Know Your Fitness IQ

by Braxton Cosby

Hello and thank you for joining me on this health rant. My goal is to educate you and build up your health I.Q. (Individual Quota- where you want to be).Let’s open up with a discussion on the differences between health, fitness and wellness. Some of it may seem like a matter of semantics, but I consider it to be more of a mindset. Let’s take a look at the definitions of each one and then I’ll break it down for you.Health- The World Health Organization defines it as “as state of complete physical, mental, and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity.”

Wellness – Merriam-Webster says it is “the condition of being sound in body.”

Fitness – the capability of the body of distributing inhaled oxygen to muscle tissue during increased physical effort. The President’s Council on Physical Fitness and Sports does not offer a simple definition of physical fitness, but instead offer a chart that breaks it down into categories and subsets, that capture how well the body is functioning based on skill, health and sport.

Confused yet? I thought you might be. It’s kind of hard to interpret the differences between the three, especially since the definitions are somewhat ambiguous. Overall, I’d summarize it as this: the ideal behind being healthy, having some degree of wellness and performing at a fit level, seem to be related to the efficiency of the body, mind, and spirit to operate at an optimal level, reducing strain and stress to the other systems and allowing the individual to achieve maximal outcomes during the activity of life.

Not bad huh? In a nutshell, people have to “feel” good about how well they interact with their environment on a daily basis and how efficient their bodies are at handling stress without undesirable outcomes such as colds or acute illness.

To clear things up a bit, I want to tackle a few other terms and hopefully equip you with some tools that will improve you health I.Q. I want to give you a little something to empower you going forward. This will be a standard baseline for you to evaluate where you are concerning overall wellness. I call it your personal S.T.A.T.S.

S- sex, T- total cholesterol count, A- activity level, T- training regime, and S- spiritual alignment. 

Knowing your S.T.A.T.S. will enable you to take a proactive approach to wellness. In this article, I want to cover S and T.

S- Sex. This is two-parter. Did you know that having sex can reduce the chances of having a heart-attack?  In a recent study by scientists at the New England Research Institute in Massachusetts, shows men who indulge in regular lovemaking are up to 45 per cent less likely to develop life-threatening heart conditions than men who have sex once a month or less. And ladies, regular sex can even boost a woman’s sense of smell by triggering the release of a hormone called prolactin, according to scientists at Calgary University in Canada. This may be a mechanism to help mums bond with their new babies.

Also, osteoporosis is on the rise. Did you know that women are more likely to suffer from osteoporosis than men?  As many as half of all women and a quarter of men older than 50 will break a bone due to osteoporosis.  But, there is hope. Light stress and exercise can reduce the risk of osteoporosis by 20% according to the Journal of Bone and Mineral Research. Women that exercise of at least 30 minutes a day are 20% less likely to develop dowager’s hump (Hunchback look) as a result of osteoporosis.

Now, let’s move on to T: total cholesterol count. You need to consult with your physician about having a physical (sometime in the near future, maybe to start off the New Year) so he/she can take your blood and analyze your cholesterol.  Your cholesterol is primarily synthesized from simpler substances within the body. It is required to build and maintain membranes; it modulates membranes fluidity over the range of physiological temperatures. Cholesterol also functions in intracellular transport, cell signaling, nerve conduction, cell signaling processes, is a precursor molecule for the synthesis of vitamin D, steroid hormones, and sex hormones progesterone, estrogens, and testosterone.

A couple of blah, blah, blahs later and you get the picture. You need cholesterol, got it? But beyond what the body normally synthesizes, we put a lot of cholesterol in our bodies with our dietary intake. Watching what we consume can drastically improve our cholesterols values. There is good (HDL) and bad (LDL) cholesterol. I will not bore you with more details, but I will give you some norms to look for.

Certain foods can help you increase your HDL’s. The top 5 foods as identified by the MayoClinic that lower LDLs and increase HDLs are: oatmeal and high fiber foods, fish and omega 3 fatty acids, walnuts/almonds and other nuts, olive oil and Margarines, orange juice and yogurt drinks with added plant sterols.

Knowing your cholesterol will help you decide on the right fitness program for you and the risk factors involved so that you can make the right choices for better living.

Next time, I’ll cover A. Take care until then.

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