Exercise and Fitness as You Age

Exercise Tips to Get Fit and Stay Fit as You Grow Older

As you grow older, an active lifestyle is more important than ever. Regular exercise can help boost energy, maintain your independence, and manage symptoms of illness or pain. Exercise can even reverse some of the symptoms of aging. And not only is exercise good for your body, it’s also good for your mind, mood, and memory. Whether you are generally healthy or are managing an illness, there are plenty of ways to get more active, improve confidence, and boost your fitness.

Exercise is the key to healthy aging

Starting or maintaining a regular exercise routine can be a challenge as you get older. You may feel discouraged by illness, ongoing health problems, or concerns about injuries or falls. Or, if you've never exercised before, you may not know where to begin. Or perhaps you think you're too old or frail, or that exercise is boring or simply not for you.

How to Start Exercising and Stick to It

Making Exercise an Enjoyable Part of Your Everyday Life

You already know there are many great reasons to exercise—from improving energy, mood, sleep, and health to reducing anxiety, stress, and depression. And detailed exercise instructions and workout plans are just a click a way. But if knowing how and why to exercise was enough, we’d all be in shape. Making exercise a habit takes more: namely, the right mindset and a smart approach. Whatever your age or fitness level—even if you’ve never exercised a day in your life before—there are steps you can take to make exercise less intimidating and painful and more fun and automatic.

Healthy Weight Loss and Dieting Tips

How to Lose Weight and Keep It Off

In our eat-and-run, massive-portion-sized culture, maintaining a healthy weight can be tough—and losing weight, even tougher. If you’ve tried and failed to lose weight before, you may believe that diets don’t work for you. You’re probably right: most diets don’t work—at least not in the long term. However, there are plenty of small but powerful ways to avoid common dieting pitfalls, achieve lasting weight loss success, and develop a healthier relationship with food.

The key to successful, healthy weight loss

Successfully managing your weight comes down to a simple equation: If you eat more calories than you burn, you gain weight. And if you eat fewer calories than you burn, you lose weight. Sounds easy, right? Then why is losing weight so hard?

10 Simple Steps to Change Your Eating Habits

Enjoy a good breakfast.

People often think that the path to weight loss is to skip meals, and breakfast is often the first to go. However, the “successful losers” in the National Weight Loss Registry would disagree: 78 percent of them eat a good breakfast and only 4 percent skip breakfast. Eating a healthy breakfast prevents much greater eating later in the day.

So, what’s is a healthy breakfast? An easy option is whole-grain cereal with lowfat milk, and a piece of fruit. Some other suggestions include steel-cut oats with hemp protein powder, flaxseed, walnuts and fruit, or eggs with whole wheat toast and fruit. Avoid heavy breakfasts like pancakes, French toast, or waffles with sausage.

10 Healthy Food Swaps for Losing Weight

Lighten up your mayo.

Swapping your regular mayonnaise for a lower-fat version can save significant calories. Light mayonnaise reduces calories per tablespoon to 35 or so, and total fat to between 3 and 4 grams per serving. Low-fat or reduced-fat varieties usually cut calories and fat to 15 and about 1 gram, respectively.

Going from 90 calories per tablespoon to 15 is a significant reduction, and when it comes to losing weight over the long term, these are the kinds of changes that really add up.

Try bacon of Canadian descent.

Abs Workout: The Fastest Way to Lose Belly Fat

The secret to amazing abs? Stop doing crunches and start doing these 3 flat-belly moves!

We all want a toned, flat stomach. No surprise there. But since many women are still relying on crunches to get it, we want to make one thing clear: Crunching is not the most effective abs workout. "Crunches work only the muscles on the front and sides of your abdomen, but it's important to target all the muscles of the core to get more defined abs—including lower back, hips, and upper thighs," says Lou Schuler, co-author of The New Rules of Lifting for Abs.

To lose belly fat and uncover amazing abs, Schuler recommends a series of core stabilization exercises based on a training program devised by co-author and personal trainer Alwyn Cosgrove. "Core exercises like the plank help train muscles to stabilize the spine and pelvis so you can avoid back pain and improve posture, Schuler says. "They also burn more calories than crunches because they work more muscles."

Related: For a flat belly and toned bikini body, check out The Bikini Body Diet by SHAPE editor-in-chief Tara Kraft.

