From Jan. 8 through Feb. 5, sign up by visiting the heart association's website or calling 1-800-AHA-USA1 - and you'll get up to 12 recorded "wake-up call" from actress Jane Seymour, singer Vanessa Williams, "Wheel of Fortune" letter-turner Vanna White, sportscaster and former Pittsburgh Steeler Jerome Bettis, and Subway spokesman Jared Fogle.
In addition, you can use the heart association's online fitness and nutrition tracker to enter what foods you eat each day, how much exercise you got, and how many calories you took in and burned.
Working too long, exercising too little
Health experts blame the lack of exercise as one reason why 65 percent of Americans - about 195 million people - are overweight and at higher risk for diabetes, heart problems, high blood pressure, stroke and cancer.
To compound the problems, Americans are generally working 164 more hours than they did 20 years ago, and many of those jobs are sedentary in which people move hardly any at all, association leaders said.
But Dr. Raymond Gibbons, the association's president and a professor at the Mayo Clinic College of Medicine in Rochester, Minn., said you can gain two hours of life expectancy for each hour of regular exercise.
Four benefits of walkingBrisk walking for 30 minutes a day can:
Source: American Heart Association• Lower your level of LDL "bad" cholesterol;
• Lower your high blood pressure;
• Help overweight people lose weight and maintain the loss;
• Reduce risk of strokes.
Focus on walking because it has the lowest dropout rate of any exercise, plus it's the cheapest.
Cheers,
Eve :-)
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