Exercise is really the best medicine - motivation to continue

I have first written about struggle with high blood pressure in October 2005, about how the doctor wanted to put me on hypertension medication. I told the doctor, if I start taking those medicine, I may have to take them for life, and that I wanted to try exercise and diet first. I did and eventually the doctor told me he would not even consider me as pre-hypertensive.

Since then, my blood pressure have been fluctuating around the normal 120/88. Recently I have started an exercise regime of the following daily ritual - 5-10 minutes of warm up on the recumbent bike and 30 minutes of brisk walking on the threadmill at a rate which is close to the maximum heart rate for my age group.

The results were the measured heart rate were consistently below the normal 80/120. For example, I just measured with the heart rate and it was only 110/70

As such, I believe exercise was the best medicine for maintaining a healthy heart rate and for cardiovascular health.

However, exercise may be dull and monotonous and my motivation to continue is

1. exercise in step to the beat of a nice song or music
2. keep in mind that exercise keeps away hypertension and other cardiovascular problems, diabetes and cancer. Image those horrible medicine I would have to otherwise take if not for exercise.

Natural Remedy for prostate cancer

Researchers at the University of California San Francisco have found that men recently diagnosed with localised prostate cancer (meaning it has not started to spread) can slow down the disease by taking BRISK WALKS (note the emphasis) as they also found that just strolling does not help. So can brisk walks be a natural remedy for localized prostate cancer?

Some possibility of how that works - it had been suggested that perhaps brisk walks affect prostate cancer progression by changing blood levels of some proteins that have been shown to encourage cancer growth.

Now for some disclaimers:

1. It is possible that their results may just be because those who participate in brisk walking may be just living a healthier lifestyle such as not smoking, healthy diet, etc. rather than a direct connection and further studies may be needed

2. Those who have not previously exercise regularly should first consult their doctors before setting out to do rigorous exercises.

Whatever it is, this is another confirmation that exercise is the best medicine and I am going to restart my regular brisk walking although I have not yet been diagnosed with prostate cancer plus for for other studies that showed screening for prostate cancer need not necessarily have a higher survival rate.