Meditate, Exercise, and Step on the Scale
6:30 A.M.: Meditate
Meditation sets the stage for good health habits throughout the day. "It's probably the best thing anyone can do because it teaches you to inhabit the body from the inside out," says Anna Douglas, PhD, who has taught vipassana meditation at the Spirit Rock Meditation Center, in Woodacre, California, for 20 years.
By training us to focus on moment-to-moment living, meditation helps us make better health decisions all day long, such as whether to down that vanilla bean Frappuccino with whipped cream or walk home from work the long way. If we sit in meditation 20 minutes a day, we are more likely to make choices consciously, says Sharon Salzberg, cofounder of the Insight Meditation Society, in Barre, Massachusetts, and creator of the new book-CD set Unplug. "We're more in touch with our motivations, our desires, our fears," she explains. Good-bye, Diet Sprite; hello, mineral water with lime. And, Salzberg says, the health rituals that spring from personal insight are the ones most likely to endure.
If you're skeptical of these ethereal pluses, consider that meditation has health benefits in its own right. It can help relieve stress, decrease chronic pain, and improve sleep. Over the past several years, brain imaging studies of people who practiced either insight meditation or Zen meditation revealed an increased thickness in their brain's cortex, a physical change that may protect them from cognitive decline as they age.
7:00 A.M.: Exercise
"It's as close to a magic bullet as we've come in modern medicine," Manson says. A 2008 study in the Archives of Internal Medicine found that people of all ages who are physically active in their leisure time actually slow down the aging process; on average, the cells of sedentary individuals are 10 years older, biologically, than those of their active peers. And a study of people over 60 in the Journal of the American Medical Association this past year noted that, regardless of weight, those who exercised regularly had greater longevity than did inactive people.
You know the drill: at least 30 minutes of moderate exercise five or more days a week. What's moderate? Enough that your heartbeat accelerates but you can still carry on a conversation. (And you don't have to do the 30 minutes in one go; you can do several short sessions during the course of the day.) Also, twice a week perform eight to 10 strength training exercises, with 10 to 15 repetitions of each exercise, says the American College of Sports Medicine. Keep yoga in your weekly rotation too. "It teaches you not to be afraid of pushing your limits. You're feeling the edge of pain but not collapsing under it and looking for a Tylenol," Douglas says. "You actually learn to stay there and breathe and be present with it. That's incredibly empowering, the capacity to not be afraid of what the body is going to do as it gets older."
7:30 A.M.: Weigh and measure yourself -- but don't do it again for another week or two
Manson recommends that women weigh themselves regularly, though not obsessively. The goal is to catch those extra five pounds before they become 10 or 15. As a study in the February issue of The Lancet reported, being obese or overweight can increase one's risk of developing as many as a dozen types of cancer.
"The best thing a woman can do is get a tape measure and measure her waist, close to the navel. As it gets toward 30, 31 inches, that's a warning signal," Manson says. Above that figure, she cautions, you substantially raise your risk of high blood pressure, heart disease, insulin disorders, and several forms of cancer.
