Sal Daher, CFA discusses the role of exercise in his keeping off 100 pounds of body weigh with no drugs and no surgery, just good habits for eating, exercising and sleeping. Listen for tips and for encouragement on building your exercise plan.
Morning walk on the banks of the Urumea, San Sebastián – Donostia
Highlights:
Why Exercise?
How Much Exercise Do I need?
Don’t Get Overly Ambitious – Start Slowly but Build Steadily
Within Safe Limits Do Try to Get Out of Your Comfort Zone – Here’s Why
Think You Can’t Exercise? Listen to These Stories Then, Tell Me You Can’t Exercise
No Financial Stake in HMR, Just Immense Gratitude for How Much They Have Helped Me
It Matters When You Exercise
Short Bouts Build Up
Do a Variety of Exercises
Zone 2 / Zone 5 Training
Exercise Has an Unexpected Side Effect for Me
I’ve Never Regretted Exercising
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Transcript of “Exercise and Weight”
Guest: Sal Daher
Hi, I’m Sal Daher. I took off and am keeping off 100 pounds without drugs and without surgery. I rely exclusively on healthy habits for eating, exercising and sleeping.
This is the third in a series of podcasts I’m doing on my weight loss. The series started with my daughter interviewing me about my weight loss titled “Losing 100 Pounds” and was followed by an episode titled “Sal’s Diet” together with a mini episode titled “Sal’s Travel Diet”. This series will eventually be capped by an interview with my outstanding diet coach, Jina Klapisch. The purpose of this series is to say to people who need to lose weight: “Yes, it’s hard, but it can be done. It just requires your putting your mind to it”.
I’m not a trainer, I’m a professional investor, but my weight loss has me so involved with exercise that I have the convert’s missionary zeal. Talking and writing about it also helps reinforce my identity as a person managing his weight. I hope some of the things I learned in my life-long struggle with weight will help you.
Why Exercise?
The benefits of exercise are so numerous that when I try to list them all I always miss several important ones.
Let’s start with cardiac fitness. Exercise promotes fitness, which makes life more enjoyable while you’re young, and together with diet and control of blood lipids, extends the time in your life when you are healthy, so called “healthspan”. Heart disease is the biggest killer. Exercise is the best antidote to heart disease and related maladies. I might repeat this for emphasis.
Here’s my list which will invariably be incomplete:
Exercise lowers you blood pressure.
Exercise builds muscle
Exercise builds balance
Exercise helps people resist diabetes
Exercise helps you sleep better.
Exercise improves your mood.
Exercise improves your immune system
Exercise can build bone density
Exercise is, counterintuitively, good for your joints
Exercise can improve cognitive function and may stave off Alzheimer’s
Exercise helps you live longer
Well, Peter Attia, M.D. in Chapter 11 of his excellent book Outlive: The Science and Art of Longevity answers the “why” question really well:
“More than any other tactical domain we discuss in this book, exercise has the power to determine how you will live out the rest of your life. There are reams of data supporting the notion that even a fairly minimal amount of exercise can lengthen your life by several years. It delays the onset of chronic diseases, pretty much across the board, but it is also amazingly effective at extending and improving healthspan. Not only does it reverse physical decline, which I suppose is somewhat obvious, but it can slow or reverse cognitive decline as well.”
How Much Exercise Do I need?
Many people think of exercise as an item on a list to check off and go on to more important things. This is expressed in the question: “How much exercise do I need?” I think this leads to undervaluing exercise because it’s not a binary thing. Dose dependence is involved.
The largest benefits from exercise do come when you go from being completely inactive to doing modest exercise as mentioned in the quote from Outlive. However, the more you exercise the more your health benefits with no upper bound. So perhaps the question should be: “How much heart disease do I want?”.
587-day steak of walking more than 10,000 steps, frequently, way more
That may seem to be a facetious question but it’s not. Consider that heart disease is the biggest cause of death for adults. It builds slowly and can be highly influenced by exercise. The effects of exercise on the health of the heart and the circulatory system are very well established. So, exercise satisficers should ask themselves: “How much heart disease do I want?”
