Perception is an amazing thing.
Napoleon Hill once said “Whatever the mind can conceive and believe, the mind can achieve.”
Is this also true for health?
I fell that it can be true if we know what health truly is!
One of the questions that I will commonly ask clients at re evaluations and re exams is how, out of 100, they would rate their health and wellbeing. After they think for a minute, a number is given to me. I will ask them why that number.
The number one response for those who give themselves a high number is “I exercise frequently” and those with a low number is “I don’t do enough exercise”.
Now, don’t get me wrong, exercise is important. However, exercise does not equate to health. In fact, in a recent opinion piece titled Athletes: Fit But Unhealthy? from Sports Medicine – Open, the authors Maffetone and Laursenmade made three key points:
1. Fitness and health can be defined separately.
2. Too many athletes are fit but are also unhealthy.
3. Excess high training intensity or training volume and/or excess consumption of processed/refined dietary carbohydrates can contribute to reduced health in athletes and even impair performance.
As they say “From the emergence of the human genus, Homo, about 2.4 million years ago, our ancestors survived as hunter gatherers for approximately 84,000 generations. They required large expenditures of energy on a daily basis derived from lipid oxidation that supported the primary activities of walking, slow running, resting, and the occasional sprint, while adapting to a rapidly evolving glucose-based brain. More recently, dramatic advances in technology by the agricultural (350 generations), industrial (7 generations), and digital (2 generations) revolutions have left us with a population that is genetically adapted for the demands of life as a forager in the wild, but living in a high-tech, generally sedentary, overfed, and emotionally stressful twenty-first century world. While the majority of the population today suffers from the problem of inactivity, there is a smaller group, namely athletes, which may be exercising excessively, or at a level inappropriate to maintain optimal health.”
Can you be fit and healthy? Yes. As long as your lifestyle and exercise regime is congruent with our genome. The number one thing on the above mentioned list creating an imbalance is stress – physical (overtraining or too intense for their body) and chemical (too many processed/refined dietary carbohydrates) – leading to things like inflammation, lowered immunity, poor digestion and hormonal imbalance.
The journey of life is about finding balance. Fortunately, the way in which Brett and Ivanka run the practice here at Family Chiropractic Chatswood, that journey can be better directed to help, guide and assist you with your health and wellbeing rather than finding out where your health is waning by trial and error.
Test Your Stress and find out Your CORE Score by calling us on 9415 4606 and making an appointment.
