My Health and Fitness Blog

We live in a world of great excess. Everywhere you turn, it’s always an overblown obsession about the next best thing. Especially with the Summer 2008 Olympics in Beijing China going on right now, the world’s attention is focused squarely on only the most exceptional physical qualities – personified within the most gifted male and female athletes at the top of their physical games. These rare and exceptional athletes possess sculpted bodies we can only dream of possessing and display flashes of speed, power, endurance, and agility we can only dream about. The pressures to perform at peak levels and successfully deliver gold medal results can be enormous. Behind the scenes, I’m sure the male and female athletes who engage in professional sports and competitive sporting events like the Olympics take their preparatory fitness training and dietary regiments to the ultimate extreme. To acquire the perfect human physique with the exceptional muscular, spiritual, mental ability to go above and behind what ordinary human kind can achieve in normal competitive settings, Olympic athletes must push their bodies to the limits of human capacity.

But for the rest of us ordinary mortals, we can only sit back and watch the awe inspiring performances unfold on our television sets. I’m sure many of us certainly wish and dream that we had the same six pack physique and stamina of American champion swimmer Michael Phelps, the pure power and sprinting speed of Jamaican track star Usain Bolt, or the flexibility and graceful beauty of American gymnast Nastia Luikin. However, the reality is that the individual bodies and feats of these amazing athletes are extremely unique and one of a kind. Due to the perfect combination of exceptional genetics and bodily enhancements brought out by extensive training as well as strict diet and fitness practices, they are able to achieve feats most of us can only dream of.

While we should all certainly try to strive for healthy lifestyles, and practice a well balanced life comprised of a healthy diet interspersed with plenty of exercise, we should acknowledge it’s unlikely the majority of us will achieve the high level of rare physical and mental perfection found only in professional athletes. Unless you were born into the role with amazing genes or spent your entire life training for that one single event as your life long profession, most of us will have to be content with our ordinary human limitations. For the majority of people including myself, we are merely – ordinary. There’s nothing wrong with being ordinary and it’s okay to happily acknowledge that. After all, 99% of the population likely falls into this large majority group. Like all the other fellow members of this group of ordinary people, we are not blessed with perfect athletic genetics, nor were we given exceptionally tall, muscular, or perfectly shaped bodies. Most of us ordinary types were probably not born with exceptional metabolism to allow us to naturally burn off fat at amazing rates with little effort, and most of us were probably not born with the perfect bodily coordination found only in the most naturally gifted athletes. But as I mentioned, that’s perfectly okay. The vast majority of us can still live truly exceptional and healthily balanced lives, well into old age.

Unless You Are Blessed With Exceptional Genetics, A Life Of Moderation Is What Will Bring You A Physically and Spiritually Happy Life

My message is to remind readers that the vast majority of us are not perfect and that there is no sense obsessing over this lack of physical perfection. We all have a few pounds extra here and there we’d like to get rid off and we all have something about our fitness and energy levels we’d like to improve. While it’s important to practice good routine exercise habits and to adopt a well balanced diet comprised of nutritious foods, there’s little sense obsessing over our natural inability to reach the pinnacle of bodily perfection that only a tiny, less than 1% will ever reach. The never ending search for that physical ideal will only lead to non stop concern, never ending stress, and inordinate amounts of money spent on useless DVD’s, unhelpful books, pointless exercise gadgets, and expensive diet programs that lead to nowhere but a self defeating cycle of anxiety. I once stumbled upon a powerful quote that perfectly encapsulated my views on how the lofty pursuit of a healthy life can be taken to the unhealthy extreme:

“What some call health if purchased by perpetual anxiety about diet, isn’t much better than tedious disease.”

- George Dennison Prentice, Prenticeana (1860)

I hope readers will read this famous statement over a few times carefully. Never has a quote been so true. Ever since our society became obsessed with the pursuit for perfect health, the perfect body, and the perfect weight, we’ve become addicted to all the dietary supplements, pills, exercise gadgets, and surgical procedures that science and medicine can afford. Some of us spend every waking moment obsessing about our weights and what to eat and what not to eat. Instead of filling our minds with this type of constant worrying and nutritional counting, perhaps we need to take a few steps back and adopt a more wholesome, balanced lifestyle.

The key to this more natural and holistic approach is to simply adopt a life of moderation. Believe it or not, the human body is a powerful biological machine and is perfectly able to regulate itself quite well with the right natural balance of nutrients and exercise. Instead of obsessing about what you should do and not do when it comes to your diet and fitness habits, try practicing a life of moderation. Instead of cutting everything from your diet, cold turkey, that you perceive as negative such as caffeine, sugars, alcohol, red meat, and fried foods, and living a life of sad deprivation befitting that of a monk, try consuming foods and drinks in moderation. It’s gluttony and “pigging out” too frequently that gets many of us into trouble, not the fact we consume those things in the first place. The body is incredibly adept at maintaining the perfect biological balance so long as you don’t indulge its sweet tooth in all respects to great excess. Moderation is the key to a well balanced life and the practical answer to living a truly healthy life that’s free from an unhealthy obsession about perfectionism when it comes to health itself.

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 21st, 2008 at 12:44 am and is filed under Diet, Fitness, Goals. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.