The benefits of an active lifestyle

While eating healthy is important, statistics show that daily physical activity can add years to your life. Here's how.

• The benefits of exercise are so stunning that if they could be packaged as a pill, it would be considered a miracle cure.
• Regular, moderate exercise halves your risk of heart disease and strokes over the long term, and makes you five times less likely to die from cardiovascular disease than someone whose daily routine involves no physical exertion.
• A Scottish study estimates that reducing levels of inactivity by just one percent a year for five years would, in Scotland alone, prevent 2,162 deaths from heart disease and 128 from strokes.
• Exercise can also bring benefits to people who already have heart disease. A Norwegian study that was conducted over a period of 18 years clearly indicated that both women and men with coronary disease who exercised for just half an hour each week were likely to live longer than those who did no exercise. The more exercise they did, the greater their longevity.

• When you exert yourself during exercise, your heart pumps blood through your body more efficiently, flushing out your arteries and protecting them from plaque buildup. Exercise strengthens your heart, reducing your resting pulse rate (your regular heart rate without physical exertion).
• Some athletes have a resting heart rate as low as 40 beats a minute, but if you get no exercise, your heart has to work harder — beating as many as 100 times per minute if you're really out of shape, in order to do the same thing.

• Research indicates that adopting a relatively active lifestyle, including exercise such as a 30-minute brisk walk every day, could prevent nearly a third of new cases of obesity and more than 40 per cent of new cases of diabetes, which is strongly linked to heart disease and strokes. Giving your muscles a workout makes it easier for your body to process energy in the form of blood sugar, or glucose.
• Researchers from Scotland underlined this when they found that insulin resistance in women with a high risk of diabetes dropped by 22 per cent after seven weeks on an exercise program that involved running, cycling, using a rowing machine and aerobics.

• It is no myth that exercise helps to keep you young. Studies have shown that women who stay physically active after the age of 50 are as fit as, or even more fit than, women 20 years younger who get no exercise.
• A long-term American study found that men who get in shape in middle age reduce their risk of dying in the following 20 years by almost a quarter.