Exercise as Treatment for Obesity and Deteriorating Mental Health

Finally, when both my knees began consuming themselves with arthritis, I went for help. Exercise was the answer. But I am preternaturally lazy. If I had an exercise bicycle it would become a clothes rack in no time, even with the possibility of live spin classes. I had to be pushed. Physical challenges always failed me unless under the relentless thumb of a coach. And I always avoided coaches. I was both too dreamy and too energized by thoughts, by activities that occurred in some mental field, not an outdoor playing field.My sons were, perhaps in blind reaction, the opposite. One liked team sports — soccer, basketball, baseball — the other took to martial arts and body building.The benefits of exercise are many: stronger bones to ward off breaks from falls; better muscle tone; weight control; moderation of depressed mood; decreased risk of heart disease; increased resistance to type 2 diabetes. It should be an easy sell for health club memberships.But exercise takes time and requires a sustained commitment, two things readily dispatched by job schedules, commuting times, family responsibilities, and the natural tendency in all of us to postpone delayed gratifications for some indefinite future time. And with weight gain, a now epidemic problem in America, the body betrays its own welfare. As obesity sets in changes occur that may become irreversible. These changes involve brain function, both mood regulation and cognition.The drive to exercise decreases as body mass index (the fatness profile) increases. Not just because added weight makes for physical laziness or that fatness induces shame before others in a gym. It's a cognitive-affective brain change induced by metabolic, generalized inflammatory responses to even mild obesity. Fatness becomes a mental disorder.Exercise may be a little key to ultimate longevity but it may unlock some of the mechanism that ages the brain. Exercise seems to forestall the cognition dissolution of dementia..Compelling data arguing for the beneficial role of exercise is piling in. Need one say more?.

"Recalcitrance is perhaps the final frontier for all of us."

.Pleasure is perhaps the best inducement. Exercise feels good. A trim body looks good. Good muscular tone allow one to enjoy long walks and creates a sense of aliveness. Energy to sustain a hard work or play day is good for the living, breathing soul. Of course, these are elements of healthy youth. But youth passes eventually. And without exercise that well-being of one's twenties passes even quicker.We are most of us living longer. Coronary stents, knee and hip replacements, medications to control high blood pressure and elevated cholesterol, cataract repair, hearing aids — all of the appurtenances for prolonging life and promoting a better quality of aging life do not hold up well in a flabby, irresilient, exercise deficient body.With age the pleasure principle endowed by sustained exercise only increases. It helps offset attributes we sometimes abhor: loss of hair, sexual laxity, wrinkles and skin sags, nocturnal urination, recall delays, poor balance, hearing and visual impairment.Besides physical exercise, aging responds remarkably well to brain exercise. I began studying the piano three years ago and was truly surprised that after a year I felt much sharper. Recall was quicker, memories seemed more readily accessible, remembering came faster; I sensed a general mental quickness. I just seemed smarter.Still, despite all the good stuff exercise will provide and all the good feeling it would induce, human inertia stands in our way. Both internal and circumstantial, that inertia can seem insurmountable.  Recalcitrance is perhaps the final frontier for all of us. René Descartes put it down right: the separation of mind and body, of will and action, both drive and disrupt intention. Exercise is a mental idea, a strategy, a plan, while the body languishes in its own disinterested domain. We all need a push, a shove, an incentive.One exercise incentivizing stratagem can be traced back to the ancient Greeks. The gymnasium, training ground for the warriors of that warrior nation, was also the center for education and for acquiring moral principles. Doing it as a group, as a dedicated community, provided the necessary push.We have somewhat recreated that in today's health club with its various exercise classes and its stands of weights and equipment. Groups like Tai Chi allow for programs of exercise that promote sustained participation because of that same community affiliation and beneficent group pressure. Military training operates by the same principle, somewhat accelerated and often oppressive.Perhaps a lesson can be found in Tai chi which has removed the aggressive and defensive thrust of its movement vocabulary and turned the exercise toward self-healing.Exercise should be just that. An ongoing process for each of us — to heal our selves.