What the Doctor Ordered

You started so well, vowing Jan. 1 to exercise regularly and watch your diet. You joined a gym or your local Y. You got the instructions on how to use the treadmill and the weight machines and you used them – for about a month. Then the novelty wore off but the pounds didn’t, your schedule got full and the promise you made early last month now seems conditional. By exercising regularly you meant when you could get to it and, well, you’re busy.

If this sounds familiar, join the rest of us. After the bounty of Christmas foods and celebration of New Year’s Eve, an exercise regimen started deep in winter that could improve health and looks sounded so sensible, so possible. But now it’s February and it’s hard to even think about another 30 minutes on that awful treadmill or stationary bicycle that got you seemingly nowhere.

Don’t give up. The hardest part about any exercise program is not the workout itself but getting to the gym or out the door for a hike or jog, and the hardest time to do that is right after the first excitement of the program has gone away, when the habit hasn’t become ingrained and the results of your efforts aren’t apparent to everyone else yet. It gets easier from here. The trick is to get from that original well-intentioned pledge to a lifelong exercise routine.

A recent Associated Press story offers technique and, perhaps, hope. It reported on a program at the Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center in Lebanon, N.H., in which doctors didn’t simply urge their patients to get more exercise, they prescribed specific exercises, describing to patients which trails they should hike and supplying trail maps. The story reports enthusiastic support from patients and doctors needing only a couple of extra minutes per visit to provide the information. Doctors who are specialists in obesity have been using this type of support for years, but it is reportedly new to general practitioners.

Dr. JoAnn Manson, chief of preventive medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston and a co-author of a report urging doctors to counsel patients on exercise and weight control, told the AP, “If a prescription for medication could reduce the risk of heart disease, stroke, Type 2 diabetes and osteoporosis by 40 percent, everyone would be clamoring for it. Well, a prescription for brisk walking has the potential to do just that.”

Is there a lesson in this for those of us who don’t have a doctor at hand writing exercise prescriptions? How about self-medicating – writing out not just when the next trip to the gym or hiking trails is scheduled but what specifically will get done, which exercise machines or which trail, at what time of day and for how long? It might add motivation and it certainly couldn’t hurt.