Once again, the results of a lot of great research related to health and fitness have been published in the past couple of weeks, and I wanted to share the best of that research with you, so let’s get right to it. (I highly recommend that you click on the links associated with each story so that you can read the full details).

The first story comes from one of my favorite sources – the Wall Street Journal, and it’s titled “The Scales Can Lie: Hidden Fat“. The story is based on a recent report from the Mayo Clinic, which suggests that fat in your body can get you and your heart into trouble even if you don’t look fat and if the scale tells you you’re healthy. The researchers termed this phenomenon “normal weight obesity”. The study looked at data from 6,171 Americans with normal body size, as measured by body mass index, and found those with a high percentage of body fat were at significantly greater risk of future heart problems than those with low amounts of fat. The research also suggests that body mass index, or BMI, the tool doctors and researchers often use to determine whether a person is obese, may fall short in some cases as an indicator of good health. Actual body fat measurements can be calculated using bioelectrical impedence analysis, which is how we do it at Fitness Together. The findings of the Mayo study, which were published in November in the European Heart Journal, suggest that reducing heart risk requires increasing the percentage of lean muscle mass at the expense of body fat. This underscores the importance of exercise in maintaining cardiovascular health – including weight lifting and other resistance training, which helps build lean body mass. Eating a healthy diet is important in reducing body fat, too, but Dr. Lopez-Jimenez (the lead researcher) observes that if you only restrict calories, you risk losing an equal amount of body fat and lean muscle tissue and thus you could end up weighing less without significantly reducing the percentage of body fat.

The second study reinforces some of the findings from the Mayo Clinic study described above. This six-month study, conducted a the University of Wyoming, assigned 36 overweight men and women, average age 39, to one of three groups to look at the impact of diet alone or diet plus exercise on a variety of health outcomes. One group cut calories by 25 percent. The second group cut calories by about 12.5 percent and exercised enough to increase energy output by 12.5 percent. A control group simply stayed on a weight-maintenance diet. At the study’s end, both the caloric-restriction group and the caloric-restriction plus exercise group lost about 10 percent of their body weight. However, those who included exercise had better health outcomes. According to the lead researcher, the big improvement was related to blood pressure. The exercising and dieting group had greater blood pressure improvements, as well as improvement in cholesterol and insulin sensitivity. So hopefully the message is clear, you need to focus on both nutrition and exercise to achieve your health and fitness goals.

The next study, titled “Making Effective Nutrition Choices”, and recently published in the American Journal of Public Health, looked at how to get more people to eat the recommended number of daily servings of fruits and vegetables. As I have said many times, it’s hard to go wrong nutrition wise by adding more fruits and vegetables to your diet. The results of the study were quite impressive. The researchers created a website providing information on the benefits of eating more fruits and vegetables and ways to incorporate these healthy foods into their diets. After just three months of using the web site, 70% of the participants were eating the recommended five or more servings of fruits and vegetables on an average day, up from 20 percent at the starting point! I believe this indicates that if you provide people with useful information and make it easy for them to access such information, then they are much more likely to follow the recommendations contained within that information. I also believe that if you create some form of accountability, such as a journal, to accompany such information, you will increase both the number of people that are willing to commit to such a change, as well as their level of commitment.

And finally, if the benefits mentioned above such as improved cardiovascular health, reduced blood pressure, and improved body composition aren’t enough to convince you to start an exercise program, then perhaps this story in yesterday’s New York Times will do the trick. Researchers in British Columbia randomly assigned 155 women ages 65 to 75 either to strength training with dumbbells and weight machines once or twice a week, or to a comparison group doing balance and toning exercises. A year later, the women who did strength training had improved their performance on tests of so-called executive function by 10.9 percent to 12.6 percent, while those assigned to balance and toning exercises experienced a slight deterioration – 0.5 percent! The improvements in the strength training group included an enhanced ability to make decisions, resolve conflicts and focus on subjects without being distracted by competing stimuli.

I hope you find the results of these research studies interesting and useful. Like the one study above indicates, if you provide people with useful, easily accessible information, they will respond favorably. That is what I try to do with these newsletters, and what we try to do at FT through our workouts, nutritional advice, and accountability.

