Fitness

The last part of my series addresses the fitness questions and challenges for those who are metabolically healthy, who even carry the right amount of body weight, but want to know what nutritional steps they can take to optimize their performance. If you missed the earlier installments, they include Your Fitness Part 1, Part 2 – for the metabolically challenged, and Part 3 – for the metabolically healthy folks who exercise and want to lose some excess body fat.

Nutrition, of course, is not the only key to enhancing your fitness and athletic performance.

There are other do’s:

• work with a trainer or follow a wisely designed exercise program
• get enough sleep
• manage your stress well

and don’ts:

• avoid over-exercising
• don’t neglect the rest of your life!

so I am just going to focus here on eating right to enhance your fitness.

What perfect timing! Just as Americans are heading to the beaches and mountains for some added exercise and recreation, the press headlines let us know: we are indeed exercising more, as we've been told to do, but unfortunately, we are no thinner for it. Our poundage is expanding despite the increased exercise!

If you consider yourself basically healthy, without abnormal lab tests or worrisome excess abdominal fat, you exercise and want to be even more fit - but, you'd like to lose that last 5, 10, or 20 pounds. How does someone who is fairly healthy, active, but overweight lose that weight sensibly and improve their fitness at the same time?

I call this group the “Weight Challenged” and in my office these folks report a familiar story. When I meet with you, you report that

• You weight more than you'd like to.
• You carry your extra weight well distributed on your body.
• Your lab tests are normal, congratulations!
• Your goals are to normalize your weight and optimize your fitness!

Your task won't be that difficult, as you have already done a lot to maintain good health for yourself.

What is your level of fitness? Consider your mental, physical, emotional, and even spiritual health - how fit are you? My training did not actually focus on “health” until I first studied Classical Homeopathy over 20 years ago. I realized it was a concept lacking from my professional medical education and found it interesting to consider: how does one define health? At the time, the homeopathic definition derived from teachings of the contemporary Greek homeopath, George Vithoulkous, who defined health as freedom on all levels. Not necessarily the absence of disease or symptoms, but freedom from those symptoms. A recent patient of mine who lives in chronic pain told me she realized at some point the pain was inevitable: she could find happiness and freedom with the pain, or succumb to suffering. I am impressed by the freedom she enjoys despite her significant pain.

There is a great personal value for you to be derived from fitness, and in this series I am specifically talking about fitness that is both physical (whether you are currently an athlete or a couch potato!), and metabolic (that's your body fat, your fat distribution, and your lab tests). Paraphrasing the words of Ben Greenfield, a trainer and fitness specialist, a goal of improved fitness offers the chance to optimize your power/weight ratio.