Reply to John Cloud’s TIME Magazine article, “Why Exercise Won’t Make You Thin”

(here’s the link to the article: http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1914857-1,00.html)

We read Mr. Cloud’s article with interest and chuckled a bit at his tongue-in-cheek humor. His article makes for good reading, but we must caution – reading his article may make you fat!

Mr. Cloud reports on research published in the journal PLoS ONE (Public Library of Science). Mr. Cloud is neither a scientist nor a clinician – he is a journalist. While the information he is reporting on may be valid, the conclusions he draws may be inaccurate, and the message misleading.

1. “Exercise won’t make you thin” – This statement is inaccurate because it’s an over-generalization. It depends on who’s exercising, what kind of exercise, for how long, and at what intensity. The study Mr. Cloud is reporting on only looked at 72, 136 or 194 minutes of cardiovascular exercise per week over six months (at most 28 minutes of exercise per day). And the study only looked at previously sedentary, overweight or obese postmenopausal women – a group that has an especially tough time losing weight. Even if the results of the study are valid, the results can’t be generalized to the statement “exercise won’t make you thin.”
2. “In general, for weight loss, exercise is pretty useless” – attributed to Dr. Eric Ravussin, this statement is also over-generalized and misleading. While it’s possible the quotation was taken out of context, the message is that people who are trying to lose weight don’t need to or shouldn’t exercise. This kind of reporting is irresponsible and potentially harmful. What about exercise to prevent further weight gain? Or exercise to maintain after successful weight loss? The health benefits of exercise for preventing cardiovascular disease, improving bone health, muscle strength, and brain function are well documented and woefully under-reported in Mr. Cloud’s article.
3. “You would have been better off sitting on the sofa knitting” – it’s hard to believe Mr. Cloud could make this statement without stabbing pains of guilt. The day sitting on the sofa knitting is better for you than a 20-minute run is probably the same day a pepperoni pizza or cheeseburger is healthier for you than fish and a salad.
4. “Self-control is like a muscle – it weakens each day after you use it” – We don’t really understand this statement, but it certainly makes adopting better habits seem futile. It suggests that the more often you make healthy choices the harder it becomes every day. We wonder what coaches or mentors who teach discipline think of this reasoning. Let’s ask Jack LaLanne or Phil Jackson if they believe self control weakens after you use it.
5. And finally… “Be warned: Fiery spurts of vigorous exercise could lead to weight gain” – Be warned – reading and believing Mr. Cloud’s article could lead to weight gain. We suspect Mr. Cloud is using the media to vent his own frustrations and cravings. The only foods mentioned in his article are the following: Italian desserts, doughnuts, French fries, muffins, butter, sports drinks, greasy burrito, bag of chips, fast food, pizza, and a blueberry bar… oh, and yes, a salad.

But let’s not miss the value of what medical research is actually telling us. Exercise alone does not produce weight loss. It must be accompanied by an enduring change in food choices and eating patterns. Without changing the way we eat, exercise only makes us fitter, not thinner. The health benefits of exercise and physical fitness are also conferred to those who are overweight or obese; it’s even more important to be fit if you’re fat. Physical activity should be a routine part of everyone’s life – including being more active during daily activities, during leisure activities and adding exercise training to improve our fitness.

Following Mr. Church’s tongue-in-cheek advice of sitting on the sofa knitting, avoiding vigorous exercise while eating French fries, pizza and doughnuts is a recipe for poor health, early illness, shortened lifespan, low productivity, poor self-esteem and yes, weight gain. Mr. Church can’t have his cake, and eat it, too.

Mark Liponis, MD

My recent short article in Parade (”Alternative Therapies That Really Work” generated a lot of criticism in several blogs and a fair amount of animosity that surprised me.  I think it’s a worthwhile conversation, so here are the links to a couple of those blogs if you’re interested.

