The Life Plan (23 page)

I have learned over the years from my patients and my own experiences that once most of us reach our fat-loss/muscle-building goals we celebrate by returning to our old habits. It’s truly amazing how little time it takes before we can look just like our “before” photos. That’s why all three of the diets you’ve read about are “forever.” There is no such thing as a maintenance program on the Life Plan.

If you are anything like me, you will periodically get off track. Make sure that you recognize this right away, and get your act together and get back on the diet as soon as possible. Don’t wait for “the end of the week” or the start of business on Monday: You don’t have this luxury. The more time you spend off track, the harder it will be to get back on.

Once you have reached your goals, continue to monitor your body fat percentage, muscle mass, strength, and all of your biomarkers for disease at least every three months. Get new bathing suit photos of yourself every three months and post them right next to your “before” photo on your refrigerator door, or in your wallet. You don’t want to ever forget how you used to look and feel. If you follow these suggestions, I think you will stay on the right track to a lifetime of leanness, great appearance, and good health.

M
y workouts take me to a unique mental zone where my life is redefined and given rhythm, order, balance, and flow. Yet it didn’t start out that way. It’s hard to believe when you look at me now, but not so many years ago it was more than a struggle to get myself out of bed and into the gym. I had to constantly create goals and incentives to keep me going. But after a while, I was reveling in the joy of my success: I just had to look in the mirror to see what I had accomplished. More than that, for the first time in my life, I felt great physically and emotionally. And I knew that my good health was mostly due to my exercise routine.

That’s why exercise is the cornerstone of my Life Plan: Without it, there is no way that I could continue to look and feel like I do at age 72. Even if you replace diminishing hormones and follow healthy eating habits, you can’t experience active aging without exercising every day. You need the right regimen and the right intensity to succeed. Once you start feeling younger and looking better, you won’t ever want to stop. This is especially true because exercise is better than anything else you can do to enhance your sex life.

Having sex three times a week serves as a benchmark that you’re healthy and physically fit. If you’re not keeping up, you may be out of shape in more ways than you thought. Sex is a form of physical exertion that can be harmful to men with advanced heart disease, especially if you’re not in shape. A study of healthy married men (ages 25 to 43) showed that the highest recorded heart rate during sex was 127 beats per minute—that’s 67 percent of maximum heart rate, which is a high rate for the nonathletic.

The strength of your erection is a true barometer of your overall health. But here’s the problem: An estimated 34 percent of all American men age 40 to 70 suffer from some level of erectile dysfunction. Before you fill your Viagra prescription, or talk to your doctor about getting one, there’s plenty you can do yourself to get your sex life back on track.

The latest research suggests that exercise helps improve male sexual function. According to the chief exercise physiologist for the American Council on Exercise, Dr. Cedric Bryant, improving muscle strength and tone, endurance, body composition, and cardiovascular function is key to a prolonged sex life. Physically active men over 50 reported better erections—and had a 30 percent lower risk for impotence than their inactive cohorts. Other research studied over 40,000 men and became the largest study to demonstrate that the more exercise a man does, the less likely he’ll experience erectile dysfunction. Plus, exercise boosts you psychologically, reducing stress, increasing confidence, and elevating moods.

Every aspect of the Life Plan will improve your sex life. Here’s how your sexual health will benefit from following my program:

Flexibility is one of the most important components of sexual fitness—and one of the most ignored. Exercise that mimics everyday life is what you need to focus on to improve your sexual function. For example, bending over to pick something off the floor, reaching, swinging, pushing, and pulling all increase your flexibility. These are called functional workouts, which you will learn more about in

Chapter 5

. They train your body to move in all planes of motion: forward, backward, rotation, and lateral.

Lifting heavy weights and performing compound movements (squats, dead lifts, and bench presses) increases serum testosterone and growth hormone levels—key hormones to improve sexual function.

Working out at an intensity level of 65 to 85 percent of maximum heart rate (which I discuss in

Chapter 7

) can mean no ED problems, according to a nine-year study published in the August 2000 issue of

by Dr. Irwin Goldstein, Boston University School of Medicine. Investigators also found that men who continued or started working out as late as middle age were still able to lower their impotence risk.

Good health is far more than an active sex life and the absence of disease—it’s the ability to maintain strength, movement, and balance. Once you master these three components, you’ll be able to continue living your life to the fullest and avoid getting old. Exercise is the vehicle that gets you there and keeps you there.

In reality, physical exercise is just another medical protocol. A 2002 study published in the
New England Journal of Medicine
concluded that exercise capacity is perhaps the most powerful predictor of life span. Exercise has also proven to be an effective strategy for preventing or reversing the top killers of American men:

Men with rheumatoid or degenerative arthritis benefit from exercise, which improves endurance, strengthens muscles, and increases both joint flexibility and range of motion. These benefits can’t be realized with drugs or surgery.

Evidence suggests physical activity reduces the risk for colon cancer.

Exercise restores function following a stroke—a benefit not shared by drugs or surgery.

Adding exercise to a COPD rehabilitation program can result in both physiological and psychological benefits, even for those with severe air flow obstruction or asthma.

Exercise combined with the right nutritional therapy can reverse heart disease, the number-one killer of all Americans. It also improves heart function, reduces several coronary risk factors, enhances psychosocial well-being after a heart attack, and improves long-term survival. Both resistance training and cardiovascular workouts strengthen the heart muscle.

Aerobic exercises like walking and running reduce depression and anxiety, improve stress tolerance, enhance self-image, and increase one’s sense of well-being. Plus, exercise stimulates the release of your own “feel-good” hormones (endorphins).