Perform moderate, regular exercise three to six times per week.
Regulate aerobic and anaerobic exercises to your age, health, and tolerance level.
Aerobic: brisk walking thirty minutes, jogging twenty-five minutes, swimming twenty minutes, formal exercise program in aerobics classes.
Mixed aerobic and anaerobic: running, tennis, exercise equipment (stationary cycle, StairMaster, treadmill, NordicTrack, newer, low-impact workout machines).
Before you lift weights, start with at least twenty minutes of aerobic or anaerobic cardiovascular fitness exercise (any of the options listed above).
Yoga and related exercises are excellent for mobility but burn few calories.
Keep a regular routine: don’t overexert one week and become a couch potato the next.
Stop if breathing difficulty or palpitations or faintness develops.
The bottom line is that proper diet and exercise make up the fundamental foundations of a sound program to prevent memory loss due to the aging process.
CHAPTER 6
Train Your Brain to Remember
Never Stop Learning
In the mid-1990s, a professor at one of my alma maters, the National Institute of Mental Health and Neurosciences in Bangalore, India, planted himself at my doorstep in New York. He was on a trip to
Rio de Janeiro for an international conference and had arranged an “essential, educational ” detour in North America before proceeding south. During his stay with me, he observed various facets of our
department at Columbia University in action. Before he left for Rio, he summarized his New York experience.
“Here in America, you people keep learning all the time. From your interns and residents all the way to your senior faculty at the top. In India, we are just as good as the people in the United States at the stage when we finish residency training, but we tend to stop learning after we get a permanent faculty position. Your learning curve is a straight line that keeps going up, whereas ours climbs early on but then slows down and completely levels off. That is why you have accomplished so much more than your former classmates, who were just as good as you were, until you left and came to the States.”
Taken From: The Memory Program How to Prevent Memory Loss
and Enhance Memory Power