Steven Salzburg’s Genomics, Evolution and Pseudoscience

Space City Skeptics

Dr. Liponis

You can read up on the latest news and health stories at parade.com.   Here are some links:

Women’s Health

The Future of Health Now

Digestive Health

8 Ways to Stay Healthy

Best of health,

Dr. Mark Liponis

It’s been said often that getting old is no picnic — but it’s better than the alternative.But getting older doesn’t have to mean feeling old. You can start feeling younger right now. This “A-ha” experience happens every day at Canyon Ranch, where people get younger before my eyes. A week of eating the right food, doing the exercise, breathing, meditating, stretching, dancing, laughing and learning causes a transformation that you can see.

First, there’s a shift in someone’s attitude — they become more positive; their outlook and their facial expression brightens. Suspicion and anxiety are replaced by a feeling of safety and hopefulness. The brighter attitude is accompanied by a lighter sense of being; a lighter step with a more graceful movement. Range of motion of joints, spine, head and neck is noticeably improved and the nagging pains of a stressful life are replaced by a satisfying mild soreness that follows the exercise of muscles that haven’t been used for a while.

Energy and mental focus improve noticeably as sleep comes easily and ends restfully. Circulation improves as well as blood pressure drops and your hands become warmer. Digestion eases as symptoms of heartburn or indigestion disappear. Muscles get stronger as weight naturally trends toward a new healthier level. These are the signs of someone getting noticeably “younger”.

The longer someone is able to stay immersed in this healthy lifestyle, the better they feel and the better they look. Invariably, people express the desire to move in and dread having to go home to the stressful grind of their day-to-day “normal” lives.

The re-experience of youth is an epiphany for many, and borders on addictive. This, I’m sure, is the reason so many people keep coming back to Canyon Ranch - to re-experience youth over again. It often makes me wonder what would happen if someone never had to leave the cocoon of health and youthfulness.

It’s taken me fourteen years to come to a full understanding of what causes this transformation, and science is finally able to explain what is actually going on inside our bodies and why this youthful transformation occurs.

The mechanism for this youthful transformation involves the immune system. In a stressful day-to-day life, your immune system is constantly activated in the “defense mode”, trying to protect you from the threats and potential dangers that abound in your environment.The army of your immune system becomes overactive — using its weapons indiscriminately and unintentionally aging you in the process.

Your immune system travels throughout every inch of your body through your bloodstream and lymphatic system. It has the ability to wage war as well as to keep the peace, and a peaceful immune system is the key mechanism to youthfulness and successful aging.

You can control your immune system. It takes its signals from its environment — what’s going on inside of you and around you. There are seven ways that you can control of your immune system, create peace in your body and have your own experience of youthfulness. Here’s a brief overview that we’ll review in more detail in our next posts:

1. Breathe: Proper breathing is the way to access the automatic functions of your body and send a peaceful message to your immune system.

2. Eat: There are three important ways to change your eating habits to help reduce the overactivity of your immune system.

3. Sleep: Your immune system requires quality sleep for repairing and recharging itself. Sleep is a learned behavior, not a birthright, so we’ll cover how to improve the quality of your sleep.

4. Dance:The best way to exercise your immune system is with dancing, rhythmic movement. Salsa, swing, tango or boogie-woogie are great, but you can also add music to your usual workouts to improve their effect on your immune system and aging.

5. Love: Humans are social creatures that require deep emotional connections for optimal health. Touch, loving, laughing and connectedness foster a feeling of peace in your immune system that improves your health and youthfulness.

6. Soothe: Create a soothing environment around yourself by adding cut flowers, soft lighting, photographs of loved ones and your favorite art. Play soothing music and have beautiful smells surrounding you.

7. Enhance: There are many natural herbs and vitamins that have the ability to enhance your immune function.

Next post we’ll begin to get into detail about the specifics of each of these seven steps and how you can experience youthfulness again, yourself!

Yours in health,

Dr. Mark

Rachael Ray Show

In the Loop with iVillage

Are you aging faster than you’d like? Would you like to slow down, halt, or even reverse the aging process?
Most of us want to live a long, long time; we just want to stay young and healthy in the process.

