Ultimate Fitness: The Quest for Truth about Exercise and Health

It is important to simplify the NCEP guidelines for lowering cholesterol. The guidelines advise TLC first. That sets the patient up for failure. There is no diet that will consistently keep weight off for 10 years in the majority of people. We don't know what we are talking about when it comes to dieting, yet we put the responsibility on the patient to lose weight. Three items in the news demonstrate our ignorance in weight loss: 1- Jeffrey Gordon: A change in bacteria in the intestine makes it easier to gain weight and more difficult to lose weight 2- Interleukin Genetics Inc. under the name Inherent Health sells a test for $149 to determine if your patient should be on a low carb diet or a low carb and low fat diet. 3- Jerry Heindel is an expert in Endocrine Disrupting Chemicals (EDC's). These chemicals disrupt our weight thermostat. The fat epidemic is not explained totally by video games and corn syrup in fast food. It reminds me of how we treated HIV with one drug. Later we realized we did the wrong thing as it allowed resistance to develop in those patients. If NCEP is evidenced based, lets leave diet and exercise out of it for now. I am reading Ultimate Fitness by Gina Kolata. The history of exercise advice from physicians over the years is very interesting. Exercise was popular before the depression and then it seemed silly to people. Ken Cooper, George Sheehan and Jim Fixx helped make it popular again. In 1960 if you jogged in the street, the police thought you stole something. 50 years later I look at my water aerobics class with other old folks and think we have come a long way. The message about losing weight and exercise is already out there. Don't waste three months waiting to see if the patient will do it when a physician prescribes it. I would be upset as a patient to pay for an office visit to be told what I learned in the first grade. I have to pay for another visit to start meds? If there was a diet that guaranteed permanent weight loss without staying in a semi-starvation state I would definitely put that at the head of the list of guidelines. There isn't one. We are asking patients to do what is impossible. As for exercise, I learned while studying for the boards that weight loss maintenance requires 60 to 90 minutes of exercise a day. I lost 80 pounds and exercised 150 minutes a day and still have gained back 50 pounds. As to weight and exercise advice, do we really know what we are talking about? I look at our history of advice and I wonder. p230: Claude Bouchard is quoted as stating that "weight lifting has virtually no effect on resting metabolism. The reason is that any added muscle is miniscule compared with the total amount of skeletal muscle in the body. And the muscle has very low metabolic rate while at rest, which is most of the time. Skeletal muscle burns about 13 calories per kg of body weight over 24 hours when a person is at rest. A typical man who weighs 70 kg has about 28 k

I listened to this as an audiobook and then (since the audiobook is abridged) bought it to see what else I missed. Kolata mixes a story of her own hard-core spinning workouts with lots of fitness myth debunkings. I liked the debunking better than the spinning, but the spinning did tie the whole thing together. Some things I learned--the "heart rates" that everyone learns (220 minus your age) are really more of an estimate and not that scientific, weight lifting won't dramatically increase your bmr (though it is worthwhile for other reasons), and muscles differ so that some people will be better at endurance and others better at strength. I learned how scientists go about researching fitness topics. And I also learned a little bit about what it must be like to be an exercise buff. I disagree with one of the other reviewers who felt that Kolata doesn't stress the importance of exercise enough. She is clearly a hard-core exerciser who believes that most people would be better off doing more than the oft-prescribed after-dinner stroll. But she also acknowledges that some exercise is always better than no exercise at all. I don't see how this book, which is all about exercise, could possibly give the impression that exercise didn't matter. I laughed out loud at the last "heart waves" mention (and that's all I'm going to reveal here--you'll have to read the book for yourself to get the joke).

In this book Gina Kolata ties together her personal experiences as someone with a lifelong interest in fitness with information about the state-of-the-art today. If you want to know what is a fad and what is proven, what the leading researchers are looking into and what they are finding, this is the book for you. With information on topics including strength training, supplements, & general conditioning, this is a book for anyone interested in separating the lore from the facts in an oft-confusing area.

This is probably the only book you'll need if you want to find out the reasons behind getting and staying fit. This is not a "how to" book- if you read the subtitle you will see that clearly! It is, however, the ultimate "why" book on fitness. The author explores her own interest in fitness (somewhat extreme IMHO!) and from there explains the origins of running/jogging and explodes a large number of myths and "old wives' tales" on fitness- some of these even my fitness instructors did not know about. She also links the various aspects of fitness together with heart rates, health, fat burning as well as weaving in a elegant description of body building and how that links to fitness. All through the book is the underlying thread of the author's own quest for ultimate fitness. A fine read and one highly recommended not only to anyone who exercises for fun, for health or for a better looking body, but also to everyone who has a vague interest in the subject.

This is an excellent book about the science that underlies the guidelines and advice that permeate the field of physical fitness. There are several ways to judge a book and three of them that apply to this book are its readability, new information, and insight. Gina Kolata writes clearly and does an excellent job mixing history, journalism, science, and personal experience. The book provides great information about the origins of many beliefs about fitness and how they have changed over time. It also shows how ambiguous modern knowledge about fitness really is. Finally, the book provides insight into things such as why some people are exercise junkies and other quit after a couple of months, why some people experience exercise euphoria and others don't, and the simple fact that bodies respond differently to exercise. The chapter regarding the fitness industry was revealing in a manner similar to Schlosser's Fast Food Nation and the chapters regarding the "Mt. Everest spinning event" were engrossing enough to make me skip my evening run.