To your health and happiness,

P.S. Just wanted to give a quick Happy Birthday to our youngest son – today is his 20th birthday! We are heading up to Bear Creek Mountain to do some skiing for a couple of days (actually my wife and son will be doing the skiing, I’ll be hanging out by the pool…)

I know from previous emails that many people like to take online quizzes to see how healthy they are and where they may be able to make some improvements. The American Heart Association just came out with such a quiz, called “Life’s Simple 7 Success Plan”. You can take the quiz by clicking here.

According to the AHA, here are the seven secrets to a long life:

* stay away from cigarettes
* keep a slender physique (BMI below 25)
* get some exercise (150 minutes of moderate or 75 minutes of vigorous exercise per week)
* eat a healthy diet (read article for specifics)
* keep your total cholesterol below 200
* keep your blood pressure below 120/80
* keep your fasting blood glucose level below 100

Research shows that most 50 year olds who follow the above guidelines can expect to live another 40 years, free of stroke and heart disease. The advice was published today in the journal “Circulation”.

The AHA also found that in a recent survey 39 percent of Americans thought they had ideal heart health. However, 54 percent of this group were told that they had either a heart disease risk factor or needed to make a lifestyle change to improve heart health, or both. In other words, many people are in denial.

It is no surprise that weight control is a leading pitfall for those people trying to meet the seven guidelines above. As Dr. Donald M. Lloyd-Jones chair of the preventive medicine department at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine, states, “People I think are far too accepting of their waistlines.”

In addition to giving you a numerical score, the quiz from the AHA also offers advice in problem areas. For example, for someone needing to lose weight, it recommends setting a goal of losing a pound per week by burning at least 3500 more calories per week than they are taking in.

Have fun with the quiz!

Whole Foods in Plymouth Meeting

I realize this may not excite many of you, but Whole Foods is one of my favorite stores (I’d have to say it runs a close second to Apple stores), and so I just wanted to make you aware of the new Whole Foods in Plymouth Meeting. It is the largest Whole Foods store in PA, and includes a cafe with wine and beer on tap, a pizzeria, hamburgers and barbecue, and fresh gelato, to name just a few of the unique features of this Whole Foods store.

I was lucky enough to attend a presentation last week at the store by Dr. Joel Fuhrman, a leading nutritionist and best selling author. His book, “Eat to Live” is one of the top selling nutrition books, and one of the few such books that I would highly recommend. The presentation lasted about two and a half hours, and I was actively engaged the entire time.

Here is a well-written summary of his presentation. One of the highlights of the presentation were the following basic guidelines for what an individual should eat each day:

* a big salad
* one-half cup of beans
* three pieces of whole fruit
* one ounce of raw nuts and seeds
* one large serving of steamed green vegetables

You can read more about “Eat to Live” at http://drfuhrman.com/weightloss/about.aspx and read more about Dr. Fuhrman at http://drfuhrman.com/default.aspx

While on his web site, you may want to sign up for his weekly newsletter, or read more about his partnership with Whole Foods.

What can I say – the guy is awesome!

In closing, I would like to mention that Whole Foods does offer tours for groups, and I have talked to them about offering a tour for our clients. However, I need to have some idea of the interest level before going too far with planning such a tour. So if you would like to take a tour (we would go to the store in Devon), please let me know by responding to this email. I have heard they are quite informative and you get some free stuff!

And speaking of free stuff, here is an event at the store in Plymouth Meeting scheduled for Thursday, Jan 21 from 2-5:

“Stop by our Community Room and create your own Whole Body goodie bag full of hand-selected sample products that we’re sure you’ll love! No sign up necessary. Limit 1 bag per person, while supplies last”

To your health and happiness…

P.S. Based on client feedback, our Fitness Together trainers are going back to a more “traditional” look. I appreciate all of you sharing your thoughts with me about the new look that we tried, but I guess it was one of those ideas that was better on paper than in reality!

