Younger Next Year

The book "Younger Next Year", by Chris Crowley and Henry S. (Harry) Lodge was recently recommended to me by a friend. He was a recently retired plastic surgeon, somewhat depressed and overweight. He said "this book is changing my life" which tends to get my attention! My wife bought the book and gave it to me that night and, over the next few days, I read it with great interest.

Harry's rules are:

1. Exercise six days a week for the rest of your life.
2. Do serious aerobic exercise four days a week for the rest of your life.
3. Do serious strength training, with weights, two days a week for the rest of your life.
4. Spend less than you make
5. Quit eating crap.
6. Care
7. Connect and commit

This book elaborates on these seven rules, which are a wonderfully simple approach to healthy aging. Although I am a fairly fit 58 year old, I can tell you I had some fine tuning to do after reading the book, and felt inspired to do it! Here is the tangible, near-term result of the book for me:

1. I am committing to trying some new things, such as a yoga class with my wife one or two days a week (I have been to three so far!)
2. Increasing my aerobic exercise duration to at least 45 minutes a day for at least 5 or 6 days a week.
3. Increasing the time and effort of my two times weekly weight workout.
4. Cutting out more fried foods from the diet.
5. Avoiding the temptation to have that third glass of wine at night.
6. Thinking concretely about connecting in my work and social interactions, rather than just going along for the ride.

I can enthusiastically recommend this approach to you if your life and your health is in a funk and needs a jump start. These guys are seasoned, realistic, optimistic and fun to relate to. They also have a web site http://www.youngernextyear.com.

Check it out. Comments always welcome.

Walk Further with a Pedometer

My wife and I recently installed a photovoltaic system at our house so that we can generate electricity from the sun. If we produce more than we use (which we do), we can sell it back to the power company. By producing an excess of electricity, I thought that we may become less careful about energy use, but the opposite reaction has occurred. We have actually become more conserving of electricity. Apparently, a similar mentality occurs when people use pedometers to keep up with the amount of walking they do on a daily basis.
The Journal of the American Medical Association recently summarized the results of 26 studies involving 2767 healthy adults that evaluated the association of pedometer use with physical activity and health outcomes. This review found that by simply wearing a pedometer, participants were motivated to increase the number of steps that they took each day. Overall, pedometer users increased their physical activity by an astonishing 26.9% over their baseline. But better yet, these same subjects also significantly decreased their body mass index as well as their systolic blood pressures.

The health benefits from use of a pedometer were clear in this study population. For those who require some extra motivation, this may be an easy way to increase their amount of daily exercise. The authors of this study weren’t sure if the level of physical activity and improved physical parameter would persist, but I can tell you that after 6 months of our photovoltaic system being on-line, we are still enjoying watching our electric meter “run backwards”.