Exercise Tips
| Suggestion | Reasoning |
|---|---|
| Do something! Any exercise is better than none | If you don't feel like jogging today, walk. If you just want to watch TV now, throw in twenty situps and pushups while watching. If you're not feeling motivated to do a full workout, do a short, low-intensity workout. Any movement is better than none |
| Exercise doesn't have to hurt | Unless your goal is to win The Tour de France or become Mr. Universe, exercise needn't be painful. Light and moderate exercise are beneficial. You don't need to torture your body & mind to improve your health through exercise. Walking is good. Light jogging is good. Movement of ANY kind is good. It's still exercise, even if you're not struggling to breathe |
| Work out for just one minute | The hardest part is getting started. So commit to working out for JUST ONE MINUTE. Once you start moving -- whether that's stepping out the door for a walk/jog or going to the gym and getting on a Stairmaster -- you'll likely warm up and just keep going. You need to overcome inertia, which requires "activation energy." Committing to work out one minute gets you over that hump. |
| Find exercises you enjoy | The best exercise is anything you enjoy because you're likely to keep doing it. Try different sports and find a few you enjoy enough to do regularly. Maybe it's weekend tennis at your local high school with your kids. Maybe it's joining the local running club and socializing with others in your community. Maybe you gravitate to the exercise bike at your local YMCA, so you buy a bike for your home. Maybe it's gardening. Any exercise you enjoy doing regularly is good exercise |
| Put exercise clothes/equipment within sight | If you put your workout clothes right next to your bed when you go to sleep, seeing it will trigger you to exercise when you wake up. Put your workout clothes, exercise equipment, etc. where you see it often, triggering you to think about exercising. You don't need fancy equipment: jogging sneakers, a jump rope, a pilates floor mat, a pair of 10-pound dumbbells. |
| Develop a simple core exercise routine | Jumping jacks, situps, pushups, planks, jogging, etc. are all free and easy, not requiring any fancy equpment. You can get into great shape by making a habit of doing a handful of basic exercises, like these. |
| Find an exercise partner | Having a regular exercise partner will help motivate you to start sweating. Partners will inject a fun social element into your exercise. And exercise partners can nudge, cajole, and embarrass us into exercising on days we might lack motivation and willpower. |
| If one exercise partner is good, a team of partners -- like a running club -- can be even better | A team of exercise partners is even better because one or two people could be sick or tired or busy on any given day, but a team of people can be relied on as a steady presence. |
| Pair exercise with entertainment (TV, podcasts, music, etc.) | Mary Poppins taught us that "A little bit of sugar helps the medicine go down." Motivate yourself to work out by pairing it with something you love. Treat yourself to something fun while working out. I love to jog while listening to audiobooks or podcasts. And I love to cycle on my recumbent bike while watching a show on my iPad. |
| Think about how good you feel after a workout | The more you think about how good you feel after working out, the more you'll associate working out with good feelings, and that will help motivate you to start your workout. |
| Think of yourself as "Someone who exercises regularly" | Transform your thinking from "Should I exercise now?" to "I'm someone who exercises regularly." When you think of yourself as an exerciser, you can skip the internal debate about whether to exercise and move straight on to doing what you do. |
| Exercise is especially important for men because male brains age faster than female brains and exercise can counteract these effects | Men generally suffer far worse dementia at earlier ages than women. Scientists looking at the brains of male and female mice of various ages are discovering some of the mechanisms causing male brains to age faster than female brains. After examining mice brains of various ages, scientist Sally Temple explained, Everyone knows that neural stem cells decline with age. But now we have to say 'in males' because in females, we really didn't see a significant loss."Her team also found that "Female brain blood vessels became thicker [with age], but they weren't crowded. Male brain blood vessels, meanwhile, became denser, thinner, and more twisted." Exercise is a super way to improve brain health and lower your risk of developing vascular dementia, strokes, and similar brain illnesses. |
