Combined Exercise & Diet Is Best Approach for Longevity

To achieve and maintain health, most of us consider exercise “or” eating right.  Stanford University School of Medicine researchers submit that changing exercise and diet at the same time gives a bigger boost than tackling them sequentially. They also found that focusing on changing diet first — an approach that many weight-loss programs advocate — may actually interfere with establishing a consistent exercise routine.   Abby C. King and colleagues split 200 initially inactive participants, ages 45 and older and with suboptimal diets, into four different groups. Each group received a different kind of telephone coaching. The first group learned to make changes to diet and exercise at the same time. The second group learned to make dietary changes first and didn’t try changing their exercise habits until a few months later. The third group reversed that order and learned to change exercise habits before adding healthy dietary advice. The fourth group, for comparison, did not make any dietary or exercise changes, but was taught stress-management techniques. Researchers tracked participants’ progress in all four groups for a year.  Despite the challenge of making multiple changes to their already-busy routines at once, those who began changing diet and exercise habits at the same time were most likely to meet national guidelines for exercise — 150 minutes per week — and nutrition — five to nine servings of fruit and vegetables daily, and keeping calories from saturated fats at 10 percent or less of their total intake.  Those who started with exercise first did a good job of meeting both the exercise and diet goals, though not quite as good as those who focused on diet and exercise simultaneously. The participants who started with diet first did a good job meeting the dietary goals but didn’t meet their exercise goals, suggesting” a possible behavioral suppression effect of early dietary intervention on [physical activity] that merits investigation.”