We are born with miraculously integrated bodies and minds. Our lungs draw in vital oxygen, essential for producing energy. Our hearts ceaselessly pump blood through vast networks of vessels to all of our tissues and organs. Raw materials are transformed into fuel by our digestive systems. Our muscles and bones propel us through the world, allowing us first to stand, then walk, then play and work.

Each day our brains take in a barrage of new information, filtering it, selectively storing it, and adapting their way of working accordingly. At the end of each day, we recharge and reset our systems by sleeping. All of us come equipped with a self-contained set of tools that, properly used, may allow us to live 100 years, or maybe even longer.

Beginning early in our lives, though, our genes, our environment, our culture, and our own free will conspire to test this marvelous organism—sometimes to the breaking point. There are people who maintain their health and live long, fruitful lives, sustaining minimal wear and tear. But others—perhaps most of us—push our bodies to the limit. Instead of eating the way our bodies were designed to eat, we indulge in foods filled with sugars and other refined carbohydrates, trans fats, and unhealthy food additives. Instead of walking to nearby destinations, we drive our cars. We sit most of the day. Some of us smoke. Some of us drink too much. Many of us allow negative feelings and stress to rule our thoughts. Not many of us get adequate sleep. The wrong choices trap us in a lifestyle that actually endangers our lives.

The effects of these poor choices compromise every system that keeps us well, and the damage is not pretty. After years of a diet high in refined carbohydrates, arteries become narrow and clogged with plaque, raising the risk of cardiovascular disease and heart attack. We find ourselves on the unhealthy path to metabolic syndrome, type 2 diabetes, osteoarthritis, and cancer. Eating too much of the wrong foods and getting too little exercise allows fat to build up around our organs and beneath our skin. Smoking fills our lungs with toxins, damaging our health in myriad ways. Not getting enough sleep worsens our memories and disrupts an important hormone cycle that prevents us from overeating. And too much stress compromises our body's natural immune system, the very tool that would help us combat much of the other damage.

Return to the Path of Good Health

Fortunately, we have the ability to choose.

That’s where our series of HealthJournals on Wellness come in. Our Wellness series will show you how to completely change your lifestyle to a healthy and sustainable one that will restore your vitality and reverse chronic medical conditions. It will provide you with innumerable health benefits. It will lessen dangerous abdominal fat, lower chronic inflammation, and reduce the threat of other chronic diseases. Your risk of getting heart disease, cancer, diabetes, and autoimmune diseases will be greatly reduced. You will be likely to live longer, too. What’s more, your systems and organs will be provided with all the nutrients they require, so that your hunger will be satisfied, and your body brought into homeostatic balance.

This wellness information is based on real science that refutes current mainstream medical notions of what we should be eating. In this series, we explain the most natural way to eat—so that fat melts away and the body’s hormonal systems rebalance themselves. In doing so, we turn popular notions of a “healthy diet” on their head. Moreover, we give you all the leading science on other aspects of wellness in your life—including how to break your bad habits, the benefits of sleep, how to de-stress, and the real benefits of exercising.

It’s rarely too late to make changes that can reverse damage to your abused organs and tissues. Even people who are sensitive to carbohydrates, and therefore genetically predisposed to putting on weight, can get back on the path to good health. By eating the right foods, exercising, modifying your negative habits, quitting smoking, sleeping well, and celebrating life, you can reverse many chronic conditions—and increase your enjoyment of life immeasurably.

We hope that you will continue to explore the miracle that is your body, knowing that the good choices you are making will enable you to enjoy a life full of activity and fulfillment. You have the power to keep your body and mind healthy, strong, and alive. You can live longer and live better.

To life!

Wellness and Exercise – Optimize the Health of Your Mind and Body with Fitness

Exercise isn't all that it's made out to be as a weight loss tool, but exercise does benefit every aspect of your body and mind. It improves sleep, helps you to think and remember better, aids digestion, builds muscle, and more. In this HealthJournal on Wellness and Exercise, discover how exercise works and learn about the real benefits of fitness.

Exercise is extremely beneficial to your health.

Exercise can improve your insulin sensitivity, helping to prevent and reverse insulin resistance and type 2 diabetes. It can enhance your heart health, improve your mood, relieve stress, and help you sleep better. There’s even more: Exercise can improve your mental health and cognitive ability, strengthen your muscles and bones, and support the health and flexibility of your joints.