| Keep healthy foods within sight and easy reach | When you're hungry, you'll see and be able to grab healthful food, making the healthy choice your default option |
| Keep unhealthy foods out of your house | The easiest way to avoid temptation is to keep temptation out of your house by not buying junk food |
| Eat before you go grocery shopping | If you shop while hungry, you'll buy more, and you'll buy more junky foods |
| Use a shopping list | If you shop without a plan, you're more likely to make impulsive buying decisions. Better to keep a shopping list on your kitchen refrigerator where your family can write down foods they want. You're not obliged to buy "Doritos" just because your daughter wrote them on the list. But having a list will remind you when shopping of the healthy foods you wanted to buy earlier in the week. |
| Keep unhealthy foods where you can't see or easily access them | If you must keep unhealthy foods in your house, keep them in the back of your cupboard (or a safe) where you don't notice them and must work hard to access them. Let your laziness help you! |
| Eat slower and enjoy every bite | If you eat quickly, you will keep eating beyond the point when your stomach starts sending your brain signals that it's satisfied because those signals don't reach your brain instantaneously. If you slow down and try to enjoy the taste and smell of every bite you eat, you'll enjoy eating more while eating less. |
| Drink water before/with your meal | Your stomach sends signals to your brain to say it's full. Your stomach determines its satisfaction level in part by how full it is, so if you drink water with your meals, you'll feel less desire to overeat. |
| Stop eating when you feel 80% full | There's a lag between when you put food into your mouth and when your brain fully processes (based on signals from your stomach) that you have eaten that food. So, if you keep eating till you feel full, you will have overeaten. "Hara hachi bu is a Japanese term meaning 'Eat until you're 80% full.' It originated in the city of Okinawa, where people use this advice as a way to control their eating habits. Interestingly, they have one of the lowest rates of illness from heart disease, cancer and stroke, and a fairly long life expectancy" |
| Stay hydrated | When I'm feeling tired, I often find drinking water revives me, suggesting I'm often dehydrated without realizing it. Drinking water regularly is great for you (esp. if water replaces soda) and may help you lose weight: How Much Water Should You Drink Per Day?. I don't advocate drinking 37 glasses of water a day, as Tom Brady purportedly does. His book advocates, "Drink at least one-half of your body weight [of] water every day. That's the minimum. Ideally, you'll drink more than that, and with added electrolytes, too." That sounds crazy excessive to me and could lower your sodium to dangerous levels (see: "hyponatremia"), but the ageless Super Bowl quarterback is doing something right, and most of us would be wise to drink more water. |
| Eat less sugar! | Most people now eat WAY too much sugar: "the average American consumes almost 152 pounds of sugar in one year. This is equal to 3 pounds (or 6 cups) of sugar consumed in one week!". We don't realize how much sugar we consume because it's added in massive quantities to many things we eat and drink, partly because the US taxpayers spend $4 billion a year subsidizing sugar farmers. Sugar and other simple carbohydrates cause all kinds of health problems: 11 Reasons Why Too Much Sugar Is Bad for You |
| Stop drinking soda/tonic/pop! | Whether you call it "soda" or "tonic" or "pop," that glass of sugar water is killing you. You wouldn't believe how much sugar soda contains: "American kids consume... over 65 pounds of added sugar per year. Think of it this way – children are ingesting over 30 gallons of added sugars from beverages alone. That's enough to fill a bathtub!" Over my first 25 years, I drank tons of soda and had tons of cavities. One day, during a jog, I couldn't run another step. I stopped drinking soda, and my stomach problems ended immediately, and I haven't had a single cavity over the second 25+ years of my life! |
