The Importance of Exercise and Movement

Hi, this is Dr. Mark Hyman. Welcome to my weekly house call, your chance to ask me your questions. And this week's question is, Hey, Dr. Hyman, I'm on board with changing my diet, but I don't really like exercising. I'm not so sure about it. And how important is it, really? Well, you've heard me say probably many times that you can't exercise your way out of a bad diet. And that's true. One soda, you have to walk four and a half miles if you want to burn it off. If you have one super size meal at a fast food place, you have to run four miles every single day for a week to burn it off. And if you had one of those meals every day, you would literally have to run a marathon every day to burn it off. So you cannot exercise your way out of a bad diet. And I've had many patients lose a hundred pounds or more without exercising. But that doesn't mean that exercise is not critical for your wellbeing. It absolutely is. And it's something that I incorporate into my life all the time. In fact, I started when I was in eighth grade and I had a gym teacher, Mr. Gibson, and he showed us a movie about running, running and runners. And there was this guy named Larry Lewis who used to run five miles back and forth to work every day as a waiter and he was 105 years old. And there was another guy who had little stumps on his legs and he ran the Boston Marathon. So I got very inspired to start exercising at a young age. And I do it not because I wanna stay thin, I do it because it helps so many things for me. One, it helps me feel better now. Give me more energy, helps me stay focused, improves my mood, helps me sleep better, controls my appetite. And all the while, I know it's preventing diabetes, preventing cancer, preventing heart disease, helping my bones stay strong, and helping my immune system work better. It absolutely is the panacea for almost everything that goes on with our body that goes wrong, especially the aging process. If you want to reverse aging, exercise is the answer. We also know that being sedentary is very dangerous for your health. In fact, people who sit a long time have as much risk of dying as people who have bad diets or people who smoke. It's pretty striking when you look at the data. There's an increased risk of cancer, of heart disease, of diabetes, mortality. In fact, they do something called the VO2 max, which is literally a measure of your fitness level. When they graph it out, which is basically the amount of oxygen you can burn per minute, and the more oxygen you can burn, the more fit you are. Lance Armstrong is super high on that scale. Well, maybe with all the drugs, I don't know, he's got. But if you're a super athlete, you're very high on that scale. And if you're very low, it means you're poorly conditioned and not fit. And if you have a low VO2 max, it actually directly correlates with mortality. The lower your VO2 max, the lower your fitness, the higher risk of death all across the spectrum of that. So fitness is really critical. Now, if you don't like to exercise, which I really don't, I mean, I rarely go to the gym. You'll rarely see me doing sort of a regimented program. I like to play. So that's how I incorporate into my life. If I'm on the road, I might go to a yoga class, I might go to a dance class, I might go for a bike ride, I go skiing, I play basketball, I do stuff that's fun. because I want to have fun. Maybe you can just turn on your favorite music, turn down the shades in your bedroom and party by yourself, dance for half an hour. You might want to walk. In fact, this week I was at Cleveland Clinic and I was not able to exercise. They started meetings really early. I was working really late. I knew I wasn't going to get a chance to exercise. So I had a meeting scheduled. I said, why don't we have a walking meeting? So I walked on a brisk walk for an hour around the Cleveland Clinic campus. just to get exercise as we had a meeting. So there's simple ways you can incorporate exercise. Sometimes I'm on the road, I do what we call the seven minute workout, which is something that you can look up online. It's originally written about in the New York Times, and it's a super high intensity workout with jumping jacks, pushups, you know, tricep dips, running in place, all sorts of simple calisthenic exercises that all you need is, actually I often do it in my underwear. You don't really need any equipment. You just need, and then you put some music on, it's super fun. and it's really simple to do. And I do simple, simple kinds of activities like that. And I have a whole regimen of things that I like to do. So try to vary it, try to have fun. If you like to go to classes, do it with other people. You know, doing stuff with other people makes it so much easier. Going on a bike ride with somebody else, going on a walk. It doesn't have to be crazy exercise either. It can just be a simple walk every day. If you go from doing nothing to walking half an hour a day, the benefits are dramatic. And then to go from those benefits to more benefits, you don't really get that much more benefit as you start to maximize your exercise. I mean, at the high levels of fitness you do, but for most of us, that often can be enough. So just choose a friend, a walk, very simple, very powerful. So you can't exercise your way to a bad diet and you have to eat right and you have to eat real food, but you really also have to incorporate movement and exercise and fun into your life because if you don't, you're not going to feel that great. One of the things that's amazing about exercise is your brain. And your brain on exercise is so much better. In fact, with exercise, your brain creates a chemical called BDNF. That means brain-derived neurotrophic factor. It's kind of like miracle grow for your brain. And when you exercise, it increases all the connections between the cells, it helps you generate new cells so your brain becomes more elastic and plastic. I was at a seminar recently with a neurologist who is a scientist, a specialist in Alzheimer's, and he showed me the most amazing slides of brain imaging of people with Alzheimer's or early dementia. When he gave them intensive exercise programs, you literally saw the brain grow, the hippocampal area, which is the memory area, that area grew with exercise. I mean, if you can grow your brain on exercise, that's stunning. So I encourage you to find something you like, play, enjoy yourself. If you want to be going to the gym, go ahead. If you want to start jogging, go ahead. Do whatever you like, but find something, do something, and get over that a little bit of inertia. Once you get over that inertia, it becomes great. So share with me how you've overcome your resistance to exercise. What do you do for fun? And maybe we can learn together about what to do to incorporate exercise in our lives. So if you like this video, I encourage you to share it with your friends and family on Facebook, sign up for it so you can get it weekly in our newsletter, and submit your questions to us at drhyman.com so next week I may make a house call to you.