Healthy Diet and Exercise
A healthy diet and exercise are two major factors that contribute to overall wellness. Both have long been cornerstones to healthy living. Maintaining a healthy workout regimen and diet will enhance the effects of hormone replacement therapy along with vitamins and supplements. Renew Health and Wellness recommends both exercise and a proper diet in order to combat the effects of hormone deficiency or aging. The combination of rigorous exercise and a healthy diet can present positive health effects and benefits that doctors simply cannot duplicate through hormone replacement therapy alone. Without focusing and including exercise and a healthy diet, clients will not be able to reach optimal health and overall wellness.
Benefits of Consistent Exercise
There is so much more to the benefits of physical activity than what people generally think of first. While exercise certainly helps men and women lose weight, the effects of physical activity have proved to be as far-reaching as being called the only true miracle drug by physicians around the world. Exercise and physical activity present a variety of both physical and mental benefits.
Physically, exercise is an important factor in helping men and women reach their ideal weight. Exercise also strengthens the body’s muscles, increases joint mobility and helps to produce healthy bone density. It also gives a person significantly more energy. Exercise provides a boost to a person’s immune system and is also important in fending off possible illnesses. Cardiovascular disease, heart disease and type II diabetes are illnesses that often go hand-in-hand with obesity. With exercise being a definite cure for overweight individuals, it subsequently reduces the risk for these potentially life-threatening ailments. Consistent exercise not only makes the body feel healthy, but also the mind. Exercise can improve a person’s mental state by helping eliminate and prevent depression.
Different types of exercise will accentuate certain benefits. For example, anaerobic exercise will help increase muscle strength more so than aerobic exercise. Similarly, aerobic exercise helps strengthen one’s cardiovascular system more than anaerobic exercises will. Because of this fact, one must have a firm grasp on the different types of exercise and their benefits in order to achieve their desired results and goals.
Flexibility Exercises
Flexibility exercises usually require a lot of stretching, which promotes a wider range of motion in both muscles and joints. As men and women age, they often experience pain in their joints. This is mainly because the muscles around the joints are rarely used and do not have the opportunity to build strength. Through flexibility exercises, the joints and surrounding muscles are strengthened so a person is less likely to experience joint pain. Flexibility exercises also help improve physical activity.
They also help increase circulation throughout the body so that blood and nutrients can flow into muscles. Risk of straining a muscle or experiencing soreness is greatly reduced through flexibility exercises. Muscles can be called upon for physical activity or exertion, and with regular flexibility exercise, this exertion will not necessarily cause pain or strain. For aging men and women, they might experience a sore lower back along with other areas. Through diligent flexibility exercises, they can greatly reduce this type of soreness.
Aerobic Exercises
This type of exercise is the kind that gets the heart beating rapidly and sends blood coursing through the body. Aerobic exercises including running or partaking in fast-paced sports such as basketball are designed to increase cardiovascular endurance. These exercises work out the heart by making it beat at a much faster rate. During the process of an aerobic exercise, a man or woman breathes in oxygen which is brought to the blood vessels. The heart beats quickly to disperse the oxygen-rich blood to muscles, which aids them in contracting during the physical activity. By getting the blood moving through the body, it also helps eliminate the toxins that have developed there.
Aerobic exercise also burns off substantial calories. If these calories were not used up during exercise, they would be stored as fat. Storing too many calories as fat causes obesity. Because aerobic exercise burns these calories, it helps an individual lose weight and keep it off.
In addition to the physical upsides, aerobic exercise can pump endorphins into the body and alter a person’s mood and state of mind. Aerobic exercise can also help depression, tension and anxiety.
Anaerobic Exercises
Instead of getting the heart pumping, anaerobic exercise keys in on increasing muscle strength through activities like lifting weights. This brings about a far different batch of positive byproducts. Anaerobic exercise helps increase lean muscle mass and also has an effect on bones – building strength and density within them. By building lean muscle mass, anaerobic exercises help reduce body fat in the process.
Many men and women strive for a toned and well-shaped body and anaerobic exercises are the primary means of reaching that goal. With the aid of hormone replacement therapy, which allows aging men and women to build muscle mass, anaerobic exercises can leave the bodies of aging individuals leaner. The more muscles that a body builds, the quicker the body’s metabolism will be. With a faster metabolism, men and women will find it tougher to put on weight compared to those with a slower metabolism.
Importance of a Healthy Diet
A workout can only be effective if the body is being fueled by the proper diet. Maintaining a healthy diet helps improve overall health by preventing a whole host of possible illnesses. Eating the wrong foods can put individuals at risk for such ailments as heart disease, diabetes, obesity and osteoporosis. Maintaining what medical professionals consider a balanced diet can be relatively difficult as one must account for a large number of nutrients and macronutrients like fats, proteins and carbs. Striking an appropriate balance among all of these factors is the key to a healthy diet.
This is why scheduling out and planning meals ahead of time is a good idea. These meals should come every few hours or so to keep the intake of nutrients constant. When individuals fail to plan their meals ahead of time, they will likely grab heavily-processed foods that do not carry much nutritional value. Compiling the right diet requires some time and thought.
Why Whole Foods are Essential
The United States has become a nation of processed foods. This does not work in the favor of those trying to strike a healthy diet by eating only whole foods. These types of food are labeled “whole” because that is exactly what the consumer is getting: a food in its whole state. The food has not been altered and the consumer gets the full nutritional value, which includes its many vitamins and minerals.
Once foods are heavily refined, as many of them are, only small traces of whole food remain which robs the consumer of valuable nutrition. Companies actually take out a lot of the nutritional value of the food during this process. If a person is trying to eat healthier, whole foods are the right choice. Whole foods have been proven to decrease the risk of cardiovascular disease, type II diabetes and even some types of cancer. Whole foods are loaded with vitamins, minerals and fiber which are all ingredients to a healthy diet.
There is no need to toss out all the guilty pleasures and processed foods, but limiting them and sticking to whole foods is a must if men and women want to see the positive results of a healthy diet.
