Hi. We are here in the studio after the lecture and we are going to have a short conversation with Dr. Hicks. First of all, thank you so much for giving this very inspiring and great lecture. I'm proud. I was a very good student. I was taking notes during the lecture, so I have some questions for you. The first question that I have is about a student who was in your lecture, who was in the class, and this student had never exercised. The student is not active. How do they start? Where is a good place to start? What should they do? It's a good question. I think the best way to start, the easiest way to start is first, plan to walk more. If you can't, it'd be nice to have a heart rate monitor, but maybe not everybody can afford a heart rate monitor so if you can't afford a heart rate monitor, you can give a watch and you touch your neck right up here. You can count your heartbeats for 15 seconds multiplied by four, you get your heart rate. Because what you want to do is try to get your heart rate up to about 60 percent of your maximum heart rate. Your maximum heart rate is 220 minus your age and multiply that by 0.6, and that'll give you your target heart rate. You can get it to 60 percent of your max heart rate walking, it's a brisk walk, that's called moderate activity. Start doing that first. Because if you haven't been exercising, your joints aren't used to the movement, your muscles aren't used to the activity. When I actually started getting back, being laid off from exercise for a while, I've advised climbing the academic ladder and it got behind. I got back into exercise. I'd actually start off by walking and just increase that. Then I cycle now , and then start riding after I had walked for a while. I think walking is the best way to start getting active again. As you get in better shape, you'll feel that. Then start maybe jogging or swimming. I think this would apply any adult? I think to any adult walking. Walking is incredibly powerful way of improving your health. A brisk walk. Not a stroll, but a brisk walk. Get that heart rate to 60 percent of your max and that's a good way to do it. I have some friends asking me if window shopping is considered walking. That's a stroll. The key is heart rate, because the heart rate is an indicator of the metabolic demands of the muscles. There's something magic about that 60-70 percent of your max rate, which provides all these positive benefits. That is the result of these compounds that are released from the muscles. That's why if you monitor the heart rate, that's a good way to get a sense of, is this exercise going to be really helpful or not? Just reviewing the numbers, so 220 minus your age. If I'm a 20 year-old student, 220 minus 20, that's 200, and I multiply the 200 by 0.7. 0.7 will give you 70 percent, 0.6, 60 percent, 0.8, 80 percent. 0.7 would be? From 50 to almost 70 is considered moderate activity, 70-85 is vigorous. That's how you can determine. If you do vigorous activity, you don't have to exercise as long as compared to, if you do moderate activity. That's actually something that we can do hopefully. Yes, that's something you can easily do. Five days a week for about 20 minutes of vigorous activity? Yes. Okay. It's the perfect way to do it. I just hope that we do it. The other question that I have was actually this is something that I had experienced myself that you said exercise by itself doesn't make you lose weight. But then we have studies and data suggesting that if you exercise for, let's say 45 minutes vigorously, you're going to be in ketosis. We all know that when you're in ketosis you lose fat. Right. Is it safe to say that if I like to eat the food that I eat and I keep the food consumption constant, but I add 45 minutes of exercising five times a week, I would lose weight? That part I would agree that you would lose weight. What I meant in the lecture was that just exercise alone without changing other aspects of behavior, and that is eating behavior, is not necessarily a good way to lose weight because when we exercise and we burn more energy, our body actually tries to compensate by increasing our appetite and so we eat more over time. If you make a conscious decision not to eat more, just maintain what you've been eating and start burning energy through exercise, then you will lose weight. But one of the things that we do, is just, we tend to really over estimate our exhaustion level and we underestimate the amount of calories that we take in every day. If you take somebody out and say, "Hey, I just ran for 20 minutes," and you're all sweating and your heart's beating really hard, men, that was a big workout. Well, in 20 minutes, you probably burnt 300 calories and a snicker's bar is 250 calories, an apple's a 100 calories. But you may have thought to yourself, "Well, I actually burned a 1000 calories in 20 minutes," but you didn't. We over-estimate our exertion and underestimate our caloric intake. That is very true. That's a common problem. I think that's why