For women the question might be: ”How much osteoporosis do I want?” Women are particularly susceptible to this debilitating and dangerous condition. Strength building exercise can be helpful in slowing bone loss. This is hugely important for quality of life, particularly since women live longer than men. It dawned on me that I should never help my wife with her luggage so she can get the muscle and bone-building benefits of carrying weights. Maybe I should have her carry my bags too…just joking!
But, seriously now, looking at exercise through this lens creates a mindset of maximization rather than satisficing. It pushes us to always be looking for opportunities to build our fitness. But you may well reply: “Exercise will take over my life, I won’t be able to do anything else.” and you would be right to a certain extent. Exercise will take time, but we adjust.
For example, I’ve made a commitment to walking at least 10,000 steps per day, which is an arbitrary goal, however it keeps me committed to exercise. As I record this It’s been 584 days since I walked fewer than 10,000 steps in a day. Over that time, I have made adjustments to my routine so I can get the steps in and still work on my startups, on my buildings and on the podcast.
I make a habit of taking in-person meetings at coffee houses (avoiding lunches saves calories) that are about a mile from my house. Since I walk so much, I walk fast and hardly break a sweat. My walking now takes about 70 minutes of my day, but I can take calls when I’m walking and I can learn stuff by listening to podcasts or recorded books. I’ve adapted. I’ll bet you could figure out some higher level of exercise that works in your life.
The result is: that I still get the same work done (or perhaps more, because of the added energy) but I hardly sit around and watch TV any more. Not a bad trade.
BTW, I also spend about 90 minutes per week on muscle-building exercises like pushups, chin-ups and free weights. I do some of the exercises Peter Attia recommends but I need to do more because I want less heart disease and more cognition in my future.
Don’t Get Overly Ambitious – Start Slowly but Build Steadily
My exercise routines were not developed overnight. I have built them up on a base of some physical activity. I have always been more physically active than the average person though not nearly enough to get my weight down to healthy levels. It bears repeating that unless you are an elite athlete you are unlikely to achieve ideal body weight by exercise alone. But exercise stands by itself as massively effective in improving your health.
My point is that it does not matter so much where you are starting, but that you are building your exercise steadily. You could eventually get to a level of activity that will astonish you. It’s just a matter of working on it.
While you’re out walking, or riding the elliptical cross-trainer, listen to a recorded version of Atomic Habits by James Clear. It will give you really actionable techniques to create and reinforce good habits in all areas of your life including exercise.
Within Safe Limits Do Try to Get Out of Your Comfort Zone – Here’s Why
In his book Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise the late K. Anders Ericsson, PhD relates a study done on the leg muscles of frogs made to twitch artificially at different rates. The study found that up to a certain level of effort of the muscle, recovery was mediated by a set of genes that aim at repairing and maintaining. When the effort went beyond this threshold, a different set of genes were expressed and led to growth of the muscle fibers. This explains the dynamic of training beyond one’s comfort range, that’s where growth is to be found.
Ericsson was not an exercise physiologist, rather he was a psychologist focused on training and expertise. His book is well worth reading because it conveys the well-founded notion that we can train ourselves to remarkable levels of expertise through what he calls “purposeful training”. You will pick up tips and encouragement on building your exercise habits.
It Matters When You Exercise
I exercise outdoors as early in the day as I can so I get early morning sunlight, which is low on skin-damaging UV light but high in sleep-and-mood-regulating blue light. Even rainy or cloudy days can provide significant sunlight. I try to minimize my exercise in the evenings to avoid getting too revved up before bedtime, though I occasionally find myself taking leisurely strolls around the block to make my 10,000-step minimum.
Another advantage of front-loading exercise is that it increases the chances of it getting done.
BTW, when traveling to Europe from the US you lose five or six hours in a day so that means getting steps in over a shorter period. My wife and I recently walked a mile between terminals at Heathrow Airport rather than take the shuttle. That unreasonable choice helped me make my minimum that day.
