How To Get Healthy
If you’re unhealthy and you want to work out how
to get healthy, there are a few places to go. The first place is to your
doctor. He or she can work out exactly where you fit on the health,
fitness and wellbeing continuum.
If you’re really in bad shape you’ll need to take
the medical route.
Because the foundation of good health is fitness,
you also need to go to your fitness practitioner to find out how
aerobically fit, strong and flexible you are.
It would also be worth
while going to your naturopath to check out your diet and find
out whether you’re eating too much
of some foods and too little of others.
However, if all you have
is one or more of the low grade, personally-generated body system
dysfunctions there’s a lot you can do for yourself.
How To Get Healthy
With The three
great body system dysfunctions of our time are:
- metabolic
- musculo-skeletal
- psychological
You’ll know them by their symptoms.
The common symptoms of
metabolic dysfunction are; elevated blood pressure, cholesterol
and blood sugar levels, the accumulation of fat around your body,
feeling depressed, tired and lacking in energy, stiffening up … You’ve
got a diet and exercise problem.
A visit to the doctor may see you come away with a prescription
for a drug to mask the symptoms. In some cases that may be appropriate;
for instance, if your blood pressure was so high that you were
about to blow a brain gasket, or your blood glucose was soaring
through the roof.
Having said that, if you want to get healthy what
you need is a prescription that outlines a course of action that
you yourself can take, one that leads to the restoration of poor
health to good. In fact, it’s a big ask expecting to get better by having
someone do something to you; sooner or later you have to do something
to yourself. It’s also a big ask expecting to answer the ‘how
to get healthy’ question without improving your aerobic fitness.
Becoming fitter is not something you can outsource.
Keep in mind
that getting healthier is not a quick fix, it’s
a lasting fix and you may need to measure the rehab process in
weeks, months, even years. It would be silly to expect to fix in
a day, something that has taken 20 years to develop.
In a nutshell,
to restore poor metabolic function to good, embark on a regular
and systematic aerobic exercise program and change your diet. Do
that and you give yourself what amounts to a metabolic defrag.
You
can embark on a metabolic health program today. Walk for 20 minutes
and eat good diet food from
the top of the Hourglass
Diet.
Over the days,
weeks and months build the walk into a 40 minute run and you’ll
be as fit as a trout, lean as a greyhound and toey as a roman sandal.
I’ve measure obesity, blood pressure, glucose and cholesterol
in thousands of people and there’s no doubt that the healthiest
people are those who exercise with vigor for 40 minutes a day.
It doesn’t have to be running, you can mix it up to include
swimming, cycling and working out on the stepper or cross-trainer.
To keep yourself honest, get a heart rate monitor and while you’re
exercising, aim to keep your heart rate over 70% of your maximum
heart rate. (Maximum heart rate is said to be 220 minus your age.)
On
the diet front, lay off the garbohydrates, fat and flour, fat and
sugar and fat, flour and sugar. You won’t die! You’ll
lose fat from around your body, you’ll feel more energized.
You’ll have less headaches.
The symptom of musculo-skeletal
dysfunction is lower
back pain and other joint pain. The principle
cause? Motion starvation. You don’t
move enough. If you don’t have a decent strength and flexibility
training program, you’re becoming weaker and tighter by the
day.
Your pain is definitely not due to a lack of Nurofen. On the
contrary, the underlying cause of the pain is tight muscles dragging
bones out of alignment and weak muscles failing to give your skeleton
the support it needs to stay in alignment.
A good strength and flexibility
training program will go a long way to answering the ‘how
to get healthy’ question.
To improve your flexibility you can’t go past yoga, it’s
been around for thousands of years. There are strength exercises
you can do at home and the gym.
If you had any sort of musculo-skeletal
pain you’d be crazy
not to start doing the exercises.
The symptoms of psychological
dysfunction range from feelings of sadness, grief, anger, frustration,
unhappiness …, down
to being stressed out of your brain or feeling blue. These are
normal healthy emotions to experience when things aren’t
going your way, but if the feelings persist, then the counsellor
or a good personal development program may be just the shot to
lead you out of the maze. Even a holiday may help.
Clinical depression
is a different kettle of fish. Some of it may be physiologically
generated. There’s a spot in the brain,
the limbic centre that can become dysfunctional if you don’t
get enough aerobic activity or have a diet lacking in omega 3 fats.
The symptom of the dysfunction is depression.
Another cause may
be something wrong with your thought processes, in which case you’re in urgent need of some serious personal
development training or counselling. Don’t even think of
replacing hours of counselling with a few minutes in the surgery.
Whilst
depression may be more serious than that, my personal view is that
before you end up at the chemists, get checked out by someone in
the psychology industry, up your aerobic activity and omega 3 fat
intake and take a 21 day away-from-home holiday.
The trouble with
taking the chemical route first up is that once you start feeling
better, your attention may get diverted from doing the things you
need to do yourself to restore poor mental function to good. Plus
getting off the stuff can be the devil’s
own job.
In the meantime stay tuned, highly tuned and remember,
the secret of how to get healthy and stay healthy lies in what
you can do yourself.
John Miller
How To Get Healthy
John Miller |
