Exercise

Until her first breakdown, Pat was trim and active, even playing on the volleyball team in college. But deep scars on her forearms attest to a lifetime of self-abuse. Pat, 53, grew sedentary, obese and reclusive. She said she has been hospitalized 25 times. "The sicker I got, and the more doped up I became, the more I tended to become isolated," she said. This year, Pat enrolled in a program here called In Shape, designed to provide regular structured exercise for people with mental illness.

As we enter the season of the year in which Americans typically gain at least a pound or two that never goes away, a new report from the Gallup Poll finds that as our actual weight drifts upward, so do our perceptions of what our "ideal" weight would be.  In Gallup's annual Health and Healthcare Survey , the nation's leading polling organization has asked Americans yearly how much they weigh and what their ideal weight would be. Compared to...

Dozens of studies have reported a link between exercise and lowered blood pressure: Some have found reductions of up to 10 mm Hg (systolic) and 6 to 10 mm Hg (diastolic) blood pressure units in people who already have hypertension. In general, reductions are not as great for people with blood pressure in the normal range: A Belgian review of scores of studies found that for people with high blood pressure, average reductions from exercise were 6.9 mm Hg systolic and 4.9 mm Hg diastolic, and for participants who did not have high blood pressure, only 1.9 mm Hg and 1.6 mm Hg. Age seems to matter.

As a nation, we are obviously getting fatter and fatter. Not only are we ever more confused about how to lose weight, we're particularly fuzzy on the question of how big a role exercise plays and whether we just have to count calories. So, here's the deal. Yes, you can count calories or weigh yourself every day. If your weight is up today compared with yesterday, you ate more calories than you burned. If it's less, you burned more than you ate -- provided you didn't drink gallons of liquid the day before, which could throw the scale off. It comes down to simple arithmetic, and you've heard it before: Calories in, calories out. You will absolutely, inevitably, sadly, this-could-not-be-clearer gain weight if you eat more calories than you expend in basic metabolism -- breathing, digesting, sleeping, etc. -- plus whatever else you do, such as chasing the kids, walking, vacuuming or going to the gym. But most of us can't, or won't, do the math, probably because it's so depressing.

Exercising 15 minutes a day provides health benefits, a study finds , good news to those who are always strapped for time. The study, which appeared in the journal the Lancet this week, found that doing 15 minutes of leisure time physical activity was linked with an average three added years of life expectancy, along with a 10% decrease in cancer mortality and a 20% drop in cardiovascular disease, compared with sedentary people. So now that we have the good news, just what can you do in 15 minutes?

Save time and increase the intensity of your workouts by performing an upper body exercise and a lower body exercise at the same time. The combo move here will tighten and tone the fronts of your arms and the backs of your legs. Hold a dumbbell in each hand and stand over your right leg with your left leg pointed behind you. Lift your chest and pull your abs in toward your spine. Look straight ahead, and maintain your balance over your right leg as you contract your biceps (the muscles in the front of your arms)

Exercising for just 15 minutes most days of the week - about half as much time as doctors in most countries recommend - appears to provide health benefits, Taiwanese researchers reported Monday in the journal Lancet. In most countries, doctors recommend 150 minutes of exercise a week. Dr. Chi-Pang Wen of the National Health Research Institutes and China Medical University Hospital and Jackson Pui Man Wai of the National Taiwan Sport University sought to learn if less activity than that would also make a difference.

Perhaps you've noticed you're less likely to forget where you parked your car after a brisk tennis match than after a trip to the library. There's a reason for that, says a new study: in healthy seniors and those with emerging memory problems, even a single brief bout of vigorous exercise and the release of norepinephrine that comes with it can enhance memory of what came just before it. The phenomenon is one of evolution's cleverest memory-enhancing tricks:...

Regarding "Scientists Have a Good Feeling About Exercise" (May 12), the writer talked about the benefits that exercise can have on helping people deal with depression. The most important thing is that the person doing these activities finds them to be enjoyable. The person should not be doing such activities out of obligation to the doctor who may be prescribing this method of treatment. James Miyasato Santa Barbara