The Foundation of Health: Exercise

I am so often surprised to see how much emphasis is placed on diet when discussing weight loss and so little emphasis is placed on exercise. I was just in a bookstore today and there were five racks of diet books and only one rack of exercise books. I suppose a big part of this is that everyone must eat but nobody has to exercise, and many of us don’t. Overall, the biggest barriers to a regular exercise plan are two-fold, time and effort. You must take time out of your busy schedule to exercise and as you shift into a more active life, your muscles often complain of the added effort. However, regular exercise is the most important ingredient to better health in our sedentary lifestyle. If you don’t exercise regularly, even walking for twenty minutes several times a week can greatly improve your health and peel weight off. If you exercise regularly, then some of the pointers below may help you to evaluate your overall exercise routine.

I am often asked what exercises I recommend? The answer is really quite simple and flexible enough to suit many different lifestyles. All exercise routines need to include cardiovascular training, strength training (usually weight-lifting) and stretching. I think of this as a three-legged stool. You can make one leg bigger than the rest but if you remove one altogether, then the stool falls over. These aspects of exercise give us strength, endurance and flexibility. Without all three of these, we are more susceptible to fatigue and injury. Therefore, in the long run, if we are to lead active lives then we need to work on all aspects of exercise. So how are each of these important?

Cardiovascular strengthening exercises improve the strength of the heart and its ability to circulate blood and oxygen to the tissues. Of course, the lung must bring oxygen into the body but the factor that limits the body’s ability to absorb oxygen is the capacity for the heart to circulate the blood. When our body doesn’t have enough oxygen, our muscles don’t work as well and we quickly become fatigued. Strengthening our cardiovascular system therefore improves our endurance and our ability to push ourselves without becoming “stressed”. This should be the focus of those just starting up an exercise routine. In the beginning, go slow, walking or jogging instead of running. Other good cardio exercises are swimming, biking and hiking.

Stretching, while just as important as cardio and strength training, is often overlooked in our society. Even with the up-swing of interest in yoga over the past ten years, I still believe that this aspect of exercise is often under-emphasized or overlooked altogether. Stretching is, however, the most important defense we have against injury. With a regular stretching routine, we can avoid injury because our joints and muscles can move further without sprains or strains. Also, stretching increases the flexibility of the blood vessels which increases blood flow to our tissues and makes it easier for the heart to circulate the blood. It also helps us to recover from the muscle fatigue that follows cardio workouts and protects us from injury when strength training. Yoga and Pilates are two exercise systems that offer complete stretching routines and also strengthen the body.

Strength Training does not alway involve lifting weights but this is the form of strength training that most of us are familiar with. Strength training builds muscle mass and bone density so that we can withstand the greater forces involved in strenuous activity. It goes hand-in-hand with flexibility because the stronger and more flexible we are, the greater the forces we can withstand without injury. However, strength training isn’t just for those involved in strenuous exercise. Since it improves bone density, it should be part of everyones exercise routine, especially as we age.

How much time is spent on each aspect of exercise depends on the activities that we are participating in. Generally, in the beginning we need to improve our cardio strength if we want to be more active. Once this is done, then we should add strengthening exercises as we continue our cardio exercises. Stretching should be done after cardio or strength training while the body is still warm. As our exercise routine becomes more strenuous then it is helpful to set aside at least and hour per week for a complete stretching routine. A routine that stretches the back, legs, shoulders, arms and neck. In the next blog, I will discuss more about how to choose the exercises that are most beneficial for you.

The Foundation of Health:Diet

One of the biggest obstacles to developing a proper diet is that there is so much information out there. I feel that we are often in a situation where we can’t see the forest for the trees. We add many different foods or supplements to our diet to improve it but do nothing to improve the overall quality of our diet. This article focuses on the big picture of diet, which is meal planning and portions.

I believe that the biggest health issue in relation to diet in the United States is the amount of food we eat and the large portions of starch, fats and meat that we consume at every meal. Even for the person who is careful about their diet, it is difficult to control what you eat, because most restaurants cater to a heavy starch, fat and meat diet. To illustrate this point I have chosen to draw out two meal plans. The first plan is actually an illustration of the recommended diabetic meal plan, that can be found on the create your plate page of the American Diabetic Associations website. The second meal is one of my favorite dishes at a local restaurant; lamb chops with garlic mashers and green beans, a glass of wine, bread and butter. Just a note here; the diabetic meal has a high proportion of non-starchy vegetables; broccoli, spinach, cauliflower, green beans, etc. A complete list is given at the link above.