Much of the efforts to attain longevity have centered on extreme measures such as starving yourself, freezing your body, storing your DNA, or hibernating much of your life away. I’d love to live to 120 in good health, but I’m not willing to make those years miserable.

So what’s the best course of action? Do we have to wait until some pharmaceutical comes up with a longevity pill, or invest in freezing our brains, or just hope we don’t die before we grow old?

Good news: I believe science will provide some bona fide longevity breakthroughs in our lifetime–and the betting is that these breakthroughs will involve the immune system.

So far, every disease that kills people has been found to have a direct link with the immune system. Heart attacks are caused by white blood cells making plaques in our arteries rupture; cancer only kills people if it can evade our immune system; microscopic examination of the brain of Alzheimer’s patients shows the immune system actively involved in gobbling up neurons; arthritis is caused by the immune system directly attacking our joints.

Our immune system plays the central role in every single fatal disease. If we can take control of our immune system, we can avoid these diseases, and die at a very old age after a lifetime of great health.

If you think of your immune system as an army with billions upon billions of soldiers – each soldier (white blood cell) is armed with WMD – weapons of mass destruction.  These ‘soldiers’ have powerful weapons to be able to enable them to kill invaders that threaten our survival.  The problem is that when our immune system uses these weapons indiscriminately, the result is collateral damage that harms our bodies.  To prevent this damage we need to learn how to control our immune system – creating a truce for lasting peace.

Controlling our immune system doesn’t involve freezing or starving.  The key to having a calm immune system that isn’t attacking us is to create a calm and peaceful environment both inside and around our bodies that allows our immune system to let down its defenses.

Answer the following questions:
Did you grow up with a pet?
Were you born in the spring?
Did you floss your teeth today?
Did you make somebody laugh today?
Have you had a massage in the past month?
Do you often sing, hum, or tap your foot?
Do you love to go dancing?
Do you have at least one loving relationship?
Have you broken a sweat exercising in the past 24 hours?
Did you weigh between 7 and 10 pounds at birth?
Do you have older siblings?
Are your hips bigger than your belly?
Have you made love in the past week?
Do you eat more than 3 times a day?
Do you take a vitamin?
Did you sleep well last night?

If you answered “yes” to all of these questions, you’re well on your way to having a healthy immune system.

As a practicing physician of more than twenty years, I have long witnessed what happens to most people as they grow old. As a result, I used to dread aging.  The prospect of facing the seemingly inevitable scenario of becoming feeble, forgetful, feeling sick, taking medications and making frequent doctors’ visits was not something I looked forward to.
Worse, most of my colleagues in modern medicine had come to define this aging process as normal. But over the years, several things have changed my mind about the prospect.
First, I’ve learned that getting older and aging are not synonymous.  I do want to get older; I just don’t want to lose anything in the process.  I’d like to keep my strength, flexibility, energy, vitality and mental acuity.   Many of my patients have taught me that losing those is not the inevitable result of getting older.
More importantly, I have also learned that all of us have control over our aging process.  We can control how quickly we age.
Yes!  You heard me.  You can do this by managing your immune system–because it turns out that all of the unwanted changes of aging have been revealed to originate from an overactive immune system.  The same defense system that protects us early in life from dangerous infections later turns on us and causes damage to our organs–blood vessels, brain, heart, glands, joints, etc.  The damage to our body caused by our own immune system accumulates over time as aging–the loss of bodily function.
This means that once you understand how to manage your immune system, you do not have to age the way others do.  You can avoid cancer, diabetes, stroke, Alzheimer’s, and so many other diseases which medical science now realizes are caused or aggravated by an overactive immune system.
I came to this realization slowly in my career, learning from my own patients.  The more I practiced, the more I encountered examples of what I’d consider to be ultra-successful aging; patients who were pushing 100 years old, and who had minds that were sharp and fit–and bodies not far behind. What, I wondered, made them so successful at aging?  Repeatedly, I found that each and every shining example of successful aging revealed markers of healthy immune function, without immune hyperactivity.