You may be wondering why weight loss wasn't listed as a benefit. The idea that exercise leads to weight loss is accepted as a basic truth by most people. The reality, though, is that it's tremendously difficult to exercise enough to lose weight. While it's true that intense physical activity burns calories, unless you’re a top-level athlete you don't actually burn a great many calories during exercise. On average, people burn about 300 calories per half hour of exercise, a caloric expenditure easily eradicated by a post-exercise sports drink or a low-fat muffin.

There’s another reason exercise isn’t a very effective weight-loss tool: It stimulates hunger. The increased hunger you feel after a workout will generally cause you to eat more, negating the weight-loss benefits you accrued in just a few bites. Intense bouts of exercise deplete your body's muscles, which are very demanding in terms of fuel. What’s more, many people ”reward” themselves for exercising by eating an unhealthy food.

But all this doesn’t mean you shouldn’t exercise! Although exercise is not the superb weight-loss tool it’s so often made out to be, people who are more physically active are, overall, healthier.

Exercise can be grouped into three different types: aerobic exercise, anaerobic exercise, and flexibility-enhancing exercise. They are categorized based on the effect they have on your body. Aerobic exercise, such as jogging and swimming, is great for cardiovascular health. Anaerobic exercise, for example weight training, improves muscle strength. Flexibility-enhancing exercise, such as stretching, can improve the range of motion of your muscles and joints. Here's a bit more on each type:

Aerobic Exercise

Exercise performed at a moderate pace over time—like light jogging, biking, cross-country skiing, and swimming—are aerobic, which means “with oxygen.” Aerobic exercise raises your heart rate and works your large muscle groups. All of this exertion requires your body to use extra energy. Your body must therefore take in large amounts of oxygen, a key ingredient in creating energy.

When your muscles demand more energy to keep working, your body gets the signal to take in more oxygen. As inhaled air reaches the lungs, the oxygen molecules it contains catch a ride on your red blood cells. Your heart pumps the blood through your blood vessels out so that oxygen can be distributed to cells throughout your body. Oxygen then combines with stored nutrients, such as fat, to create energy so your muscles and organs can work.

The increased activity in your circulatory system actually creates new blood vessels, and your accelerated heart rate strengthen your heart. Busy blood vessels are more likely to remain clear and flexible, too. All of this means more robust cardiovascular health!

Anaerobic Exercise

Lifting weights, sprinting, jumping, and other activities that require short bursts of increased effort are forms of anaerobic exercise. Because the action happens in short bursts, the body can't take in oxygen fast enough to create usable fuel in the same way it does during aerobic exercise.

Instead, your body generates fuel by a process that does not rely on taking in large amounts of oxygen. Specifically, it uses a fuel that is already stored in the muscles that are being worked. This fuel is glycogen, a carbohydrate, which can be broken down into glucose and used directly by the muscles. These supplies of glycogen don’t last very long, and they also create byproducts which cause that familiar “burn.”

Resistance work, such as weight training, is a common type of anaerobic workout. Resistance exercise can change your appearance by defining muscles and improving your overall tone. But the benefits are more than skin deep. Your body has a natural tendency to lose muscle mass as you age. People tend to lose about 0.5-1% of their muscle mass every year after the age of 35. Getting in the habit of lifting weights or performing other anaerobic work will make it easier for you to keep up your strength and lean-to-fat ratio in later years. In fact, by engaging in this type of exercise and eating a proper diet, you can prevent most of the muscle loss associated with age. In a 2011 study, researchers found that the greater a person's total muscle mass, the lower his or her risk of having insulin resistance, which is a precursor to type 2 diabetes.

Flexibility-Enhancing Exercise

Flexibility-enhancing exercise most often takes the form of stretching. This type of exercise can improve the range of movement of your joints and lengthen the muscles that cross your joints. As you age, your muscles gradually become shorter and tighter, reducing your overall flexibility. You become more susceptible to muscle, tendon, and joint injuries. Stretching can increase flexibility and reduce the risk of injury, allowing you to exercise more easily.

Stretching has many other benefits. It increases blood flow and circulation so that more nutrients can be shuttled to your muscles and joints. This can help reduce muscle soreness and that’s why you should always stretch after any aerobic or anaerobic exercise. Stretching can also help to strengthen the muscles in your back, enabling you to have better posture and balance. Lower back pain may be alleviated by stretching. Finally, flexibility-enhancing exercise, like all forms of exercise, can help relieve stress. Gentle stretching exercises can ease muscle tension associated with stress, improving your mood and helping you to relax both physically and mentally.