I hope that you had a happy, relatively stress-free holiday season, and a chance to visit with family and friends. I also hope that you didn’t get too far out of your healthy routine, and if you don’t have such a routine, we all know that this is the time of the year when most people vow to start one. Either way, now that the holidays are over, there’s no excuse for not committing some time every day to a healthier lifestyle.

I should warn you that this is a lengthy email, but there is so much great info to share with you this week that I couldn’t hold back. Perhaps you can make becoming more informed about health and fitness issues one of your New Year’s goals

So how does one begin to commit to a healthier lifestyle? One of our clients just asked me a similar question earlier this week, and here is part of my response to him:

“My recommendation is to approach your health and fitness holistically. From the fitness side, that would mean a blend of cardio, strength, and flexibility, and from the health side, good nutrition, good sleep habits, and stress reduction.

For the nutrition, I am a firm believer that most people know what good eating is, and don’t need someone to constantly preach to them. To me, you can’t go wrong by eating more fruits and vegetables, eating less meat, cutting out the sugar, and other well known basic habits. It really does help to keep track of what you are eating – whether it is done using a computer, a smartphone, or on paper.”

I pointed out that there are many options for accomplishing these health and fitness objectives. For the cardio, walking, running, biking, swimming, and rowing are all great ways to benefit your cardio system. My favorite happens to be the rowing machine, and I have set some goals this year for myself on the erg (more specifically – a marathon in less than 3 hours and 2000 meters in less than 7 minutes; I plan to provide periodic updates on my progress throughout the year).

For the strength part of your fitness, I believe that is what we do best at Fitness Together. Our expert fitness consultants (Chris, Sam, Julie, Iszel, and Kera) can design a program for you that is specific to your goals, needs, and abilities, and will offer continual encouragement to keep you on track.

As to the flexibility, once again, that is something that is incorporated into all of our FT workouts, and most clients find it the most enjoyable part of the training session. Yoga and Pilates are other methods of improving and maintaining your flexibility. (One of my sons just gave me a gift certificate for a week of Bikram Yoga. I thought I was in good shape, but this was something else. The room is kept at 105 degrees, and you are constantly pushing yourself for 90 minutes beyond your limits. I went 6 times in the 7 day period, and I must admit it was a challenging yet enjoyable experience.)

So I hope that offers you some advice on how to approach the New Year with a commitment to your health and fitness.

Finally, there was a great mix of health and fitness news this past week, which I would like to briefly share with you. In fact, a few of you were kind enough to inform me about a couple of the stories from the Wall Street Journal that I reference below.

The first story ask the question “Did Americans get any healthier over past decade?” and unfortunately a quick answer to the question is no. About 10 years ago the government set some lofty health goals for the nation to reach by 2010. By many measures, we did not do so well. There are more obese Americans than a decade ago, not fewer. We eat more salt and fat, not less. More of us have high blood pressure. More of our children have untreated tooth decay. But the nation has made at least some progress on many other goals. Vaccination rates improved. Most workplace injuries are down. And deaths rates from stroke, cancer and heart disease are all dropping. I would encourage you to read the full article.

The second article is a short summary of an interesting study recently published in the European Journal of Social Psychology. The study was designed to look at how long it takes to establish habits. The study reveals that when we want to develop a relatively simple habit like eating a piece of fruit each day or taking a 10 minute walk, it could take us over two months (66 days) of daily repetitions before the behaviour becomes a habit. And, while this research suggests that skipping single days isn’t detrimental in the long-term, it’s those early repetitions that give us the greatest boost in automaticity. This fits in with our approach at FT. The reason we want you to commit up front to a certain time period is becuase we know it takes awhile to establish a habit (this study confirms that belief). In addittion, this is why we encourage new clients to come in more frequently in the beginning because it is the frequency of those early sessions that makes it easier to have exercise become part of your normal routine.

The final two articles I will bunch together, since they both come from the Wall Street Journal. The first one is titled “The Hidden Benefits of Exercise” and the main message is that beyond the typcical benefits usually associated with exercise, research is showing that even moderate physical activity can boost the immune system and protect against chronic diseases. The second story talks about “Why You Should Step Up Your Workout“. According to Dr. Paul Williams, a staff scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley Calif., “There is no gene or drug discovery that comes close” to the effects of more and more-vigorous exercise. Dr. Williams’ studies have shown that exceeding the federally recommended exercise guidelines can reduce the risk of stroke, heart attack, glaucoma, diabetes and other diseases by as much as 70% above the benefits of merely meeting the guidelines.