| Avoid processed foods | Processed foods contain tons of refined sugar, salt, chemical preservatives, and bad fats. If the listed ingredients include many odd names that baffle you, you should probably avoid that food because it has been highly processed and lacks nutritional value: "UPFs (ultra-processed foods) are formulations of substances derived from foods plus numerous additives used to flavour, bleach, colour, emulsify, texturize and preserve. They contain little, if any, real food at all. These foods are typically high in calories, unhealthy fats, added sugars and sodium and are lacking fibre and protective phytochemicals... Participants who consumed the highest amount of UPFs (14 per cent of total food intake versus 6.6 per cent) had a 26-per-cent increased risk of dying from any cause, and a 58-per-cent greater risk of dying from cardiovascular disease. The greater the intake of UPFs, the greater the risk of death." |
| Buy whole foods | Processed foods have junk (like sugar and salt) added to them and good stuff (like fiber) removed. Better to just eat natural food. E.g., eat whole fruit, not just fruit juice, which lacks the fiber and often contains extra sugar |
| Frozen whole foods are fine | Though fresh food tastes great, frozen whole foods are also nutritious. Frozen food is often cheaper and easier to buy and stockpile in your home |
| Try to buy local foods with less packaging | Locally grown foods haven't travelled thousands of miles and often come with little or no plastic packaging. Local foods are better for both the environment and your local economy |
| Let yourself indulge occasionally, and enjoy it | No one eats healthy food all the time, so don't beat yourself up over eating an occasional ice cream or cake or fatty pizza. Enjoy it as a special treat. Just don't make it a habit. |
| Replace dessert & junky snacks with delicious but less unhealthy alternatives | You can be healthier while still enjoying food just by replacing very unhealthy foods with foods that are less unhealthy: Enjoy grilled chicken instead of fried chicken. An RXBAR or fruit-and-nut bar instead of a candy bar. Dilute your ordinary lemonade or orange juice with 50% water. Another food that's not great for you but is can be a tasty junk food alternative is cheese. Wired.com references a number of scientific studies to conclude "the evidence so far reveals cheese to be neither a superfood, like yogurt, nor a mass killer, like sugary soda." |
| Enjoy the same delicious foods but in smaller portions by enjoying each bite more | When enjoying dessert or salty fried potato chips, eat less by eating slower and savoring each bite. A giant study of Americans found that foods we eat mindlessly, like potato chips and soda, are leading causes of weight gain: "Within each 4-year period, participants gained an average of 3.35 lb... 4-year weight change was most strongly associated with the intake of potato chips (1.69 lb), potatoes (1.28 lb), sugar-sweetened beverages (1.00 lb), unprocessed red meats (0.95 lb), and processed meats (0.93 lb) and was inversely associated with the intake of vegetables (−0.22 lb), whole grains (−0.37 lb), fruits (−0.49 lb), nuts (−0.57 lb), and yogurt (−0.82 lb)... alcohol use (0.41 lb per drink per day)" |
| Avoid supermarket aisles full of processed foods | Foods that can be eaten after months without refrigeration because molds and fungii refuse to touch them aren't foods you should put into your body. The healthiest foods in supermarkets are the fresh, natural, perishable foods found around the edges and part of the frozen foods aisle. Unrefrigerated interior aisles and the checkout line are packed with processed foods loaded with chemical preservatives and extra sugar and salt. Around the supermarket perimeter, you'll find fresh fruits, vegetables, fish, meat, eggs, and other natural foods. The Mayo Clinic explains how to shop at the supermarket. |
| Use smaller plates and bowls so you scoop up less food but feel like you're eating more | Our brains interpret the amount of food we're eating in part by how big it looks. If you put the same amount of food on a big plate or a small plate, that food looks bigger on a small plate. So using smaller plates and bowls will help you take less food. |
| To eat less junk food, put it in a bowl or on a plate and close the bag. Don't eat out of the bag! | If you eat straight out of the bag, you'll get into a trance of eating one cookie after another or one Frito after another. Instead, decide how many you want to eat, put them in a bowl or on a plate, close the bag, and enjoy. Seeing a finite quantity will help you slow down and enjoy each one. |
| If you're trying to lose weight, think of feeling hungry as the feeling of losing weight | Losing weight is hard. When I started intermittent fasting to try to lose some weight, it took me days or a week to get comfortable feeling hungry. It helped to think about that as the feeling of losing weight |