Short Bouts Build Up
Another trick to getting in a lot of exercise is that doing many short bouts in a day does add up. Don’t think of those 70 minute I spend walking as one chunk. It’s more like 15 plus 15 plus 20 plus 10 plus 10. Broken up that way it is less daunting and may even be more helpful to controlling your blood sugar, particularly if those 10-minute bouts come after meals.
Do a Variety of Exercises
In addition to walking, occasionally running, calisthenics and weights, I try to build in different exercises to keep things interesting and to broaden muscle groups addressed. Whenever I can I climb stairs. I do frog jumps with my grandkids which exercises a different set of muscles than walking. Bonus points for carrying a 32-pound grandkid while frog jumping! It’s also great for flexibility. I also enjoy swimming whenever I can. I never take the nearest parking spot; I look for the farthest.
Having a lot of exercise possibilities in your repertoire comes in handy when an injury prevents you from doing a certain type of exercise.
Find a Buddy / Join a Group
Exercise is a countercultural activity. Everything around us pushes us in the direction of being physically inactive: long hours of work, long commutes, long meetings, our car-centric lives, TV etc. To counter this unhealthy vector from the culture, try to find a subculture that encourages exercise and join it. It’s more fun that way and you’re more likely to succeed at building your exercise habits. A lot of what goes on at the HMR weekly support group is about exercise. There’s always some challenge going on to prompt people to try new types of exercise. Certain gyms are places where we can find pro-exercise subcultures. Join a cycling group or a runner’s or rower’s club. Always be on the lookout for these opportunities.
Zone 2 / Zone 5 Training
Peter Attia, based on his extensive reading of experts on exercise physiology has come to emphasize doing 80% of one’s cardio training at the Zone 2 level which is a fast walk at almost the point you want to start jogging. As he explains in Chapter 12 of Outlive, the point is to promote our body’s ability to burn fat rather than just sugars. This dual-fuel capability distinguishes athletes from the unfit who cannot power their activities with their fat stores. He recommends spending the other 20% doing interval training with spurts of Zone 5 training interspersed with slower rest periods. Zone 5 means going all out.
I derived the grandpa version of this. I organize sprint races with my grandkids and friends giving each one her or his individualized head start. Then I run all out for two, or three minutes. Take a breather and do it again.
A variation on this is when are walking somewhere with them, I’ll break into a full sprint while shouting “slow poke, slow poke”. They all inevitably break into a full run. It’s a great Zone 5 workout for me and for them. It’s also great fun.
Exercise Has an Unexpected Side Effect for Me
I find that my increased focus on exercise pays off in increased attention to controlling calories and eating healthily. When I’m exercising it’s easier to control my eating.
In fact, when I’m feeling like noshing, I go out for a brisk walk and the feeling passes. I can’t really explain it but it works for me. People imagine that exercising will make us hungry. I have not experienced that. Perhaps it is that I hydrate really well after exercising to avoid mistaking thirst for hunger.
I’ve Never Regretted Exercising
I got this one from Jina Klapisch, my diet coach, who once challenged the class to come up with a time they regretted exercising. The only example was exercising while injured. Other than that, crickets!
I hope you’ll find these thoughts useful. Consider sharing this podcast with someone who could benefit from it.
To wrap up, I’d like to emphasize the following points:
Exercise is essential to good health. There’s no more valuable intervention for improving our health long term.
Think about building your exercise habits over time. Don’t get overly ambitious at the start.
Eventually think about getting outside you comfort zone in order to grow your strength and fitness.
Start exercising early in the day.
Break your exercise into bouts.
Do moderate exercises after meals to better regulate blood sugar.
Vary your exercise.
Join a group that supports your exercise.
Consider Zone 2 / Zone 5 training
Exercise has unexpected benefits
This is Angel Invest Boston. I’m Sal Daher. Thanks for listening.