Your healthy diet and exercise program should be designed around the concept of sustainability. This means that you want a program you can maintain comfortably for an extended time so that the effects you see from your program are not temporary. Furthermore, your program needs to be created with your individuality in mind; exercise and diet aren't a one-size-fits-all concept. Many factors including genetics and current health status play a large role in determining how diet and exercise will affect you.
Healthy Exercise
The exercise you commit yourself to should be centered around your capabilities. Think about your experience and physical condition and begin your program design in that manner. In general, the American College of Sports Medicine recommends that two days of full-body strength training per week combined with three to five days of cardiovascular exercise per week is the minimum exercise that you need to be healthy. However, this should only be a blueprint to start and should be modified to your goals as you proceed.
Healthy Diet
Your diet needs to incorporate fats, proteins, and carbohydrates. The Mayo Clinic generally recommends that fats be 20 percent to 35 percent of your diet, carbohydrates 45 percent to 65 percent, and proteins 10 percent to 35 percent. Of course, these proportions can be changed depending on your physical conditioning and the type and amount of exercise you are participating in. However, the consumption of all three metabolic substrates will enable you to properly prepare, execute, and recover from exercise and daily activity.
Adherence
Your program can only elicit benefits to you if you adhere to it with diligence. Healthy results can only be obtained through modest and deliberate changes to your body, and dramatic and excessive changes are going to be temporary and generally unhealthy for your body. For example, the journal "Kinesiology" states that a kilogram of body fat is equivalent to 7,830 calories; if you were to try to lose that in one or two days, you would be putting your health in jeopardy. Expending that amount of calories over one to two weeks can be deemed healthy weight loss that may be sustainable.
Modify
The way your body responds to diet and exercise is through healthy stress that stimulates changes to occur. Consequently, you can't continue to exercise the same way for years and expect that your body will respond to the same exercises. You need to change your exercise program variables every two to four weeks to constantly provide that "overload" stimuli. The result will be adaptive changes specific to the exercise stress that your program elicits.
Effects
The benefits you set yourself up to see based on a maintainable, progressive, and individualized diet and exercise program includes both disease prevention and aesthetic effects. The journals "Journal of the International Society of Sports Nutrition," "Circulation," "Kinesiology," and "Obesity" show healthy diet and exercise practices can be effective in improving body composition, decreasing cardiovascular disease risk, improving muscle strength/size/endurance, decreasing heart attack risk and weight loss.
References
- "Kinesiology"; How Effective is Exercise in Producing Fat Loss?; K.T. Borer.; 2008
- "Obesity"; Exercise, Abdominal Obesity, Skeletal Muscle, and Metabolic Risk: Evidence for a Dose Response; C.A. Slentz et al.; 2009
- American College of Sports Medicine
- "Journal of the International Society of Sports Nutrition"; ISSN exercise & sport nutrition review: research & recommendations; R.B. Kreider et al.; 2010
- "Circulation"; Treatment of Hypertension in the Prevention and Management of Ischemic Heart Disease; C. Rosendorff et al.; May 2007
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