Eat less and move more — How to meet new exercise guidelines

Listen up, Americans. The government has been recommending you get 150 minutes of exercise a week for a decade now. That’s just 20 minutes a day — and not even 1 in 4 of you can handle it.

But the Department of Health and Human Services, armed with some new research on the benefits of exercise — no, not even exercise, merely “physical activity” — is prepared to offer you losers and couch potatoes a few more inducements and a shot at redemption.

On the inducement side, getting regular physical activity has now been linked to lower rates of eight different kinds of cancer, including those of the lung, kidneys and stomach. In 2008, when the first “Physical Activity Guidelines for Americans” were released, government scientists could assert only that adequate levels of physical activity helped reduce the risk for breast and colon cancer.

And that’s on top of its ability to prevent heart attacks and strokes, decrease arthritis pain, improve brain health and academic performance, and generally lift your spirits.

The new guidelines were released Monday at the annual meeting of the American Heart Association and American College of Cardiology. They were also published in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

All told, people who are physically active for approximately 150 minutes a week cut their risk of dying at any given age by one-third, compared with those who don’t exercise at all. In preventing disease and improving a person’s function across the lifespan, “only a few lifestyle choices have as large an effect on mortality as physical activity,” the JAMA report says.

Still not convinced? The government scientists warn that being a couch potato is downright dangerous, accounting for 10 percent of all premature deaths among Americans. It’s expensive too: About $117 billion in annual health care costs are incurred because of Americans’ sedentary habits.

As powerful medicine goes, “this is cheap,” said Adm. Brett P. Giroir, the assistant secretary of health who unveiled the new guidelines on Monday. After all, “the best way to reduce the cost of drugs is not to need drugs.”

BUT WAIT, there’s more. The federal government’s exercise gurus are now making it easier for couch potatoes to satisfy the recommendations for minimal levels of physical activity, which remain unchanged at 150 minutes per week of “moderate-to-vigorous aerobic activity” each week, with muscle strengthening activities on two days during the week.

It used to be that you had to get up and move around vigorously for at least 10 minutes at a time for it to count as exercise. In many minds, that’s a requirement that conjures up images of sneakers, spandex and sweat.

No worries. “All activities count,” the new federal guidelines say. “Bouts of any length contribute to the health benefits associated with the accumulated volume of physical activity.”

That means that if, during a two-hour stretch in front of the television, you were to get up from your couch during every commercial break and march up and down the stairs until your show returned … well, on average, you would have racked up an impressive 22 minutes of, let’s say, moderate physical activity per day.

In a week, that adds up to 154 minutes. Take a victory lap.

Dancing, gardening, walking the dog, marching briskly across a sprawling parking lot — all these count toward the weekly total. The new guidelines enshrine this idea in a soon-to-be-launched campaign called “Move Your Way.”

Just remember that, at its minimum, moderate-intensity activity is defined as reaching a rate of oxygen consumption (a rough surrogate for calories expended called METs, short for metabolic equivalents) that might be achieved by walking at a pace at which it would take you 20 minutes to cover a mile.

Ideally, the writers of the guidelines would like you to get in — or try to work up to — some “vigorous-intensity” activity, for which the intensity of your exercise would have to reach 6 METS or more. That includes running a mile in 10 minutes, which is a 10-MET activity and therefore easily qualifies as a vigorous-intensity activity. Stair-climbing – assuming you’re doing it at a pretty rapid clip – is generally considered an activity at which you could reach 9 METs.