9 Reasons Your Diet Isn’t Working

No, gluten and dairy aren't the devil. Stop believing these weight loss myths once and for all

Maybe you have a high school reunion coming up. Maybe you just haven’t been feeling your best. No matter your reasons for wanting to drop a few pounds, read this first and know that not every weight-loss “rule” is true.

Myth: Everyone loses weight at the same rate

The truth: Sometimes slow and steady wins the race, but not necessarily when it comes to dieting. Every body is different. For example, the more weight you have to lose, the faster you'll initially lose it. The opposite is true as well: Someone starting out with a lower body-fat percentage is going to shed pounds at a slower rate because they've got less to lose.

What to Do Every Hour to Lose Weight All Day

Get closer to your goal weight by bedtime with this around-the-clock workout and diet guide

Losing weight isn't about doing one good thing like going for a run or throwing kale in your smoothie—it's made up of a million healthy choices that you make all day long, every day. Don't view this as a burden; view it as a fun challenge! Every hour is an opportunity to do something that can bring you closer to your weight goal. So tomorrow, when you wake up, here's your around-the-clock guide to feeling slimmer by bedtime.

Identify & Remove Toxins That Limit You

I’ve had a lifelong battle with toxins.  More like a war really. When I say toxins, I’m not just referring to pesticides or hazardous waste.  A toxin is anything that damages the body.

Toxins can be from food (wheat, legumes, etc.), the air, water, mold, clothing, or for some, even your cell phone.  I won’t be able to cover every possible toxin in this article, but I’ll show you how to identify and remove the most common and damaging.

One of the first ways I started biohacking was with a game called FreeCell.  This is a simple online game you can play where you match squares.  I played the game for several weeks to establish a baseline, then I started testing.  I was looking for a way to track how certain foods effected my brain function.  A few weeks of trial and error revealed that two days after eating wheat – my score dropped significantly.

I soon moved on to more advanced ways of tracking my mental performance, but this was a great start. After I eliminated numerous food toxins like wheat, legumes, and aspartame, I still felt there was something wrong.  I was eating the equivalent of a paleo diet (the term and community didn’t exist back then), but there were certain foods that still made my joints hurt and my head throb.

Are weight-loss drugs worth trying?

New medications, which may be safer than earlier drugs, have expanded the options for treating obesity.

Obesity is now considered more than a risk factor for other conditions; it’s a disease itself. It has been the subject of intense scientific and medical research to develop effective treatments. But the quest has been elusive.

Four medications approved by the FDA since 2012—Qsymia (phentermine and topiramate), Belviq (lorcaserin), Contrave (naltrexone and bupropion ) and Saxenda (liraglutide)—have added to the options for treating obesity, says Dr. Lee Kaplan, who directs the Obesity, Metabolism, and Nutrition Institute at Harvard-affiliated Massachusetts General Hospital. “We now have six FDA-approved drugs, but that is a tiny percentage of the number available to treat hypertension and other chronic diseases, so we need even more options to treat obesity most effectively.”

3 health strategies to help you get through the holidays

Plan now to help prevent overeating, trips to the hospital, and depression.

The winter holidays are supposed to be a joyous time, filled with celebration. But they come with health risks, such as loneliness and depression, overeating, weight gain, falls in icy weather, foodborne illness, and heart problems. Here are ways to protect yourself while enjoying the season.

1. Avoid the blues

Even though the holidays are often happy, they sometimes trigger loneliness, sadness, and a general feeling of the blues. “You may be missing family members and friends who live far away, or those who’ve passed on. Or you may feel sad if you’re unable to take part in holiday festivities the way you once did,” says Dr. Michael Craig Miller, assistant professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School.

Abdominal fat and what to do about it

The Family Health Guide

Though the term might sound dated, “middle-age spread” is a greater concern than ever. As people go through their middle years, their proportion of fat to body weight tends to increase — more so in women than men. Extra pounds tend to park themselves around the midsection

At one time, we might have accepted these changes as an inevitable fact of aging. But we’ve now been put on notice that as our waistlines grow, so do our health risks. Abdominal, or visceral fat is of particular concern because it’s a key player in a variety of health problems — much more so than subcutaneous fat, the kind you can grasp with your hand. Visceral fat, on the other hand, lies out of reach, deep within the abdominal cavity, where it pads the spaces between our abdominal organs.

Visceral fat has been linked to metabolic disturbances and increased risk for cardiovascular disease and type 2 diabetes. In women, it is also associated with breast cancer and the need for gallbladder surgery.

