It's no surprise that a home exercise program did the trick to treat obesity and improve the health of heart failure patients. Exercise is one of the most effective treatments for heart disease, and it doesn't cost you anything except your time.

Even the American Heart Association has realized the great importance of the benefits of exercise by adding "lack of exercise" to the list of major risk factors for heart disease.

There are a number of different health problems that exercise solves, which allows it to provide the benefits it does. Exercise can help resolve:

• High blood pressure
• High cholesterol
• Stress
• Depression

The article above also illustrates one crucial facet about exercise:

You should treat it like a drug that must be precisely prescribed for you to achieve the maximum benefit. If you are overweight, have high blood pressure, high cholesterol or diabetes then you will want to consider a daily exercise program, working up to 90 minutes per day until you normalize the problem.

I am a major fan of using exercise therapeutically. Many probably don't know that one of my primary motivations for going to medical school was to use exercise therapeutically to help people get well.

Personally, I have been exercising ever since 1968 when I read Dr. Ken Cooper's book, Aerobics. Dr. Cooper was a colonel in the Air Force and developed a fitness system for the space program. He actually invented the term "aerobics."

Interestingly, around that time physicians would actually prescribe bed rest for those who had suffered a heart attack. They actually believed that the heart would be further damaged by the exercise.

Amazing how times change.

That said, eating the right foods based on your body's unique nutritional type is another essential tool to improve your overall health.