The Three-Pronged Approach to Fitness

For complete fitness and to reap all the rewards of being physically active, you need to include aerobic and anaerobic activities in your regular exercise routine along with flexibility-enhancing exercise. You need aerobic exercise to strengthen your heart and lungs as well as improve your stamina. Anaerobic exercise is required to increase muscle strength, speed, and power. You also need to stretch and incorporate side-to-side movement for balance and flexibility as well as to keep your joints limber. Mixing up your workout routine helps protect you from injury and keeps you motivated to stick with your exercise regimen.

Continue reading to delve more into the benefits of exercising.

While exercise isn’t the essential weight-loss tool that it’s often said to be, it has so many other benefits that it should be an integral part of your lifestyle. Following are the real reasons you should exercise:

1. Improves insulin sensitivity and increases glucose uptake by cells
2. Releases fat from fat cells so it can be used for fuel
3. Increases the number of mitochondria (energy generators) in your cells
4. Elevates your mood and relieves stress and anxiety by releasing endorphins
5. Improves sleep
6. Promotes neuron growth and heightens mental functioning
7. Improves cardiovascular health
8. Strengthens muscle and bone and supports your joints

Let’s go into each of these benefits in more detail.

As you’ll recall, insulin is a hormone produced by the pancreas. It helps keep your blood glucose (blood sugar) levels in balance. Insulin does this by telling the cells in your body to absorb glucose from your blood after you’ve eaten. This absorbed glucose can then be used immediately as fuel by the cells or stored for later use. Once the glucose is absorbed into your cells, insulin has completed its job and the levels of insulin in your blood go back down.

Unfortunately, things can go wrong when this system goes out of balance—specifically, when there’s too much glucose and insulin constantly circulating in your system. Chronically elevated levels of glucose in the blood, usually the result of a diet high in refined carbs, forces your pancreas to constantly make more insulin to facilitate the burning of glucose. If your cells are bombarded with high levels of glucose and insulin for years, they can become insulin resistant. That means your cells will no longer listen to insulin when it tells your cells to allow glucose inside. Once insulin resistance happens, you’re not far off from a diagnosis of type 2 diabetes.

Exercise has been proven to increase your cells’ sensitivity to insulin. Insulin-sensitive cells listen to the signals from insulin and can easily take up glucose from your blood and convert it to energy. The more efficiently the cells absorb the glucose, the less glucose remains in your blood. That means your pancreas doesn’t have to produce so much insulin.

Eating a low-carb or ketogenic diet minimizes the spikes of glucose and insulin in your blood. Exercise makes your cells more sensitive to the action of insulin. By combining this way of eating with exercise, you can avoid or even reverse the effects of insulin resistance and the symptoms of type 2 diabetes.

Insulin not only tells your cells to absorb glucose from your blood, it also tells your fat cells to absorb fatty acids from your blood. Once inside your fat cells, the fatty acids can join with glycerol (created from the glucose that was absorbed into the cell) to form large molecules of fat known as triglycerides. Triglycerides are so large that they cannot escape from the fat cells without being broken down into smaller components. When insulin is present in your blood, it stops this breakdown from occurring, leaving the triglycerides stuck inside your fat cells.

Here’s the takeaway: When insulin is present in your blood, triglycerides (fats) are created and stored in your fat cells. What’s more, the insulin keeps these stored triglycerides trapped in the cells and prevents them from being used for fuel.

Where does exercise come in? Exercise prompts your body’s cells to accept glucose more readily. Less insulin is needed to clear glucose from the blood, and the insulin remains in your blood for a shorter period of time. Because there’s less insulin, there’s less creation and storage of triglycerides as well.

There’s more good news! Once insulin is no longer present in the blood, the triglycerides stored in your fat cells can be used for energy when they’re needed. They’re no longer trapped in the cells by insulin. Your body breaks down the triglycerides into their component parts: fatty acids and glycerol. They then travel to the liver, kidney, and muscles, where they are absorbed and further processed into energy.

Your cells are powered by tiny dynamos called mitochondria. Mitochondria are microscopic energy factories inside your cells. They are able to convert fat, protein, and glucose into usable forms of energy that cells can use to fuel all their activities. All living cells have mitochondria, but some types of cells, such as muscle cells, have more mitochondria than others.

Exercise increases the number of mitochondria in your cells, specifically in the muscles that you are working. This improves your body's ability to burn the nutrients you consume, such as fats and carbohydrates, to produce energy. In other words, the more mitochondria you have, the more energy you can generate during exercise and the faster and longer you can exercise.

IMAGE: Fat cells (left image) don’t require a lot of energy. Because they are fairly inactive, they don’t need many mitochondria (arrow). Muscle cells (right image), on the other hand, have a great many mitochondria (arrow head). Muscle cells are constantly active, and having many mitochondria allows them to keep up with energy demands.