Think You Can’t Exercise?

As we age, the sad truth is that the majority of folks over the age of 60 are sedentary. While there are a handful of ways to define ‘sedentary,’ here are few disturbing facts:

• Almost 60% of older adult’s reported sitting for more than 4 hours per day.

• 65% of older adult’s sit in front of a screen for more than 3 hours daily. 

• Over 55% older adult’s report watching more than 2 hours of TV daily. 

• In a small survey, it was found that 67% of the older population were sedentary for more than 8.5 hours daily. 

I would venture a guess that the vast majority of these folks know that not exercising is unhealthy for them and that they would be healthier if they could exercise more. In my practice, the 2 most common reasons why folks do not exercise as they age are fatigue and pain.

Discover Your Personal Weight Loss Plan

Autumn is in full-swing and just around the corner are the holidays. And with the holidays and the cooler weather moving in, many of us find ourselves gaining some weight during the fall and winter months. This is, of course, nature’s plan to insulate both humans and animals with a naturally-occurring higher fat and higher protein diet during the cold, winter months. I’ll give myself leeway to gain 5 pounds or so in the winter, but often this season is the beginning of rich and sweet treats at family gatherings and events, and it’s easy to get way off track. In the case that you do find yourself holding onto a little more than what you’d like, in this article, you’ll find some tools to self-diagnose why you might be struggling with stubborn weight that you just can’t drop and solutions to address each specific issue.

Remove Toxins from Your Fat Cells

We are all designed to continuously and naturally remove toxins from the body. There are two kinds of toxins: water-soluble and fat-soluble. Water-soluble toxins are easily flushed out of the body via the blood and kidneys, but the fat-soluble toxins are a challenge for the body to remove. These fat-soluble toxins such as heavy metals, pesticides, preservatives, food additives, pollutants, plastics and other environmental chemicals must become water-soluble for the body to eliminate them fully. This happens mostly in the liver, but if our digestive and detox pathways are not functioning optimally, these toxins find their way from the liver to the blood, fat cells, and brain, where they can store for years, setting you up for health concerns down the road.

I believe that if we keep our digestion, stress levels and detoxification pathways balanced, we can prevent dangerous chemicals and toxins from storing in our bodies.

HOW TO LOOK LEANER AND FITTER IN LESS THAN 3 DAYS

Feel your best by following these diet and workout tips -- forming healthy habits.

We all know that getting a great physique takes months of training and dedication. But what if you don’t have months to get a leaner, fitter body? What if you need to look great in just a few days?

Believe it or not, you can change the way you look and feel in two to three days. So if you have a hot date, an important meeting or a special night on the town, use these sneaky tricks to slim down, tighten up, and feel better about the way you look.

To change the way you look, you need to focus on your midsection, says David Sandoval. David is a self-proclaimed “wedding miracle maker” who works with brides, celebrities and beauty queens to help get their bodies red-carpet-ready. “Most people want their waist to look smaller because it makes the chest look bigger, and everyone wants that.”

The 5 Foods to Avoid If You Want a Six Pack

It's not your fault you don't have a six-pack—blame it on the food you eat.

Carrying a spare tire around your belly? You're not alone: Fifty-four percent of U.S. adults now have abdominal obesity, up from 46 percent in 2000, according to a recent report in the Journal of the American Medical Association. If you fall into that category (male abs are considered fat if the waistline measures more than 40 inches), it's time to consider cutting down your consumption of these five foods:

Refined grains

Not sure what a refined grain is? It's an ingredient found in foods like white rice, white bread, and regular white pasta. The unrefined stuff (whole wheat, brown rice and quinoa) is always healthier.

20 TIPS TO SHED BODY FAT FOR GOOD

Here, we give you 20 ways to give body fat a proper send-off. A big part of it has to do with your lifting and cardio regimens - keep those up. But in this list, we step away from the gym and into your kitchen to present a practical list for cleaning up your eating habits and, as a result, your physique.

1. CHANGE YOUR LIFESTYLE.

When you go on a "program" to lose body fat, you may set yourself up for failure. A program implies an endpoint, which is when most people return to their previous habits. If you want to lose fat and keep it off, make changes that you can live with indefinitely. Don't over-restrict calories, and find an exercise program that adequately challenges you, provides progression and offers sufficient variety so that you can maintain it for years to come.