Exercise: Have your cake and eat it!

We have all heard the benefits of exercise for long term health: reduce risk of heart disease, certain cancers, type 2 diabetes, stroke, and the list goes on. But let’s be honest the immediate gratification of sitting on couch with a bag of potato chips a large ice cold pop and vegetating out for a couple hours while watching a marathon of Pawn Stars seems a lot more enticing. Here in lies the challenge we face every day: the immediate gratification of poor health choices over long term benefits of exercising.

We live in a mostly immediate gratification society here in America. If I want to watch a good movie I can go to the Movie Theater and pick from 12 different flicks each having 3 or 4 different times to pick from. If I want a bigger selection and don’t want to wait for the times it is offered, I can go to the video rental store and pick from 100’s of titles. Heck I don’t even have to go out of my house or worry the movie I want is being rented by someone else; I can just get Netflix and have the movie delivered instantly right to my TV. I don’t even need to be tied to my TV to watch the movie I can get it on my phone and go where ever I want and still get the movie I want when I want it. Now that is instant gratification at its best.

So we can see that we are used to instant gratification and benefits from the things we do these days and exercise doesn’t seem to fit into that category, so no wonder we like to skip past it. But actually it does give us some instant benefits!

Immediately following your 30 minute walk (or whatever form of exercise you choose) you will start to experience some very enjoyable effects to your body and brain. You will produce an increase in the “happy” neurotransmitters serotonin and dopamine. These neurotransmitters will improve your mood and reward/pleasure centers of the brain and reduce stress and anxiety feelings you may have. Insulin sensitivity improves so your muscle cells take in glucose (the energy molecule your body uses) floating through the blood stream. This makes your pancreas (what produces insulin) happy since it doesn’t have to work as hard to produce as much insulin (the chemical that allows for the absorption of glucose into the muscle cells). You will also get an increase in HDL-cholesterol, which is the good cholesterol that we want. You will see a reduction in blood pressure immediately following your exercise bout. Heck even your bowels will move better after you exercise.

So if immediate gratification is what you like, then exercise may be just the thing you need instead of being a couch potato and eating junk food. Immediate and long term benefits with exercise, how cool is that. Maybe I can have my cake and eat it too, as long as that cake comes in the form of exercise.