Diet v Exercise

To start of this discussion today, I want to focus on the relative importance of diet and exercise. When I use the word ‘diet’ I am not thinking in terms of the latest fad to used to exploit the gullibility of people and sell yet another book. We will have no South Beach diets, Atkins Diet, Diet of the Stars or whatever here. Instead I mean the word in the simplest sense of what you eat. Actually, to extend the definition just a little, I also mean how you eat. The latter I will address in subsequent blogs but for now let me just remark that aspects of the how can be just as important, indeed even more important, than simply the what.
Sometimes a false dichotomy is created by people writing about this subject between diet and exercise. This is a little misleading as it is clearly not an either or choice. One can quite easily maintain a healthy and life giving exercise program hand in hand with a similar attitude to exercise. The point I woulld like to make though is relates to the relative importance of both. Many folks seems to think that they can eat what they like, when they like and, as long as they take enough exercise, they will remain healthy. Perhaps this misconception comes from the times of their youth when a fast metoabolism meant that they could eat in absolute abundance and as long as they took some exercise could maintain a reasonably athletic figure.

This pleasant aspect of youth can be a little deceptive though. Essentially, if your diet is too high in calories it would take a very, very excessive amount of excercise to expend those extra calories. Such a huge amount in fact that only distance athletes and others in indulge in extreme endurance sports will come anywhere close. Although I would recommend both a healthy diet and eating habits and exercise it is clear that the eating habits are far more significant in terms of longevity. There are many cases of those who barely exercised at all and lived to very ripe old ages but few, painfuly few, of those who may have done large amounts of exercise but had awful dietary habits.
In point of fact, recent studies have found that exercise has its limitations, particularly the sort of exercise involved in such pursuits as marathon running or that indulged in by triathles. I will cover this subject more extensively in a subsequent blog, but for now suffice it to say that as with almost everything in this life we live, more is not necessarily better.
Next week I plan to move on to a few words on the amount of calories we eat and a few thoughts on how these should be consumed, but for now....
Live Long And Prosper!