Why illustrate these two meals? I believe that they give us a good idea of portions and how that affects our health. This is a classic example of what we are is what we eat. If more of your meals are close to the diabetic meal plan you will be leaner and healthier. If more of your meals are similar to my favorite restaurant meal then you will be fatter and less healthy. I hope that this point is obvious to everyone. So the real question is why don’t we all eat the diabetic meal plan all the time, it is a well-balanced meal right? You don’t have to be a vegetarian or a vegan, so everyone could eat this kind of meal. All this meal does is change the portions of what we normally eat a little, which is why I have chosen it. The diabetic meal plan is actually what we all should be eating, just about every day. My example of a favorite restaurant dinner is closer to what most of us eat. I know from many years of counseling people about their eating habits that shifting the amount of vegetables and fruits we eat in our diet is really quite difficult for most people. So how do we make this shift?

I have 3 simple ideas that can change the amount of fruits and vegetable you eat forever and make you a healthier person. Here they are;

1. Snack – take several pieces of fruit with you each day and snack on them between meals. You can also steam vegetables (10 minutes) and toss them with soy, sesame oil, or crushed garlic and olive oil to give them some zest. Put stem in a container and take that to work as a snack. Try different vegetable/fruit combinations to get a well rounded source of nutrients.
2. Find restaurants in your area that have vegetable heavy dishes. This one is always a good idea because we all must eat out sometimes. Usually, Asian and Indian restaurants are the best bet. Again, you don’t always have to eat at these restaurants but the more often you can eat a healthier meal the better.
   
3. Eat more organics. True, organic vegetables and fruits are more expensive, but they are also richer in nutrients. They also taste better. One easy way to work organics into your diet is to join a delivery service. In the Seattle area we have Spud. There is also a national service called Diamond Organics.

For those interested in losing weight we will go into portions more at a later date. There is some evidence that eating higher quality fruits and vegetables in the right portions can reduce the overall caloric intake. This will, of course, reduce weight over time.

One final note, if you have never had a high portion of fruit and vegetable in your diet, you may experience some minor digestive complaints when you make the changes above. Just as our muscles have to adjust when we start a new exercise, so too must our digestive system adjust to the additional fiber and more complex nutrients in our diet. However, the benefits greatly outweigh the downside. You will not only be healthier, but will open yourself to experiencing a more varied and satisfying diet. Bon Appetit!

The Foundation of Health: Diet and Exercise

One should strive to maintain good health by taking a balanced diet and exercising regularly. - Atharva Veda


If we could give every individual the right amount of nourishment and exercise, not too little and not too much, we would have found the safest way to health. - Hippocrates


Small changes in diet and exercise can prevent type 2 diabetes from developing or slow it in its tracks. - The American Diabetes Association (ADA).


If you go to the American Heart Association's (AHA) website, you will also see that they recommend changing your diet and regular exercise to maintain your heart health. Can you see a pattern developing here? The above quotes were chosen from amongst many other similar ones because they show a huge span of consistent belief about what is needed to be healthy. The Vedas, Hindu scriptures, were composed from earlier spoken verse about 1000 B.C. Hippocrates, a Greek physician from around 400 B.C. is the "father of medicine in the western world". And, even modern health organizations like the ADA and AHA, believe in the importance of good diet and exercise. So why are we still confused about basic health issues?


The devil is in the details. This is where the confusion comes in. What exactly is a balanced diet? What exercises should I do, how often and for how long? These are the questions that we will begin to answer in this first series "The foundation of health". Making the right health decisions is important for all of us and luckily the information is out there if you just know where to look for it. We also look at how making the right health decisions can improve our lives in many ways.


Note! In any of the ancient writings on health, diet and exercise were viewed as an important foundation for having a full, happy life. Being healthy doesn't just keep us out of the hospital. It is a great treasure because it allows us to be active and vital in our daily lives. This post serves as an introduction to this series but further posts will focus on the specifics of diet and exercise. In the final post in this series we will look at how we can integrate diet and exercise into our lives in a way that is both meaningful and fun. Enjoy!

Introduction

The Woodinville mural on the Carol Edwards Center by the muralist group Matamuros.

We have decided to start blogging here at Balance Acupuncture for two reasons. First, we hope that this will be an avenue for discussion of health issues with our local community, Woodinville, WA. Second, we want to provide quality healthcare information from a natural medicine perspective for anyone who wishes to live a longer, healthier life.

The real advantage of a blog is that you the reader can participate. We would love for you to ask questions and comment on things that have worked for you to make you a healthier person. Discussion is the best way to investigate a problem and find a solution so feel free to join in.

This blog will be moderated, so please if you wish to comment, do so in a polite and thoughtful way. We will mostly cover health issues from a natural medicine point of view. This includes; exercise, nutrition/diet, herbal supplements, acupuncture and massage. We also take a very wide view of health because for us health involves every aspect of a person, including; physical/mental/spiritual health and the environment that you live in. We will be starting with some basics. These first few entries will be about the general guidelines for good health...as we go we will get into more specific issues. We will also respond to specific issues where there is a lot of questions or comments. Expect to see a new blog post weekly and we hope to make this a healthy and enjoyable part of your week!