The Executive Health Plan: about this series

Someone brings us lunch or we go to a restaurant, kidding ourselves that the walk from the kerb to the door is exercise. We love flying: we get to lie more or less flat, more or less uninterrupted for, perhaps, 12 hours. After a long day we walk, stiffly, to the lift, then the car, then at home slump in a chair, exhausted, watching TV news reports from a continent that started work hours after we did. We eat, drink and climb into bed, knowing that we won't sleep well and will get up in the morning and, using little more than mind over matter, we go through the whole process again.

It would be great if we could take three months off work and away from our families, in our own version of TV's The Biggest Loser. But, in the real world the life you lead is what pays the bills – or meets some deep seated need in you to be productive.

In this series, we find ways to improve your general health and well-being while not imposing a ridiculous diet, not expecting you to jump into a tortuous gym regime, staying away from fads.

To do so, we start from the basic realities: many executives are too unfit to get fit.

Leading orthopaedics surgeon Mr YEOH Poh Hong in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, says "it takes five weeks of exercise to repair one week of muscle wastage."

Clearly anyone who suggests that, having spent years behind your desk, you get up and spend an hour on a cross-trainer is delusional.

As the Chinese proverb says: "every journey of a thousand miles starts with a single step."

My own journey started with a 54" waist: within six months of simple exercise, it's down to 40". My ankles clicked when I walked: now they rarely do. Six months ago, I used the wheelchair ramp at kerbs so as to avoid climbing up the single step: now I happily walk up two or three floors using the stairs. I would find myself dragging myself around after only half-an-hour's shopping: now I bound around all day. A walk that used to take 20 minutes, now takes 10 – and I feel better for doing it. Whereas I used to become very tired making day-long presentations, now I feel energised at the end of the day – and do a better job because I'm not thinking about how tired my legs and back are.

The benefits are not just physical: my brain is more active, I think faster and more clearly. Amazingly, I have lost almost no weight. That will come later as I move to more cardio-related exercise.

This series starts from the basic premise that fitness and being overweight are not – within reason – mutually exclusive.

For sure, we need to maintain a non-obese weight; we need to keep our bodies looking not too horrid or we become unattractive. It's amazing how many men will criticise their wives for the ravages of middle age, including weight gain, while turning into mini whales themselves. The late 19th century idea that corpulent is "healthy" is wrong. But it is also true that we will never again be the shape we were at 18 years old. And being over-thin and bony is no more healthy than being over-weight.

Downward facing dog is great – when we are watching a fit young woman in her mid 20s doing it. For us? Well, let's just say it's going to be a while before we bend that much – if ever.

Being strong for life is not about being a contender for The World's Strongest Man. It's about being able to do the things you want to do, when you want to do them, without having to think of ways to do them with as little effort as possible.

We don't recommend you go out right now and join a gym or go out and buy a whole load of training equipment: most exercises can be done with things you find around the house. We don't recommend you go to the fridge and toss out everything that isn't green. We certainly do not recommend you start to take piles of supplements and we don't recommend that you cut out all drinking. And we absolutely do not recommend that you even consider surgery.

The first lesson of any plan to improve your health is not to make radical changes. The best thing you can do is to make small changes to your behaviour, modify not revolutionise, replace your current bad habits with new ones but not to try to do it all at once. You need to find a routine that works for you and that you can stick to: one that says "exercise from 08:30 to 09:30 daily" does not work because things crop up. But routines are like buses: once you've got off a routine, it's hard to catch it up and get back on.

So, what you will be looking for is a way to make a routine work for you, to be built into your day but to be flexible so that you can work it into convenient spaces. All you have to do then is to make sure that you create a convenient space.

Remember, you got into this condition because you chose to: you need to choose to get out of it. No one made you unfit or fat: you did it to yourself.

The Executive Health Plan is not only for men: the dangers for women of an executive lifestyle are no less and the fixes no simpler. The exercises work for both men and women as do the dietary suggestions.

Over the past 30 years or so, we have got fat together; now we are going to get fit together.

We thought that we should call this series "how to get yourself back after a lifetime of self abuse." But we realised some people would misunderstand that phrase. So we gave it a more prosaic title.

Welcome to The Executive Health Plan.

It's time to take care of yourself (tm)

Nigel Morris-Cotterill

Head, The Anti Money Laundering Network

Editor, ChiefOfficers.Net

Full time desk jockey.

Direct access: www.itstimetotakecareofyourself.com