep doing both long enough, you can lose enough fat that you keep off you WILL look better.


5. For all of these reasons and others both men and women find that doing regular exercise, particularly vigorous exercise, improves your sex life.

Many men know it works for them. That virtually every study done on it shows that it works as well or better for women is far less well known!

6. Interval cardio and strength training lower blood sugar readings if they are high and tend to turn off insulin resistance or prevent it from happening. So they both prevent and can help reverse or improve type 2 diabetes.

One study found that just 60 seconds of very vigorous exercise done a few times a week lowered the HBA1C blood sugar reading in the people who did this that the researchers tested for just one example of this.

7. Doing regular interval cardio and strength training are also two keys to losing fat and keeping it off.

People who eat enough protein and do regular interval cardio and strength training and keep doing them lose almost all fat and only fat when they lose weight.

People who just take in fewer calories tend to lose muscle and bone besides the fat. So losing weight is far less good for them and they lose far less fat. Then when they eat a bit better, most of the weight and the fat all come back. Worse, sometimes only the fat comes back. That can make them fatter than when they started.

But there is even more good news for people wanting permanent fat loss – lots more.

If you routinely have parts of your interval cardio and strength training that are quite vigorous you not only burn calories while you are exercising, you burn more calories for up to several HOURS afterwards.

And, since you add some weight to your muscles as your muscles get stronger from the exercise, when you eat you not only have the exercise burn calories, the added muscle does too. That has profoundly positive effects on permanent fat loss. Your food powers your exercise and your added muscle and stops feeding or making fat!

So, without cutting back that much in your food and drinks that you eat and drink, you have less fat left over to feed fat deposits. And, because you have to cut back on the calories you take in that much less, it becomes dramatically more doable to lose fat long enough to lose most or all of your excess fat; AND it becomes a sustainable lifestyle so you are enabled to KEEP OFF the fat you lose.

Nor is this just good sounding theory. In the studies done on people who lose a lot of weight and fat and keep it off, virtually all those people do regular exercise and keep doing it. And they’ve exercised since they began to lose fat successfully.