First a couple of words about running. I am the last one who should say this, but please, please be very careful with any running program. It can be very hard on your legs. If you are in your 40s, you can look as a 20s, you can have the skin, the heart the lung of a 20s, but your LEGS are always minimum as old as you. Every 20 lbs excess weight gives 10 + years to the age of your legs. So even if you are in your 20s, you can have 50-60s legs! Regardless of you high school sprinter past.
No, I do not talk against running, I started it at 46, and having great success. BUT I spent three months to reach that 30 min jog. I lost 8 lbs in the first month almost only from walking. Then 7 lbs from mostly walking. When I started to run 5 miles I had only 10 lbs overweight. Despite of this very careful slow approach, (rest days, slowly increasing time, distance, excellent shoes, help from experienced runners) I spent weeks icing my legs every evening. (Though fortunately nothing serious.)
About intellectual life vs exercise. Let me mention another possbility. Somebody is a "gym/exercise rat" exactly because of his/her very intensive intellectual life. I have a computer scientist husband, two science PhD students kids. They all are exercise rats. My husband needs the sunrise run every day to hande the 10-12 hours in front of his computer during the day. My daughter spends 10 hours in the Physics lab, science library, then she always heads to the universtity athletic center to exercise 60-90 min. (And forgive her Frederick, but she - with other grad students somehow prefer trashy magazines during exercise over scientific/medical/law/business magazines.) My son spending a night in the observatory heads for a 6-8 hours hike every Friday-Saturday-Sunday.
About weight loss. The problem with exercise, that your body accustoms to any exercise very fast, working more efficiently, burning less and less calories. If the different running calculations were right I would have been melted away completely already. As I mentioned, when I WALKED 30 min I lost 2 lbs/week. Running was new for my body, and this helped to speed up my metablism. But when I started to RUN 30+ miles a week (10+miles long run on every Saturday) I lost less than 1/2 lbs/week with the SAME diet.
I agree: chose something that you ENJOY. Anything. Do it because you feel better, to improve your healt, not solely because of it's more or less affect on your weight loss.
Last edited by Galadriell : Tue, Feb-03-04 at 08:15.
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