Have you ever gone to the gym to blow off steam? Taken a brisk walk around the block to shake a nasty encounter? Experience has taught us that exercise helps to relieve anxiety by triggering the release of good-mood brain chemicals called endorphins.

Endorphins, the body’s homegrown pain relievers, are known to block pain signals to the brain. In fact, endorphins are the body’s version of the opiate drug morphine. Endorphins are released into the bloodstream after intense aerobic exercise, and they can also be released during long, moderate- or high-intensity anaerobic workouts as well. In both scenarios, the release of endorphins brings about feelings of calm and well-being.

One well-known example of this phenomenon is the so-called “runner’s high,” which creates feelings of euphoria and happiness after a moderately long period of running. Runners should be aware, however, that when they experience a runner’s high, they may injure themselves by pushing past their bodies’ physical limits. The endorphins suppress pain and allow runners to keep going, surpassing what they otherwise would consider to be their limit.

Just how effective are endorphins? Research has shown that exercise can improve mood and control anxiety on a par with antidepressant medication. In one study of subjects over age 50 who had been diagnosed with major depressive disorders, researchers tested three interventions. One group of subjects started an aerobic exercise training program, a second took a leading brand of antidepressant drug, and a third combined the two interventions (some exercise, plus the antidepressant drug).

After 16 weeks, all three groups showed improvement in their depression symptoms. The group taking the drug had the most immediate improvement, but by the end of the research period it was clear that the exercise-only group had improved just as much as the medication-only group and the combination exercise- drug group.

Did you know that exercise can help you sleep sounder and longer as well as feel more awake during the day? It's true. But the key is found in the type of exercise you choose and the time you perform it during the day.

Vigorous exercise raises your levels of the stress hormone cortisol, an enemy of sleep.

Vigorous exercise also stimulates your heart, brain, and muscles and also raises your body temperature—the opposite of what you want at bedtime. So save the heavy workouts for earlier in the day, and unwind with stretching or calming yoga poses in the evening. Taking a leisurely walk in the evening is fine, too. But within 2-3 hours of bedtime, you should not engage in any activity that raises your heart rate above its resting rate.

If you want a more intense workout, it’s best to do it in the late afternoon or early evening, about 5-6 hours before you go to bed. Your body temperature will start to fall just as you're getting ready to go to sleep. A decrease in body temperature seems to be one of the triggers that help to ease you into slumber.

Morning exercise indirectly benefits sleep by relieving stress and improving mood (remember those endorphins?). Exposure to natural light in the morning can also reinforce the body’s sleep-wake cycle and make the transition between sleep cycles smoother and more regular.

Being very active and maintaining your cardiovascular fitness will ultimately help you sleep more soundly at night—just don’t work out too close to bedtime.

Not so long ago, conventional wisdom held that you couldn't do much to change your brain. Once your brain reached its full size, it was believed, it could only lose cells—your ability to grow new cells was gone forever. But in the past few decades, research has illuminated the brain's power to grow, evolve, and make new connections well into old age.

One protein that makes this possible, brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF), is released in greater volumes during aerobic exercise. BDNF has been called “Miracle Gro” for the brain, and it’s no wonder. Its effects include protecting existing brain cells, encouraging their growth, helping neurons form new connections and pathways, stimulating the growth of new neurons, and solidifying long-term memories (also known as learning!). BDNF is also an important agent in the phenomenon of brain plasticity—the ability of the brain to alter its signaling pathways in response to something new.

IMAGE: Brain cell growth at day 1, day 5, and day 7

All of this adds up to a lower incidence of Alzheimer's disease and other dementia disorders as well as better memory retention, decision making, and ability to learn.

Physical changes to the brain after exercise are dramatic. But the real proof of the impact of exercise is in actual mental performance, which is usually measured by testing people before and after they start an exercise program. The results are very clear: Exercise improves mental functioning regardless of age or gender.

In one study, researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign conducted important research on the relationship between exercise and the brain. They measured the aerobic fitness of 165 people aged 59 to 81. They also took MRI scans of the subjects' brains and tested their spatial reasoning, which involves visualizing objects and making logical conclusions about how they might be altered. The adults who were most aerobically fit tended to do significantly better on the spatial reasoning test. There was also a clear connection between fitness and the size of key areas of the brain involved in long-term memory storage.

In another study done by the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, researchers took a look at this phenomenon in younger subjects. The researchers assessed the fitness of a group of 9 and 10 year olds by having them run on a treadmill. The kids also took a test that gauged their ability to filter out extraneous information. Brain scans were performed on all of the kids. The results: Those who were most fit tended to do best on the tests. Not only that, the scan showed that the area of the brain that helps coordinate actions and thoughts was larger in the kids who were more fit.