| Encourage family and friends to eat healthier | When your family and friends eat unhealthy food, you'll be more tempted to eat unhealthy food, both due to cultural/peer pressure and because doing so is convenient. When you're surrounded by people who eat healthy food, eating healthier requires less effort and less willpower. Encouraging family and friends to eat healthier food -- e.g. by buying healthier snacks and less junk food when you buy groceries -- will also likely improve their health and happiness. |
| To lose weight, try avoiding evening snacks and breakfast | Intermittent fasting involves restricting the hours during which you eat. I've had some success by avoiding foods between 8 pm and noon the next day. Something like this might be worth trying. Don't beat yourself up if you have an evening snack or breakfast, but pat yourself on the back each time you succeed |
| To help avoid tempting late-night snacks, brush your teeth after eating dinner | I'm lazy and don't want to brush my teeth twice, so if I brush after I "finish" eating and later find myself tempted to snack, I'm less likely to succumb to temptation because snacking will force me to brush my teeth again. |
| No need to pay more for organic (except animal products, for which organic reduces animal cruelty) | There's surprisingly little evidence organic food is any better, let alone worth its higher price:"Consumers tend to favor organic food because they believe the advocates who claim it is safer and more nutritious to eat, but there is little or no scientific evidence to support these claims. Others buy organic food because they assume it comes from farms that are smaller, more traditional, and more diverse, but this is not a safe assumption either. Most organic food on the market today comes from highly specialized, industrial-scale farms, not so different from those that produce conventional food." Organic farming improves the generally horrible lives of the animals we eat and whose milk and eggs we eat. Organic farmers also don't feed antibiotics to healthy animals, a horrible practice that helps germs evolve resistence to human medicines. These are things I care deeply about and will gladly pay far more for. But, animal welfare aside, organic isn't clearly superior to chemical-based farming. Organic farming requires more land: "Trying to grow all of our food organically today would require farming a much wider area, damaging wildlife habitat. Rachel Carson, the founder of our modern environmental movement... saw no reason to ban manufactured fertilizers, a requirement under the organic standard." |
| Reduce your meat consumption, especially red meat | A study of 474,985 middle-aged adults surveyed their initial meat consumption, related it to hospital admissions and mortality rates an average of 8.0 years later, and concluded that "higher consumption of unprocessed red and processed meat combined was associated with higher risks of ischaemic heart disease, pneumonia, diverticular disease, colon polyps, and diabetes; results were similar for unprocessed red meat and processed meat intakes separately." Risk rose with higher meat consumption: "every 70 grams of unprocessed red meat and processed meat that a person consumed daily raised their risk of heart disease by 15% and of diabetes by 30% after taking into account other lifestyle factors, such as physical activity and alcohol consumption, and body mass index." After University of Edinburgh professor Paul Timmers studied a dataset "equivalent to studying 1.75 million lifespans or more than 60,000 extremely long-lived people," his findings "strongly suggest that high levels of iron in the blood reduces our healthy years of life, and keeping these levels in check could prevent age-related damage. We speculate that our findings on iron metabolism might also start to explain why very high levels of iron-rich red meat in the diet has been linked to age-related conditions such as heart disease." |
| If you must eat red meat, avoid processed red meats, the worst for your health | A 2008 academic "review of epidemiologic and experimental evidence" found that "the excess risk in the highest category of processed meat-eaters is comprised between 20 and 50% compared with non-eaters. In addition, the excess risk per gram of intake is clearly higher than that of fresh red meat". In 2015, The World Health Organization classified processed meat as a Group 1 carcinogen, "In other words, there is convincing evidence that [it] causes cancer". Meats are processed in various ways to enhance its flavor. Meats processed by adding nitrites may be especially harmful |