Taking control of your lifestyle

TAKING CONTROL OF YOUR LIFESTYLE

By pursuing a disease-free lifestyle, you're doing something about it before it happens. That's a wiser strategy, Dr. Bortz maintains. It's also a major act of heroism, given that you're not exactly smothered with support from the prevailing culture.
Take, for example, the eat-right plank on your disease-free platform. But is there enough doctors’ advice in the world to offset TV images of Michael Jordan telling you how wonderful it is to eat hamburgers?
"We're a cowboy culture," Dr. Wurzelmann says. "There's a deeply ingrained and continuously reinforced belief that our strength derives from eating cows. What it comes down to is that eating beef is seen as having a lot to do with masculinity."
But that's where taking control of your own lifestyle comes in. Here's how to do it.

Remember what it's all about. The best beginning for a disease-free lifestyle is understanding the end. "You have to know why you're doing it," says Ed Burke, Ph.D., vice president of the National Strength and Conditioning Association in Colorado Springs and co-author of Getting in Shape. "If all you want is to lose five pounds to look good when you go to Jamaica on vacation, then don't bother." Instead, Dr. Burke says, think about having more energy always, about feeling stronger forever, and about losing weight and keeping it off. "Your approach should be long-term," he says. "Make it part of your life."

Keep things underwhelming. All six disease-free lifestyle elements are essential. But if you suddenly get religion and resolve to change your diet, lose weight, start exercising, and quit smoking on day one, you're going to be overwhelmed. "You can fail miserably if you try to do too much at one time," Dr. Glynn says. "It should be a sequence of lifestyle changes rather than one big one."
The slow-but-sure approach works best for any individual lifestyle element, too. "You can't run a half-hour if you've never walked around the block," Dr. Bortz says. "Take small steps of mastery."

Rewire yourself. For weight loss, gradual and steady progress isn't just easier. It's what works. You didn't gain the weight in two weeks, so you can't lose it healthfully in that amount of time either. You have to learn new behaviors. "Once you got fat, the eating center of your brain became fixed on that," Dr. Bortz says. "If you starve yourself and lose 20 pounds in two weeks, you haven't had time to rewire your brain."
Hence, you haven't accomplished much, and you're probably going to gain the weight back. "Short-term enthusiasm is wonderful, but until you get your behavior reprogrammed, your long-term results are going to be poor," Dr. Bortz says.

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GENERAL HEALTH

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