people who log what they eat, isn't a very effective way to help manage weight because they're logging exactly what they're eating. They really are keeping track of their calories. But exercise is a good way, contributes to weight management though. It's not just about losing weight but managing your weight, because people tend to gain weight as they age, and if you walk regularly, if you jog or cycle regularly, you're burning calories. Again, if you make a conscious effort to watch what you're eating or just eat or you've been eating, those excess calories being burned through exercise will help manage your weight. Okay. Thank you. I was very intrigued with the slides and discussion you had on our muscles secreting interleukin 6 and those other cytokines. Now, we are looking at muscle as an endocrine organ. We also know that, for instance, the adipose tissue can also be an endocrine organ. During your lecture, I was thinking about when you're under stress, because the stress has become an epidemic on college, campuses, and pretty much everybody. Everybody's stressed. If you're stressed and you're exercising and your muscles are secreting those myokines, how are they going to interact? Because you're stressed, your cortisol levels are high and then you're exercising and you're secreting myokines? In general, aerobic physical activity tends to reduce stress levels. So people that are feeling under stress, actually by being engaged in some physical activity can help reduce that. Now exactly how certain myokines interact with stress hormones, I'm not sure off at the top of my head, I have to look that up myself, quite honestly. But I do know that stress is generally reduced through physical activity. This issue of myokines, as I said in my lecture, has just changed in the entire field. This is a major discovery of all the compounds that are released, that have influence on adipose tissue, bone, the GI tract, the liver, the kidneys, the brain. This is a game changer and we start to see the positive benefits of these myokines on human physiology and on health and how we are actually alter disease trajectories, we don't know everything about them yet, but we know that they are a big game changer. I have one last question. You are talking to college students, and if I'm a college student, one of the incentive that I have to get involved in anything is how it can help me academically. So if I'm a student, I want to increase my GPA. You talked about how exercise can improve memory and cognition. If I'm a student who only likes to exercise, hopefully I'm not, hopefully, we want to exercise for other reasons, but if I just want to improve my memory and cognition and improve my GPA, what is your prescription for exercise? I would go with the prescription of the American College of Sports Medicine and a 150 minutes of moderate exercise per week, 75 minutes of vigorous exercise, you start to see the benefits over time. Those benefits on the brain as we discussed, are increased cognitive performance, increased memory. These compounds that are released stimulate the production of a compound of the brain called brain-derived neurotrophic factor, and that actually causes neurogenesis. You build more neurons, synaptogenesis, better connections, and there's been studies after studies now showing improved cognitive performance with aerobic physical activity. The American College of Sports Medicine has a nice book. I'm not promoting that book per se, but I'm say is a nice book called Exercise Prescription, and for everything that you can think of in terms of your illness or health, they prescribe exactly the exercise. But the basic rule of thumb is 150 minutes of moderate activity, 75 minutes of vigorous activity, if you don't have time for the 150 minutes a week. One hundred and fifty minutes can be extended up to 300 minutes. Anything beyond that, you're not gaining anything else out of them, except maybe some endurance, but the health benefits, they're all in that range. I promise this is my last question, timing of the exercise. Is it better to exercise in the morning or in the evening? Because some students tell me that I can only go to the gym at 11 o'clock at night. That's so anytime I have. If you ask me, I just went to a seminar where that was discussed on the defects for circadian rhythm on exercise. The bottom line was, anytime is a good time to exercise. If you do exercise late at night, what ends up happening when you do exercise, you do induce a fight or flight response and so you might not be able to fall asleep as easily, if you do late at night. So you go to the gym 11 o'clock at night, you may be up till two or three in the morning. Maybe that's why students need to do to stay up instead of taking Ritalin. If they go and exercise, you'll get a significant catecholamine release that will help you stay awake. But exercise anytime is better than no exercise at all. Well, thank you so much. I appreciate it. Thank you so much for listening to us.
