What the Heck is " Fitness " Anyways? -And How to Tell If You Are Getting Good Advice

To paraphrase the great satirist Mark Twain, "Get your facts right first, then you can distort the truth if you want." Such a funny yet so true statement-... especially when it comes to fitness, nutrition, exercise, and health information.

If you are reading this article, there is no doubt you have read many other articles concerning health and fitness, each claiming to know the "best" way to do gain muscle, or the smartest way to lose weight, or the best time to do "cardio", or which brand of whey protein is the most effective. Some of it is ok, some of it is garbage, but all of it is irrelevant until ...

Exercise

YOU DECIDE WHAT YOU WANT ...YOU DECIDE WHAT "FITNESS" OR "BEING HEALTHY" MEANS TO YOU!

Other people's opinions, especially doctors, trainers,coaches, online "experts", gym owners, your best friend, your family, or the government do not matter unless you make them matter.

You must decide and determine what a healthy and fit life looks like to you how far you want to go with it, be flexible to change as you learn more or change your desires, and then commit to the process of getting there. It really is that simple. But most people don't do this. And the problem is that ...

Advertisers for the food, fitness, and diet industries are very good at what they do ... they are good marketers and sales people and are trained to convince you that "their program" or "their product" is what you will need to be healthy or fit.

I know the diet industry is now a billion dollar industry, and the only thing fatter than theirbottom lines are American waistlines. And the health industry spends more money per person than any country in the world, and Americans are not even in the top 20 countries in the world healthy!

Once you determine what fitness means to you, then, and then only then, are you ready to figure out how to make it work.

AND THE SECOND MOST IMPORTANT THING YOU NEED TO DO IS ...ASK YOURSELF HOW TO DO IT! It almost makes me want to say, duh! But most adults don't do it ... they usually are asking questions (often internally) like:

Why do diets never work for me? Why can't I ever tone up my triceps? How come she can eat chocolate and stay trim, but whenever I do it goes straight to my hips? Why do my knees hurt all the time whenever I squat?

You see, if you ask the wrongquestions, you will set yourself up to get the wrong answers ... But the great thing is, if you ask yourself the right questions, you will get the RIGHT answers! Now check out these questions:

What can I do to make this new diet work for me? What am I willing to learn and do to ensure I am able to tone up my triceps? How can I eat chocolate and stay fit while enjoying the process? How can I find a similar person who has had knee problems and can now squat pain free?

Did you notice that changing what and how you ask questions makes all the difference in the world? One set of question presupposes certain things to be true that are not true and assumes that's the way it will always be ...The second set of questions changes your perspective and opens you up to new possibilities ofwhat can be.

How can you start to apply the art of question asking to your current health and fitness goals and pass on what you learn to another person?

How to Find Good Advice

1. Find someone who has done what you want to do, and had to go through several difficult challenges to get it accomplished.

If your goal is to lose weight and have a lot of energy, find someone who struggled with their weight for a long time, finally lost the weight, and has kept it off consistently. Do not talk to virgin sex counselors! In other words, there are plenty of attractive women in gyms who are into running or aerobics, etcetera ... but the reason they run or do aerobics is because they are thin to start with-it is easier to run when you weigh less. If your goal is to gain moremuscle, don't just assume the hulking dude at the bench press machine is the guy in the know. There is a good chance he got interested in weight training because he was naturally a big guy.

2. A person's advice should be simple and actually make common sense. Make sure they take a "whole body approach", rather than solve one problem while causing 5 other problems.

How many times do you see a commercial on television for some new drug to treat high cholesterol, or heart disease, or a liver ailment and at the end of the commercial they list a dozen or so "side effects" or potential problems with the drug?

In the same way, many people try to exercise their body by training each muscle with a different exercise, supposedly isolating the muscle to strengthen it more. Yet ourbodies are hard-wired to work interdependently, our emotions can control much of our physiology, and even what we eat and excrete (or don't) impacts our energy levels.

If a doctor or trainer, or coach seems only to be treating your symptoms, then this is bad advice-many times the symptom is actually your body repairing itself! One of the worse cases of this is when someone gets a fever and they are told to take medication to control or suppress the fever. The fever is your body's mechanism of raising your body temperature to speed up the flight of white blood cells to fight off the intruder! You keep the fever in check by supplying your body with liquid nutrition, not stopping the mechanism that is actually helping you!

What the Heck is " Fitness " Anyways? -And How to Tell If You Are Getting Good Advice