| Get With the Program! Basics |
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| The healthiest vegetables are always green. Greens are undoubtedly healthy, but vegetables and fruits in other colors—red, orange, yellow, blue, and purple—all bring different nutrients to the table. You’ll get the most antioxidants, vitamins and minerals if you keep your plate colorful. |
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Aerobic exercise—the kind of exercise that makes your heart beat faster and your breathing accelerate—is one of the cornerstones of an effective weight-loss program. For most people, changing their eating behavior means eating fewer calories, a move that can cause their metabolism to drop. If you bolster your metabolism with regular aerobic exercise and then begin to gradually eliminate unnecessary calories, your weight loss results will be dramatic.
 That, though, is only one of several significant reasons for adding aerobic exercise to your life. Aerobic exercise improves cardiovascular fitness. That is, it improves the ability of your heart, lungs, and arteries to deliver oxygen to working muscles, as well as your muscles’ ability to use that oxygen to fuel its efforts. By getting your cardiovascular system into shape you’ll bump up the total number of calories you burn in a day. You’ll also receive other perks of cardiovascular fitness: lower cholesterol, reduced risk of heart disease (and some cancers), less back pain, better toned muscles, increased energy, and a more shapely body, just to name a few!
What Kind of Aerobic Exercise?
As soon as you begin exercising aerobically, your metabolism starts to increase, and continues to speed up in direct proportion to the length and intensity of your workout. Best of all, the boost your metabolism gets from exercise can last for hours after you’ve stepped off the treadmill.
When weight loss is your goal, it’s critical to use a highly aerobic form of exercise. The more highly aerobic an activity is, the more aerobic enzymes it will cause your body to produce. These enzymes, found mostly in the muscles, help you burn fat, and you want your body to produce as many as possible.
The aerobic workouts that I consider the most effective—my A list--are power walking, jogging, aerobic dancing, and stair climbing. (Click here for more information on my A-list exercises.) On the “B” list are stair stepping, elliptical exercise, spinning, stationary cycling, indoor rowing, and indoor cross-country skiing.
Other workouts can help keep you healthy and contribute to weight loss, but these do it better. They give you the most bang for your buck.
How Much?
One well-kept secret is that many of the beautiful bodies you see in movies, on TV and in magazines are the products of hours and hours of exercise. Before the glamorous owners of these bodies are photographed, they put a considerable amount of time into refining their  shapes. It’s part of the job.
In the real world, most people don’t have that much time to devote to exercise, and I’m not expecting you to work out for hours at a time. But if your goal is to lose weight, you’ll typically need to do at least 50 minutes a week of aerobic exercise. (Some people may need to do even more.) You can break up those minutes to fit your schedule, but keep in mind that you’ll need to do at least ten minutes of continuous exercise at a time to appreciably increase your aerobic enzymes and, thus, your metabolism. If you hit a plateau in your weight loss, try tacking on more minutes each week—that should stimulate your body to start shedding pounds again.
How Hard?
The more aerobic exercise you do in a given amount of time, the better cardiovascular shape you’ll be in and the less body fat you’ll retain. Perhaps you’ve heard that if you want to burn fat, you should stick to low-intensity exercise, but the rationale behind that recommendation is faulty. It’s true that at higher intensities your body tends to burn more carbohydrates (in the form of glycogen, stored in the muscles and liver) than it does stored body fat. But, it doesn’t matter that much which fuel you burn the most of during exercise. What does matter is that by exercising at a higher intensity you’ll increase your metabolism, thus burning a higher rate of calories 24 hours a day.
There’s hardly any difference in the amount of fat you burn over a period of 30 minutes if you go slowly or at a moderately high pace. But the difference between the amount of fat your body will burn if you have a highly fit cardiovascular system and a system that’s just so-so is significant. In the end, a revved up metabolism will play a bigger part in ridding your body of excess fat than a low-intensity workout ever could.
So what is the ideal intensity? One that gets you in the zone. Being in the zone is exercising at 70 to 80 percent of your maximum ability, and there are two ways to figure out if you’re reaching that goal.
The first method is a numerical equation that calculates what’s known as your “target heart rate range.” That range is the recommended range of heart beats per minute that you should safely achieve during exercise. To estimate your target heart rate range at 95 percent of your maximum ability, start by figuring out your target heart rate: 220 – your age x 75 percent (.75). So if you’re 40 years old, your target heart rate is 180 x .75 = 135 beats per minute. To get the target heart rate range, add and subtract 5 (beats) from your target heart rate. For a 40-year-old, that comes out to 130 to 140 beats per minute. So if you’re 40, after you warm up for 5 minutes or so, your heart rate should be between 130 and 140 beats per minute for the duration of your workout. (Click here for my automatic calculator that measures your target heart rate.)
What’s difficult about this measurement is that you have to take your pulse during exercise, which can be sort of tricky. That’s why I prefer that clients use the second method of determining if you’re exercising in the zone: perceived exertion. (Of course, if you’ve been told by your physician not to exceed a certain heart rate, then stick with the first method.)
 Perceived exertion is a subjective measure of how hard you’re working based primarily on your breathing. The scale goes from zero to ten, with level zero being how it feels to be at rest and level ten being an exertion so difficult you could probably only maintain it for a few seconds. On this scale, being in the zone is being at level seven or eight. At level seven, you feel fatigue but are certain that you can maintain the pace for the rest of your session. Your breathing is deep, but you can still carry on a conversation. Level eight is slightly more vigorous. If you asked yourself if you could continue at that pace for the rest of your workout, you might not be 100 percent sure. You could still carry on a conversation, but you wouldn’t want to. For more details on how hard you should push—an explanation of levels zero to ten--click here.
It may take you a while to consistently maintain level seven, but don’t be discouraged. If you can’t exercise at that pace for your whole workout, start at a lower level of exertion, then increase to a seven for one or two minutes at a time. Probably within a week or two you’ll be able to exercise at level seven for at least ten to 15 minutes. Remember that highly aerobic exercise isn’t supposed to be completely comfortable. You need to challenge yourself if you want to see some results.
For more information check out my books Get With the Program! and The Get With the Program! Guide to Good Eating.
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