Health And Fitness - There's A World Of Difference

Most people think of health and fitness in absolute terms - either they're fit and healthy, or they are unfit and unhealthy. However, many tit people are very unhealthy, and too many healthy people are just not fit. Running enthusiast James F. Fixx, who died during a jog, and basketball great, Pete Marovich, are examples of fit people who were not healthy.

Health and fitness have two separate meanings:

Health is a state where all systems of the body - nervous, muscular, skeletal, circulatory, digestive, lymphatic, hormonal, etc. - are working optimally. This process is called homeostasis.

Fitness is the physical ability to perform athletic activity.

As society became modernized and industrialized, people became less physically active. Only a couple of generations ago, most people worked hard to accomplish their daily chores. Today, those active chores have been replaced by door-to-door service, elevators, escalators, microwaves and Cuisinarts, etc. Forced activity, which we call exercise, is now a separate and unique cultural element.

This radical change from an active to an inactive lifestyle has taken place, genetically speaking, within a very short time frame. The human body cannot adapt to such a drastic change within such a brief period without consequences. The stress of the body's adaptation difficulties has been related to the in-creased incidence of problems including heart disease, low-back problems and intestinal disease. Disease and dysfunction have resulted from a loss of that natural performance, activity.

Most people consider themselves to be healthy when they feel well and have no major complaints in the form of symptoms. Unfortunately, there is no such thing as absolute good health. Everyone has some type of imbalance.

An example of this type of person is Joan. She had a great genetic makeup and had been healthy all her life. She was a good student in school but she'd never played any sports and was inactive as an adult. Now, at age 39, she thought she should start exercising. She began jogging five days a week, following a program she had read about in a running magazine. A month later, she needed to see a doctor. For the first time in her life, Joan had back and ankle pain, and was exhausted.

Joan was trying to exercise at a level meant for someone who was very fit. What she didn't realize was that, although she was healthy, it takes time to build fitness. Her program was modified to meet her level of both health and fitness. Within three weeks, she felt like herself again. Now, at 41, Joan feels better than she did when she was 30.

Unfortunately, many people with sincere intentions - athletes included - are becoming less healthy through exercise. Very often when people take up a physical activity in order to get fit, they want to run the fastest and lift the most weight right away to make up for lost time.

It's sad to see the many injuries that accompany these poor exercise habits, caused by an improper balance between health and fitness. It's even worse to see how many people accept these injuries as a normal part of the process. Bring together any group of active people, from world-class athletes to once-a-week tennis players, and before long they will be proudly sharing honour stories of shin splints, muscle pulls, and back problems, as if their pain was a measure of their athletic ability.

In order for the body to work properly, health and fitness must go together. The healthy person must learn to develop his fitness. In turn, this should further build personal health. Whether jogging two miles a day or training for the New York Marathon, this activity should match you needs at a specific time.

Many people don't fall neatly into the healthy or fit categories. Instead, we have gray-area problems. These are the people who seem OK. They don't have an existing disease state, but neither are they functioning at an optimal level. They are the people who have yearly physicals when they are told "everything is just fine," yet they have symptoms such as sinus headaches, back pain, heartburn and fatigue. They may also be the people who are jogging one day and die of a heart attack the next.

Exploring the gray area of health and fitness requires listening, learning, thinking, and understanding. When people gain an understanding of how and why the body works the way it does, they tend to take better care of it, respect it more and stay on a healthier course.

A lot of people, including doctors, have been programmed to a large extent by the media and ad campaigns. A re-education process is in order to bridge the gap between what's known scientifically and what's hearsay from unreliable sources.

Thus, we can strive toward better health and fitness.