The Importance of Exercise
“Start Your Engines!”
Most of my newsletters throughout the years have been focused on making better choices in what we allow to enter and contact our bodies. What we consume internally and the products that we apply externally, dictate how well our bodies will respond in its ability to rebuild and survive. They say you are what you eat, and this is true, but this is only half the formula in achieving better health. Eating well and making better food choices is paramount. It’s one of your biggest weapons in combating the loss of your health. Unfortunately, nutritionally deficient foods are literally everywhere in our lives, causing the premature break down of our cells. If it has a drive up window, chances are, nutrition is not on the top of their food list. A good rule of thumb is if it has a drive up, don’t drive up! Now, I would like to add the last piece of the equation to increase the odds for you to enjoy a long and happy life while achieving and maintaining optimum health.
Hopefully you are choosing your food more carefully by reading the ingredient label and my newsletters. Our bodies need much more than just consuming high quality carbohydrates, protein, and fats (macronutrients). Consuming micronutrients, which are lacking in our everyday food supply, is just as important as those first three. The final building block for obtaining better health is not an input but an output.
Being active!
It amazes me how most people think that resisting gravity is a bad thing, the enemy to avoid at all cost. We enter a building and immediately take the elevator, avoiding the stairs. We will sit in our cars, hawking for a closer parking space to the front door of a store so we don’t have to walk too far, while we drive up to the mail box to get our mail rather than parking our car and walking to it. We seem to purposely avoid being active. We almost wear it as a badge of honor. The least amount of activity we have to do and move around, the better we seem to feel. Or do we?
The top health issues that plague our country are: obesity, cardiovascular disease, cancer, diabetes, arthritis, osteoporosis, anxiety, depression and Alzheimer’s disease. I decided to visit the website Drugs.com, which lists all of the available drugs that can be prescribed for dealing with the above health conditions. When researching, I decided to add up all of the pharmaceuticals that were offered for controlling the above health issues and their symptoms. I came up with over 1167 drugs. What was missing was the one prescription that has no side effects, is free, and is a major factor in preventing or reducing the effects of most of these diseases.
Exercise!
Being active is a major factor in improving every health condition listed above. We seem to treat exercise as a burden rather than as the best prevention for most health issues. Exercise is proven to reduce weight; it can also reduce your risk of heart disease (Mayo Clinic), lower the risk of cancer (National Cancer Institute), help manage glucose levels (American Diabetes Assoc.), help lubricate the cartilage in dealing with arthritis (John Hopkins), improve posture and strength for osteoporosis (National Osteoporosis Foundation), and increase the levels of endorphins when dealing with anxiety and depression (Mayo Clinic). The people who embrace exercise in their daily lives and stay active also have less accumulation of “beta amyloid plaque,” the proteins that build up in the brain of people who suffer with Alzheimer’s disease (University of Wisconsin). And yet, we push the button to wait for that elevator and place the remote close enough so not to get up from our chairs. We then willingly line up to take over 1167 prescriptions to help manage the symptoms, but not the cures, for most of our health problems without thinking twice about how we could have avoided them in the first place. When you really stop and think about it, how dysfunctional is our approach in dealing with health issues in this country!
One of the major reasons why many people lose their health and become overweight is because of being overly toxic internally. This comes from the food we eat, the air we breathe, and the toxic
chemicals in our cosmetics, food packaging, and food additives. From the mercury found in tuna to the BPA found in your cash register receipts and in the linings of your canned products, unwanted chemicals are being ingested by all of us on an everyday basis. You can only do one of two things, and hopefully you will do both. First, is to make better product choices to avoid ingesting harmful chemicals and the other?
Sweat a little!
One of the greatest benefits from exercising is the ability to de-tox heavy metals through sweating. And it doesn’t stop there either. Activity massages the digestion system, making it easier to pass waste, thus reducing the effect of constipation and colon cancer. It also creates endorphins, giving you that feel-good moment (runner’s high) without taking pharmaceuticals. Like all muscles, the heart needs to lift weights too for strength. Walking, running, pushups, and just about anything else that you can think of to resist gravity will accomplish this goal.
Oxygen is the greatest healer in life. All of our cells need it to survive and to reproduce normally. Being active forces oxygen to the smallest parts of our bodies, nourishing and cleansing our cells, while detoxifying them all at the same time. Sitting on the couch accelerates your physical breakdown while diminishing the oxygen needed to sustain your cells for proper reproduction.
Walking a little further to the food store rather than hawking that closer parking space as being a proud accomplishment is a false premise. What we avoid is exactly what we all need to do. I could write from now until the cows come home and just scratch the surface of the importance of being active. Make exercise a major part of your life just like brushing your teeth, showering, washing your clothes, getting enough sleep, texting, emailing, putting on makeup and eating well. It is the best prescription that you can ever take and it is free! It has to be a daily part of your life, for it is the foundation that strengthens the very vessel you live in. Once you lose your mobility, so do you lose your joy of life?
If you are healthy, work on holding onto it for as long as you can. If you have health issues, check with your doctor and health provider to determine how you can start adding exercise to your life while being safe. It’s OK to take your body out for a spin and rev its engine, for It’s the only personal vehicle you will ever own! Take care of it!
Exercise is a double-edged sword. Yes, on one hand, it is one of the best things you can do to put the odds in your favor in staying healthy, but on the other hand, it also creates a tremendous amount of free radicals too. Always take an antioxidant before exercising to negate the free radicals that will be generated and to compensate for being active, such as: Co-Q- 10, Green Tea, Vitamin C, and Dark chocolate (70% or higher).