Get Strong Lifelong
Three hours a week
to gain muscle,
lose fat,
and stay healthy
for life.
By Sanjoy Dutta, M.D.
Acknowledgements
I dedicate this to my wonderful wife, my two daughters, my parents, my sister, and my friends. All of them give me every reason to live longer and cherish each day.
And to my patients and coworkers, who have helped me grow as both a doctor and a person.
A Request
Promotion and marketing and social media are not my strengths.
So, if you find this book useful, and worth the small investment, please
WRITE A REVIEW on Amazon and recommend it to someone you know.
Would also love to hear your own experience and modifications on
Amazon or Facebook (www.facebook.com/getstronglifelong)
Worksheets are posted on the Facebook site.
Table of Contents
Introduction: Is this book for you?
Do you want to be stronger, healthier, and feel better than ever?
Do you want to be the best physical and emotional version of yourself?
Do you want to prevent diseases that could shorten your life?
Do you want an exercise and diet program that is realistic, practical, and works?
Then this book is for you.
Exercise and a healthy diet help prevent many life shortening diseases such as heart disease, diabetes, dementia, and even cancer. The COVID 19 pandemic has shown us that people with poorer health are even more likely to die from infection. Doctors will always stress the importance of getting healthy, but they dont really tell people how to actually get there. And most exercise and diet programs require an unrealistic amount of time and commitment.
Being healthy, fit, and strong lifelong is easier than you think. This book will tell you what you can do to dramatically improve your health and fitness in a realistic, practical, time efficient, and achievable way. It requires awareness and some willpower, but you can actually be much more successful than you realize by setting aside just a few hours a week for exercise and making very small adjustments to your diet over time. This book is about choosing the right exercises, improving your understanding of what you eat, carefully measuring your progress, and making micro adjustments to stay successful over a long period of time. Hopefully for life.
If you want to be the healthiest you have been in years and look like it, this book will get you there if:
You can set aside about 3 hours a week (total) for exercise most weeks.
You are willing to increase your awareness about how you eat, and willing to start making some straightforward easy to remember changes for the rest of your life.
You are willing to measure your progress and make small adjustments as needed.
This book will provide you with a concrete exercise program and guidelines about how to choose food. But rather than just tell you what to do, the aim of this book is to help you understand how your body physically responds to exercise and food. You can then apply that knowledge to modify and adjust the program provided, to best fit your body, your schedule, and your lifestyle. You DO NOT have to devote unrealistic hours in the gym or follow ridiculous diets with too many rules. That is because the recommendations in this book are based on time tested well accepted honest science and medical knowledge rather than poorly designed science, or hot of the press fad science that has not been proven consistently. By understanding how the average human body responds to different types of exercise and food choices, eventually you will learn how your specific body responds to these changes. By closely measuring your progress, you will learn what works best for you. EVENTUALLY YOU MAKE THE RULES. This knowledge will give you the flexibility to design a program that meets your goals not just for a few weeks or months, but for the rest of your life.
The recommendations in this book can be used by any adult, man or woman, trying to get healthier and in better physical shape. However, much of my research has been motivated by my own personal interest and experience. I have researched studies on both men and women, and just men, but not studies on just women. Therefore, I would say the main target audience for this book is men like me: Men of any age who want to work towards their best health ever, do not want to spend useless hours in the gym, and do not want to go on fad impossible to follow diets. This does not mean the information cannot be used by women, but I want to be honest about the fact that due to hormonal differences, there are differences in how men and women respond to diet and exercise, and that my research on womens responses is not as thorough as it should be.
I am a husband, father, and surgeon in my 50s who has been trying different fitness and diet routines since my 20s. I am also a weight loss surgeon who has spent my career helping people understand how their bodies truly respond to exercise and food, and how to avoid being fooled by the TONS of false information created by people trying to promote their latest fad diet or program or product. There have been periods in my life where I have been able to exercise every day and other periods where I did not exercise for months. Between work and family, it is very difficult to commit to a predictable exercise routine and make progress. After many years of researching different programs, online advice, and the latest exercise and nutrition research, I learned which trainers had the best recommendations, which exercises were the most effective, and which food choices were the most critical. I learned how to make significant progress while still saving time and working around my unpredictable schedule. I feel stronger, more active, and happier in my 50s than I did in my 20s and 30s.
Dont Join the 0.1%
Most of the information on the internet about exercise and diet is overwhelming and confusing. Most of the articles and recommendations are often written by trainers or fitness buffs who seem to be in incredible shape. Many of their recommendations will tell you that you are going to have to be obsessive about food, focused, spend hours in the gym, schedule your life around your workouts, and essentially put the rest of your life on hold. Most of these programs are geared to getting into superhero shape. You have to become the stereotypical gym rat and ultra-healthy eater. Why? Because thats what most of these trainers and bodybuilders do. For them, this is their full-time job. Almost all of the programs and regimens and videos and websites are designed by men and women who spend most of their waking hours working out and then trying to somehow make a living out of it. Fitness magazines will convince you that you have to try a new workout regimen every month to keep up. How else would they sell magazines?
If you are like most average people, you have other priorities in life: raising a family, maintaining a home, working probably more than 40 hours a week and perhaps commuting several hours on top of that, paying bills, dealing with illnesses and crises, and hopefully occasionally doing something fun here and there. You are a person with real responsibilities and a real life. So, when you have precious and limited time, your goal should not be to look shredded or ripped or buffed or jacked. Your goal is to simply look athletic, be stronger, be healthier, and live longer.
If you plot the amount of effort needed vs the actual improvements you make, you can easily guess that the more effort you put, the greater improvements you will see. However, after a certain point, you have to put in a tremendous amount of work into your program to get that superhero or performance athlete look. Your goal should be to get into that zone where you can get as much improvement as possible with as little work as possible. In the graph below, you are going to aim to put just enough work to be in that athletic and strong zone that leads to more functional health and a potentially longer life.