Mr Incredible is superhuman, and it seems we all want to be just like him.

‘Health’ and ‘Fitness’ are meaningless terms by themselves. They only become meaningful when you take the time to give your own personal definition to them as it applies to you.

Many people will change the way they eat, exercise and live in an effort to be ‘healthier’ and ‘fit’, but how do you measure this?

One of the obvious answers is the look of your body. It’s reasonable to assume that a healthy body is a healthy looking body.

There are other metrics like blood markers of disease risk and physical ability to do work (running a distance for time etc)

But these don’t seem like an end in and of themselves but rather sign posts along the way.

I believe all of our health and fitness pursuits are simply an effort to cheat death and live as long as possible. After all would do an exercise that made you look better, and made you more fit, and reduced your risk of disease, but also shortened your life?

John

It's all about YOU

“That’s not good for YOU”

“That’s not healthy for YOU”

How often have you heard these two claims from someone who is neither a health professional or even in any sort of physical shape that you would consider desirable?

It’s is quite common for someone who is overweight or out of shape to comment on what is good or not good for YOU in many areas of health and fitness.

Picture this scenario:

You’re out with some friends, you’ve been doing really well on  Eat Stop Eat or some other weight loss program and you decide that tonight you’re going to have a few slices of pizza just because you can and you want to. Then someone else at the table says “eating all that pizza isn’t healthy for YOU”. I’m sure this scenario doesn’t sound out of the ordinary.

Now picture the same scenario and that same person saying “eating all of that pizza wouldn’t be healthy for me”.

Sounds a lot different doesn’t it! A lot less judgmental, and it sounds like that person would actually be taking responsibility for themselves instead of finger pointing and preaching to you.

This is a fundamental problem we face when other people who are casual consumers of health and fitness media start taking it upon themselves to tell you what they think is good for you. This allows them to sit in the background out of the spotlight and make you and your dietary and fitness habits the center of attention and scrutiny. This is both unfair and ignorant.

The next time this happens to you just flip the logic to aim the conversation back at them and say “thank you for sharing your opinion on what is healthy for me, but I’d really like to know what you think is healthy for YOU and what you’re doing about it”

…in most cases this should shut them up.

John

Drugs aren't bad, they're everywhere!

I was having a discussion today about the line between acceptable and unacceptable drugs on sports. I believe all sports should allow drugs and the athletes should disclose the exact drugs and dose they’re using so we could all get a realistic view of what it takes to compete at the highest levels.

This got me thinking about all the different drugs people consume on a daily basis, and then I kinda realized that almost all human consume some sort of drug very regularly.

The broad definition of a drug: A substance consumed that alters normal body function and is non essential for life.

With this definition you can easily come up with a list of drugs people consume daily, the two most obvious are caffeine and alcohol, but that is hardly where the list stops. I’ll throw a few more down to get the list going. I’ll need you to jump in here and add any that I’ve missed. (these can be any drug that is consumed on a fairly regular basis without a prescription)

Caffeine

Alcohol

Nicotine

NSAIDS (non steroidal anti inflammatories)

Excessive Sugar/salt/fat (you could easily make the argument that over consumption of these items is used as self medication)

Theobromine (active ingredient in chocolate similar to caffeine)

Marajuana

And this is just the common stuff that many people might be using. There obviously an enormous list of prescription drugs that a huge proportion of the population is using as well.

Almost everyone you will ever encounter will be a habitual user of at least one or two of the drugs mentioned above and then some. As we get older almost all of us will become prescription drug users as well.

So I’ve started the list, if there is something you can think of that I have missed please add it in the comments section.

John

You can't hold your breath to death, but you sure can starve to death.

Well this one takes the cake. I received an email about a man who claims that he has not eaten food or consumed water in 70 years. His claim is that he survives from some sort of supernatural life force and simply breathing is enough.

Believe it or not some people actually believe it’s possible to survive on nothing more than oxygen, it’s called ‘breatharianism’ and it’s about as wacko as it gets. Of course nobody will ever try this because they’d be dead within a few weeks. The specific article that was sent to me was pointing out how this particular man had gone 6 days without food without any adverse effects…this shouldn’t be a surprise as there is well documented cases of morbidly obese people fasting for weeks on end in order to drop weight.

I even did a 5 day fast a few months ago…it’s just not that big of a deal.

Breatharianism is the final stop on the continuum of craziness that starts with the good and bad food dichotomy.

It starts with a list of foods that are good and ones that are bad, then the bad foods list grows due to contamination of toxins (whatever the hell that means), genetic modification, veganism, raw foodism, fruitism, and so-on until there is nothing left to eat.

I’m not suggesting that all people who believe in a good and bad food paradigm will end up with the breatharian belief, but a case can be made for showing a common origin of the thought process behind both ideas.

It’s easy to find fault in almost any food if you examine it enough. No matter what food you choose there is a criteria that could end up labeling it as ‘bad’ and not worth eating. Taken to the absurd extreme this would leave you with nothing left to eat (as a breatharian would believe is a perfectly fine conclusion)

Reason and common sense just isn’t with some people.

John

What Do You Do When You're As Health And Fit As You Can Be?

Why do you suppose anyone reads about health and fitness? My guess is that they want to improve both their health and fitness (kind of obvious I know)

But there has to be a point where you simply cannot continue to make measurable improvements…or at least there will be a point where more information, more effort, more planning will have diminishing returns.

So how do you know when you’ve read enough and done enough?

Is it a life long thing that can only be measured when you’ve reached some longevity goal (living to over 100 perhaps)

Is it a strength goal or endurance goal? (this wouldn’t make much sense unless you also included age as a dependent variable…in other words, your strength at age 65 will be less than your strength at age 25)

Is it just to know more than other people?

Is it to have good markers of health as defined by various governing medical organizations? If so what do you do when all of this looks good and you are in so called ‘optimal health’. Do you actually try to be better than this? (I think some people in fact do try to be better than optimal by striving to be more and more ‘fit’)

In my opinion people read about this stuff because they want to believe that they can take an active role in their own health and fitness (which of course you can considering you will also define your own health and fitness)

But I think problems arise when people do to much reading and theorizing and not enough ‘doing’. Information gathering can easily become more stressful and lead to a deterioration of health and fitness rather than helping you improve it.

If you find that you read more about fitness than you do about fitness you need to get your priorities in line.

30 mins of reading about what might be healthy will NEVER be as good for your health as a 30 min walk.

You’ve only got so many minutes in your life, so you might as well get the most bang for your buck out of each one.

John