It's all well and good for me to say you should exercise more. But what should you do? How should you do it? Where and when and how often? Those are the questions this article will answer. Choosing the right exercise means developing a balanced weekly activity routine that suits your lifestyle, circumstances, preferences, and abilities.

The right exercise for you

Putting more activity into your life is a matter of talking it a step at a time. It's unrealistic and unsafe to expect to go from couch potato to weekend warrior in a day, a week, or even a month. If you start off with something that is beyond your level of fitness, the chances are great that will become discouraged and stop.

The wong way I have a friend who was a cross-country runner in high school. In the intervening 40 years, he's shifted his extracurricular activity to reading gourmet cookbooks and eating the results of his research. Every once in a while, he decides he really should get some exercise, so he laces up his running shoes and runs for a mile. He comes home panting and sweating, lamenting that a mile just seems a lot longer than it used to. And that's the end of running until the next time. . . a month or more down the road. What he is doing is both foolish and dangerous. But you know that.

The right way Another friend of mine had done little exercise for years when she decided she was looking pudgy and feeling low­energy. She joined a gym and started going to beginner-level exercise classes twice a week. On the days she did not take a class, she used the treadmill at 2 mph for 30 minutes and then did a training-machine circuit, using the lowest possible weights.

She told me that at first there were exercises she simply could not do. Double crunches, for example, put an impossible strain on her back. And there were others she could do, but not for as many reps as the instructor counted out. But she hung in there, doing as much as she could.

To her amazement and delight, she found she was gradually able to do more. As her abdominal muscles got stronger, so did her back. Double crunches were possible, though she still could not do as many as other people in the class. She increased her speed on the treadmill, getting up to 3 mph at a slight incline. She increased the weights on the training machines. Before long, she stopped feeling like the newest kid on the block. She did it the right way, and the results were obvious.

How fit are you? (revisited)

Take out your weight-loss notebook and turn to the part of your personal database that you filled out while doing the self­assessment in Chapter How fit are you. Review your answers to the lifestyle activity quiz. If anything has changed, revise it.

If it's been a while since you filled out this section, take the strength, endurance, and flexibility yardstick tests again, and enter any changes into your database. If you took one of the online fitness tests, you might want to do it again, and enter any changes in your database.

The entries you now have in your personal database are what experts call your baseline, where you were when you began. As you become more active, you will be able to measure yourself against this baseline and see how much your fitness level has improved.

Your fitness level will improve as you begin to exercise more.

What seems to be just too hard may become just hard enough. And in time, what's enough will seem easy.