The Happy Body

Highlights

• # The Happy Body by Aniela and Jerzy Gregorek
• Athletes focus on what they do, not on how they look, although beauty comes along anyway.
• THE SIX PRIMARY QUALITIES OF YOUTHFULNESS 1. Flexibility 2. Strength 3. Speed 4. Leanness 5. Ideal Body Weight 6. Good Posture
• Ironically, to achieve flexibility, strength, and speed, one need only focus on speed, and the other two will result automatically. That is because in order to become faster at any movement, one must increase one’s elasticity and one’s strength.
• “If you follow my program, you will feel better in about 3-6 months. In about a year, you will look in the mirror and notice that you look better. And if you stay with it, you will be in the best shape of your life in 2-3 years.”
• Saving yourself from falling depends on the fast reactions of your brain, nervous system, and muscles. In older people, this brain reaction is delayed by a split second which is enough to increase their incidence of falls.
• The Overhead Squat Press, which is the safest exercise for developing speed, will train you to accelerate your reactions and to prevent them from ever slowing down. It will do this by increasing the number of your fast-twitch muscle fibers and the volume of hormones in your brain.
• Athletes, dancers, and bodybuilders all aim to increase the size of their muscles, but athletes and dancers become strong, fast, and agile by aiming for an optimally efficient muscle size, whereas bodybuilders become weak, slow, and awkward by aiming for ever-bigger muscles, which become increasingly inefficient.
• Leanness is the optimal percentage of fat to muscle.
• Jerzy feels the most balanced at 10 percent body fat,
• 10 percent should be the leanness standard for men, and 13 percent for women,
• Whatever your food triggers are, you must avoid them totally, like an alcoholic.
• Eating properly is a 24-hour-a-day business because losing or maintaining weight is actually harder than overcoming alcoholism. Once alcoholics take that first drink, they are lost — but they can refrain from taking that drink in the first place. With food addicts, however, there is no option to give up eating.
• If you eat a single excess apple a day you will gain fifteen pounds of fat in a year.
• If you eat until you are full, your stomach will expand beyond its normal size. That will slow the process of mixing food inside the stomach, thereby slowing digestion. If your digestion slows, your metabolism slows down with it, making you tired and sleepy.
• Most people think of exercise as a way of burning calories. If they eat too much on the weekend, they figure they can burn it off on Monday. This belief about exercise is a total misconception. First of all, it could take one to two hours just to burn off the calories from one bagel
• all interval exercises make us better by increasing our youthfulness, and all endurance exercises make us worse by contributing to our hardening and aging process.
• The truth is that both interval and endurance exercises have cardiovascular benefits, but the former has them without the side effects of exhaustion, inflammation, and musculoskeletal degeneration. In fact, interval exercises are better for the heart than endurance exercises because the range between the highest and the lowest number of heartbeats is far greater, and therefore the muscles of the heart are made stronger.
• During the part of the day when we are not running or working, we recover in three basic ways: proper exercise, proper nutrition, and relaxation.
• people can gain, at best, 10% of their Ideal Body Weight in muscle every year.
• The Happy Body program, we use lavender oil and Jules Massenet’s “Meditation from Thais” (specifically, the version performed by the Budapest Philharmonic Orchestra) to relax our clients after they have completed their exercise routines (Figure 5.1).
• how do you know how much to perform and how much to rest? The easiest way is to observe how you feel when you wake up in the morning. If you get out of bed feeling excited about the day and eager to accomplish things, you are fine. But if you get out of bed without enthusiasm and energy for the day, your life is out of balance.
• A simple way to estimate the correct amount of calories in food for lunch or dinner is to use your own hand as a guide. If you need to lose weight, eat the volume of one of your hands in protein and two of your hands in vegetables. If you need to maintain your weight, eat the volume of one and a half of your hands in protein and three of your hands in vegetables. If you need to gain weight, eat the volume of two of your hands in protein and four of your hands in vegetables. (Vegetables include any salad you may eat at lunch or dinner plus the vegetables that accompany the entrée.) For snacks, you can slice bars by
• If you would like to drink alcohol, don’t eat any vegetables or anything else aside from protein. Avoid sweet alcoholic drinks, such as cocktails. The best alcoholic beverages are vodka, tequilla, cognac, and whiskey.
• If you are at a restaurant, do not look at the menu, because menus are designed to stimulate your appetite. Decide before you go whether you want to eat animal or plant protein. Ask the server what choices they have, select the one that is consistent with The Happy Body food plan.
• Always follow the percentages given for every exercise, even if any of the exercises seem too easy, because that will only prove that your body is out of balance.