Authors: Mark Hyman
Tags: #Health & Fitness / Diet & Nutrition / Diets, #Health & Fitness / Body Cleansing & Detoxification
The Blood Sugar Solution 10-Day Detox Diet: Activate Your Body's Natural Ability to Burn Fat and Lose Weight Fast (34 page)
How am I feeling physically?
What changes do I notice in my body?
What thoughts and emotions are present for me today?
What do I believe to be true about myself and exercise?
What has stopped me in the past from getting in shape?
What new set of beliefs would serve me better and help me get in shape? (For example, changing your belief that you don’t have time into a belief that you can make time for what is important to you.)
What are the top three reasons I want to get in shape?
What would my life look like if I were fit and healthy? Is there anything about that image that worries or scares me?
What kinds of physical activity have I always wanted to try?
How can I explore these activities? (Hint: Start with baby steps… do some research, get a DVD, try a beginner’s class, etc.)
What practices can I put into place to keep me on track with my exercise routine? (For example, pairing up with a friend for daily walks, committing to a weekly fitness class, or setting small and specific exercise goals to strive toward.)
At this stage, if you’re ready to up the ante on your daily exercise, I recommend incorporating interval training into your routine. Your ability to burn calories is linked to how much oxygen you can consume per minute (referred to as VO2 max). If you have a very high VO2 max, you’ll have a very easy time losing weight. How do you get your cells to consume more oxygen? Not by breathing faster, but by making your cells smarter and fitter. You can do this through interval training—exercise in which you’re moving alternately fast and slow, or at high intensity followed by low intensity. Interval training can help change your metabolism by making more mitochondria (the little energy-burning factories in your cells).
Interval training also helps you make the best use of your time. High-intensity interval training, or HIIT, involves working at the very top end of your capacity for forty-five to sixty seconds, then recovering for three minutes by walking or a slow jog, then returning to very high intensity for another forty-five or sixty seconds. If you can maintain this cycle for even a few minutes at a stretch, you’ll see significant fitness gains very quickly. And you can do it walking, running, biking, jumping rope, dancing, or even swimming. Just focus on getting your intensity up to a 9 on a 1-to-10 scale during the intense intervals, and then allowing your system to recover as much as possible during the rest cycles. And prepare to work up a sweat!
But even if you don’t feel up to working out at a high level of intensity, you can still get the benefit of interval training. Generally speaking, any fast/slow/fast/slow routine will help you get far more out of your thirty-minute exercise window than a steady-state workout will. For example, if you’re walking thirty minutes, you could do a routine similar to this:
Two minutes walking at a slow-to-moderate pace to warm up.
Four minutes walking at a moderate pace.
Two minutes walking or running at a fast pace (fast enough that you are breathing heavily).
Continue to alternate four minutes at a moderate pace/two minutes at a fast pace three more times.
End with three minutes of slow walking to cool down.
I had a patient who was running eight miles a day, and his fitness level wasn’t that great. I got him to exercise much less frequently but incorporating fast and slow intervals, and he lost fifty pounds! That’s right: You can exercise less and lose more weight. Studies have shown that people who do interval training can exercise less and yet burn 9 percent more body fat.
If you are in good shape, you might need to work harder to hit the high-intensity level. If you are very out of shape, start slowly. If you have heart disease or diabetes, you should have a stress test or see your doctor before starting a vigorous exercise program. But remember, anybody can start with walking!
There are many different types of interval programs out there that you can explore. A recent study found that you could dramatically improve your fitness and metabolism with a simple seven-minute high-intensity workout. I have been doing it lately; it is hard but worth it. After seven minutes I feel energized and as if I’ve had a great workout. Go to www.7-min.com for a timer that tells you exactly what to do and when. Many of my readers have had great success with another powerful interval-training program I came across called Pace Express. Go to www.10daydetox.com/resources to learn more about both of these programs.