Book Description Review “Readers looking for an impetus to start exercising will find it in this accessible and well-organized book … the plethora of sources Foreman includes is a testament to her depth of research. Foreman’s primer will be both educational and deeply motivational for the aspiring fitness enthusiast.” — Publisher’s Weekly Read more About the Author Judy Foreman is a nationally syndicated health columnist who has won more than 50 journalism awards and whose columns have appeared regularly in the Boston Globe, Los Angeles Times, Dallas Morning News, Baltimore Sun, and other national and international outlets. She graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Wellesley College, served in the Peace Corps in Brazil for three years, and received a Master’s degree from the Harvard Graduate School of Education. From 2000 to 2001, she was a Fellow in Medical Ethics at Harvard Medical School. She has been a Lecturer on Medicine at Harvard Medical School, a Knight Science Journalism Fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and a Senior Fellow at the Schuster Institute for Investigative Journalism at Brandeis University. She has also been the host of a weekly, call-in radio show on Healthtalk.com. She has won more than 50 journalism awards, including a George Foster Peabody award for co-writing a video documentary about a young woman dying of breast cancer, and she is author of A Nation in Pain: Healing our Biggest Health Problem (Oxford, 2014) and The Global Pain Crisis: What Everyone Needs to Know (Oxford, 2017). Read more Customers Review: What a great read! This book is meticulously researched and written in a fun, relatable way- totally accessible. At the end of this book I feel like I have a great understanding of how exercise helps the different systems of the body. This information is a great motivator to keep it up for a lifetime!
Exercise is Medicine is an amazing combination of useful advice about the value of exercise and a clear and comprehensible discussion of the science underlying this advice. For those confronting aging, as all humans do, this highly readable book is full of good ideas about how exercise can help with a range of physical problems including obesity and cancer. But it is also a book based on serious science, which is explained carefully and clearly. The book is valuable whether or not you choose to master the scientific evidence. Even if you don’t, the author clearly shows that she knows her stuff and is basing her arguments on many, many research studies. A must read!Sally Engle Merry
I’m a big fan of exercise science, so I wasn’t sure if I would learn anything new in this book. But it’s so well-researched and easy to read that I read the whole thing in three days, and learned so much in the process. She really digs into the science behind the benefits of exercise, and has lots of interviews from researchers, which I love. But you can also skim or skip those paragraphs and still learn how to optimize your exercise to be healthier and happier. Even a little bit gives you big benefits, it turns out.The book is organized well, so you can target the chapters that you’re most interested in, or read straight through. Everything you need to know to make the decision about how to read it is in the introduction. I especially like the stories of the feats of older athletes. Some of them didn’t even start exercising until late in life, and still see huge health gains. There are also weird facts throughout – like that muscles produce hormones, and why reproducing later in life has generally led to healthier people. I really enjoyed reading this book and highly recommend it for anyone who is interested in the only real “magic pill” for health and happiness.
Ever since I heard a story of a man whose depression was lifted by taking up jogging, I have wondered what could go on in the body to make that happen. This and many other questions were answered in Judy Foreman’s book, Exercise as Medicine: “How Physical Activity Boosts Health and Slows Aging.” The author explores what happens as the body ages, and relates it to the miraculous influence of exercise. Then, chapter by chapter, she tackles various parts of the body and explores what changes.“Exercise is the closest thing there is to a magic bullet for preventing disease and disability, maximizing health, and prolonging life.” “Even running slowly for just 5 to 10 minutes a day is linked to a lower risk of death from all causes.”Why? How? In cutting edge times, there are labs that have intricate ways of peering into the tiniest of molecules, and researchers who document their real life effects on real people. Foreman has collected the evidence for us in a narrative style that explains scientific jargon in understandable terms.We evolved to be active. But yikes, who knew—- “Indeed, a sedentary lifestyle is now confirmed to be a stronger predictor of premature death than obesity, diabetes, high cholesterol, high blood pressure, and smoking.” (Chapter 3, “Sitting Kills”)Exercise gets “fat, muscles, the brain, virtually all our organs, to ‘talk’ to each other biochemically.” Muscles are “hormone factories” that communicate chemically to bones. Exercise cranks up the process of making new mitochondria, the power factories inside our cells. Numerous positive effects on the brain are documented. The book explores the relationship of exercise to our microbiome, the microbes that share our body.The author considers the work about immunity and inflammation one of the most important in the book. She also explores how scientists are trying to create a pill that imitates the effects of exercise. A long chapter is devoted to answering commonly asked questions.My original interest in the depressed jogger was rewarded with a lot of new scientific findings about molecules with long technical names, like endorphins, endocannabinoids, and brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF). “Overall, the evidence is overwhelming that exercise is an excellent treatment for depression, that it is often as effective as antidepressant medications and that it works synergistically at the molecular level as an adjunct to medications.”You won’t see TV ads for exercise, but I came away from this book convinced that if you want something that helps most any condition, is free, and doesn’t have side effects—-EXERCISE AS MEDICINE is it!
The real-life stories in Mrs. Foreman’s book were so inspiring. The facts well documented. Reading this book gave me such an inspiration to start regular exercise. I keep the book sitting on my desk as a reminder. Every now and then I open it back up and read a few of the passages I’ve highlighted as a refresher!
Ms. Foreman’s book on the importance of exercise is a must read — as a lover of all things active, I learned so much from this book. Exercise is Medicine not only broke down the scientific benefits of exercise to all parts of one’s body/health (brain, bones, heart, etc.) in a lay-friendly manner, but also provided light-hearted, funny anecdotes and examples along the way! Would highly recommend! |
6 reviews