If you’ve read this far, congratulations and thank you! I wish all of you the best with your New Year’s resolutions to become a better you.

To your health and happiness…

P.S. I want to thanks for the many positive comments we have gotten about the new improved look at our Newtown Square studio. It only took two and a half years, but we finally got some artwork on the walls (I guess that’s what happens when you have a couple of guys in charge of the studio), and a coat rack. In addition, our trainers are sporting a new, more “uniform” look.

By this point in time I am guessing you have already read more than one story about how to stick to your New Year’s resolutions, so I don’t think there is a need for me to add anything in that regard.

Fortunately, there were a couple of interesting stories this week related to health and fitness that I would like to share with you.

The Wall Street Journal had an article about the effect of menopause on a woman’s heart. Previous studies provided mixed evidence on the effect; some studies even suggested that it was actually heart disease that could push women to an earlier menopause. Now a study indicates that a woman’s LDL or bad cholesterol rises markedly during the year before and after menopause begins-the time period that coincides with a significant drop in levels of estrogen. “The data underscore the need to monitor LDL cholesterol levels as women approach the menopause transition,” says Kim Sutton-Tyrrell, an epidemiologist at the University of Pittsburgh and senior author of the study. The findings were published this month in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology.

The study “helps to understand the role of a woman’s natural estrogen in protecting the heart and affecting risk factors for coronary disease,” states Dr. Manson, chief of preventive medicine at Harvard-affiliated Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Boston. She said the findings point out the importance of “knowing your numbers” when it comes to cholesterol and other heart-related risk factors as women enter menopause. Many women and their doctors don’t think to get a cholesterol check at that time of their lives, she added.

Dr. Manson also says that exercise is a fundamental strategy to respond to the impact of menopause on heart risk. “Physical activity is so key,” she says. “It will do a lot to avoid weight gain and build muscle mass, which helps boost the metabolic rate.” Reducing the amount of visceral fat-that which accumulates around the waistline-can help improve cholesterol levels.

The New York Times had a story titled, “Phys Ed: How Little Exercise Can You Get Away With?”. The story references a research study from Scotland that concluded that only 20 minutes a week of simple activities such as walking or even housecleaning could keep a Scot from feeling gloomy. It should be pointed out however that such a regimen certainly won’t do much for your cardiovascular fitness and is unlikely to lessen your risks for a multitude of diseases and, ultimately, of premature death, benefits that a greater amount of exercise may provide. It also won’t help much with weight loss.

So how much activity do you need? As reported in a previous Wellness Wednesday, the general recommendation is for 150 minutes per week of moderate intensity physical activity, with more benefits accruing if the activity is more intense or additional time is spent on the activity. However, there are limits on physical activity beyond which there may be no additional benefits, and could perhaps even be harmful.

The key, according to Frank Booth, a professor in the department of biomedical sciences at the University of Missouri at Columbia is to do something. “Inactivity is looking more and more like one of the underlying causes of many chronic diseases,” he says. If, he adds, “you want to live to be 100 then don’t just sit all day.”

The New Year certainly is a great time to get started on a fitness program, and I encourage all of you to do so. If you want some guidance from some of those “how to stick to your resolutions” stories, here are a few I found useful:

“How to Keep Those New Year’s Resolutions”

Realistic Resolutions From Dr. Oz

Top Reasons Those ‘Get Fit’ Resolutions Don’t Stick Top Reasons Those ‘Get Fit’ Resolutions Don’t Stick

And as a final encouragement to get you started off on the right foot this year, I want to remind you that this Saturday, January 2, at our Newtown Square studio all of our sessions are free (existing clients only). There are just a few open slots remaining, so if you want to reserve a spot, please be sure to call 610-355-0935 as soon as possible.

Wishing you a healthy, happy New Year!