Two years of research have since helped me to learn how we can gain control over our immune system and prevent it from damaging our bodies and aging us prematurely.   I’ve written what I’ve learned in UltraLongevity – The Seven-Step Program for a Younger, Healthier You  (Little Brown September 2007).

I don’t believe I would have realized this if I had continued working in emergency rooms and intensive care units.  There, almost everybody has an overactive immune system.  My understanding of the immune system came only after my own career shifted from the typical Western medicine of treating disease to the wellness environment of Canyon Ranch, where I’ve worked for the past fourteen years.
Canyon Ranch medicine centers on prevention, health improvement, optimal health and successful aging.  Of course, we also diagnose and manage disease, but our focus is wellness and helping clients feel the very best they possibly can.
The experience of working with people who take an active role in their health has been eye opening and has changed my expectations of what optimal health can be at any age.
It has also dispelled some of my preconceived notions and prevailing myths about health and aging. For example, like most people, I once believed that your genes had the most powerful effect on your health, and by looking at your parents you had a good idea of where you were headed, health-wise. But I’ve now seen so many examples of people avoiding  “genetic destiny” by adopting healthier lifestyles than their parents that I no longer believe in genetic pre-determinism.
The past fourteen years have given me a new insight into the power of both the human body and the human spirit, and when both are aligned I’ve seen nearly miraculous results that have made me question the conventional wisdom I was taught in medical school. Since then, I’ve learned from my patients that not everything I was taught is necessarily true.

Are you healthy? Really? How do you know? How can you be sure there’s no little cluster of mutant cells growing silently into a tumor somewhere inside your body? How do you know there’s no silent plaque in one of your arteries ready to rupture and cause a heart attack or a stroke? Or a slow buildup of plaque in your brain that might turn those ‘senior moments’ into bona fide Alzheimer’s disease in 10, 20 or 30 years?

Doctors and scientists keep inventing stronger and more precise scanners – CAT scans, MRI scans and PET scans to try and see even smaller defects inside of us. Should each of us get a whole body scan every year? What if it finds something deep inside of us? What can we do – have surgery? What if the scans don’t catch it in time? Or what if they catch it too early and we have needless surgery?

Believe me, these questions are not trivial and they are becoming more and more relevant as medical science, technology and costs advance faster than our ability to understand what they mean or how to pay for them.

But once again, nature trumps technology. Our bodies are a lot smarter than a computer or the scanners used to peer inside us. Our bodies know if and when we’re sick years, if not decades before symptoms alert us to a problem. The wisdom of your miraculous body knows everything that’s going on inside of you long before any scanner possibly could.

To find out if you’re healthy, really healthy, you just have to ask your body.

Of course you need to know how to ask, and how to interpret the answer.

In the miraculous creation of the human body, we were all born with a built-in diagnostic and early detection system just like your modern car’s computerized diagnostics. Your diagnostic system is your immune system – billions upon billions of microscopic cells traveling through every crevice of your body on surveillance for any disruption.

In UltraLongevity you will learn how to harness the power of your immune system to treat and prevent disease as well as to promote health and longevity. I’ll post more soon and I hope you enjoy and get healthier by reading my book.

Medical director of the world-famous Canyon Ranch Health Resorts, Dr. Mark Liponis presents his extraordinary new idea: that aging and aging-related diseases—including heart disease, cancer, and diabetes—are autoimmune problems, and that a well-managed immune system is the key to healthy aging.

Cutting-edge research makes UltraLongevity the first and only book to explore aging within the context of the immune system, and it will change the way we look at health forever. Starting with a quiz—”How Fast Are You Aging?” [CLICK HERE TO TAKE THE ONLINE QUIZ]—Liponis explains the new science, lays out an accessible and proven 7-step program with an 8-day meal plan, and motivates readers to put the program into practice so that they can keep their minds sharp, become more physically fit, be more resistant to infections and disease, and feel and stay younger than they ever imagined. Through the UltraLongevity program, Liponis promises more than a long life; he promises a long, healthy life.