Another study of 9 and 10 year olds tested their fitness level and scanned their brains, but the kids took a different test, which assessed their memory skills. The results: The scans of the fittest kids in this group showed that the area of the brain involved in memory was larger in the fittest kids.

Researchers agree that there may be other factors at work, but the correlations between exercise and increased brain functioning are very strong.

The cardiovascular system includes your heart and the network of arteries, veins, and capillaries that transport blood throughout your body. One of the benefits of aerobic exercise is that it lowers blood pressure by getting your heart pumping harder.

Having high blood pressure is an indicator that you may be at risk of developing heart disease. Blood pressure is the force of blood pushing against the walls of your arteries as your heart pumps blood. The more blood your heart pumps and the narrower your arteries, the higher your blood pressure will be, and the harder your heart will have to work to circulate blood throughout your body.

It might seem puzzling that it’s good to get your heart pumping hard by doing aerobic exercise, but bad for it to pump hard because of high blood pressure. The difference is that with high blood pressure, just one part of your heart—the left ventricle—takes on the brunt of the work. This extra work causes the left ventricle to enlarge. The enlarged tissue loses its elasticity and is not able to pump as efficiently or with as much force as a healthy heart.

When you get your heart pumping harder from aerobic exercise, on the other hand, your heart muscle gets a proper workout. The heart needs to pump up to 10 times more blood to a muscle group that's exercising than to one at rest. This type of exertion doesn't cause the heart tissue to enlarge. Instead, the heart muscle gets stronger from repeated exertions, just like your biceps. A stronger heart has an easier time pumping blood, so it can relax more between beats. With relaxation, arteries expand, creating more room for blood to flow, which means lower blood pressure.

Studies have also shown that vigorous exercise stimulates the growth of new blood vessels in muscle tissue. As your heart becomes more efficient, the superhighway of blood vessels in your body has a greater load to deliver to your muscles. When more oxygen is taken in to be transported to tissues, your arteries accommodate the increased traffic by building new pathways for blood to travel.

IMAGE: Cross section of muscle tissue before exercise (left image) and after exercise (right image). Thomas Adair, Ph.D., professor of physiology and biophysics at the University of Mississippi Medical Center, has conducted research showing that, in lab animals, intensive exercise results in a robust growth of skeletal muscle blood vessels (arrowheads).

Building or maintaining muscle mass and strength are the main objectives of anaerobic exercise. Properly working a muscle by pushing it to do more work than it’s accustomed to produces microscopic tears in the muscle fibers. It’s these micro-tears that cause soreness the day after a strength-building workout. The sore sensation signals your body to repair itself and get stronger. It’s advisable to rest a day in between these types of workouts to allow the muscle time to heal.

If you are consistent in doing your anaerobic workouts, this cycle of “tear and repair” ends up making each individual muscle cell bigger and more powerful. Being consistent also teaches your muscles to work with the nerves that trigger their action in a more coordinated manner. The result? When more cells in a muscle are working in sync, that muscle can perform more work—in other words, you’ll be stronger.

Anaerobic exercise also stimulates bone cell growth. When you challenge yourself with bursts of weight-bearing work, your body signals cells called osteoblasts to add new bone cells to your hard skeletal matrix, where minerals solidify and harden them. This process makes your bones stronger and denser. People with greater bone density have a reduced risk of fractures and breaks and are less likely to develop osteoporosis.

What about your joints? You may have heard that exercise is bad for joints, and there are, in fact, joint conditions that are named after certain types of exercise—“tennis elbow” and “runner’s knee,” for instance.

However, it’s been found that the cartilage that pads your joints and the fluid that lubricates most joints are not harmed by regular exercise. Victims of tennis elbow or runner's knee are in real pain, but usually they have overextended or otherwise misused their joints. Many sufferers aren’t athletes. Often they have overexerted themselves or have exercised incorrectly.

Your joints will not be overtaxed by regular exercise if you have strong muscles surrounding and supporting them and you maintain a healthy weight. An Australian study of 297 men and women over age 40 demonstrated the importance of exercise to joint health. Ten years after the study began, magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans showed that those who engaged in the most vigorous weight-bearing exercise had the thickest and healthiest knee cartilage of all.

Exercise benefits so many of your body's systems and processes that it’s not surprising people who stay active tend to live longer. The benefits from exercise head off strokes, dementia, depression, anxiety, cardiovascular ills, and more. The right balance of exercises can add rich, enjoyable years to your life.