Where You Live Affects Your Fitness

    During the course of your growing up years, you lived wherever your parents chose to live. You didn’t give any thought to the health implications of the location your parents chose, or if they had chosen a place that was conducive to your physical, mental, and spiritual health. Chances are your parents didn’t give it much thought either. Not until recently, has there ever been given any thought to the fact that where you live affects your level of fitness. But it does, and it’s a piece of information that is sure to influence many generations to come.

    So how is this information compiled, and what can we learn from it? The information is compiled based on statistical information from areas such as smog levels, pollution levels, water quality, government based fitness incentives, and recreational and fitness facilities available. Generally, one of the major magazines published in the United States, will compile all this statistical data, and publish an article as a recreational guide to healthy cities.

    What do we learn from all this published information? That where we live really does affect our health and well-being, and sometimes, there’s very little we can do about changing that fact. Unless, of course, you want to move.

    Often, the greatest contributor to our health and fitness, via our outside environment, is the level of pollution we’re forced to live with on a daily basis. How do we absorb pollutants in our outside environment? The most common way is through the air we breathe. It is not the only way, however. The water we drink, the homes we live in, and the cars we drive, all have the potential for unhealthy contaminants.

    Our work environment at one time was a contributor to the pollutants we were exposed to, but thanks to greater Environmental Protection regulation, most of those dangers have been eradicated.

    Past the pollutants contribution, the availability of health facilities, the amount of government support for health and fitness, and the availability of medical faculties also affects our health and wellness from a location standpoint. If you live in a rural area with no direct access to health facilities, and there is no medical facility, your level of fitness and health will not compare to that of a person who lives in a more populated area that can offer those things. The down side to the more populated area, of course, is a greater risk of air pollution.

    Some areas of this country are just fitness conducive. Places where the air is still free from pollutants, there is an availability of hiking, biking, and walking trails, and the medical and fitness facilities are numerous. The problem with most of those places, however is that they are mostly of a recreational base, not manufacturing or otherwise industrialized, and jobs are not that numerous.

    What can you do about your own fitness concerns, based on where you live? Make the most of where you are. Educate yourself about the greatest fitness problems in your area, and do what you can to make corrections for your own fitness benefit.

What Role Does Nutrition Play in Our Health?

    Nutrition as it applies to our daily lives means that we take in what we need to maintain our body’s healthy state. Nutrition has become an important word thanks to the involvement of the USDA in our daily food requirements, and the FDA’s involvement in determining what is and is not dangerous for us to consume.

    What about eating habits? What about vitamins? What role does our daily intake play in our health? More than you have been lead to believe or understand. The body’s ability to remain well under anything other than ideal conditions is a direct result of the nutrition received on a daily basis. The mind’s ability to remain well is, again, a direct result of our nutritional intake. For instance, the human brain doesn’t develop well without the necessary input of protein in our daily diet. No protein, no intelligence.

    Nutrition refers to the nurturing of our body, in our ability to keep it healthy and functioning as it is supposed to do. Our ability to provide the body with all the necessary food, vitamins, and minerals so that we continue to thrive in our daily life processes.

    How do we determine that we are providing the essential nutritional needs? That knowledge comes by educating ourselves about what our individual needs are, the needs of our family, and then taking that knowledge and applying it to the foods we buy, that we prepare, and that our families consume.

    Health is taught as a science course, and addresses matters of personal hygiene, diseases, and the broad spectrum of health as it applies to the masses. No individual attention is given to how to attain optimal health via our eating habits. It’s funny that we skip the most important, fundamental building block to good health: our nutritional and caloric consumption in our food. I personally believe we should have the field of nutrition and physical activity married into something combined to provide every person that enters the school system with a personal knowledge of their bodies’ needs, caloric, and nutritional, so that they complete their education with mental and physical competencies, as well as analytical and mathematical competence.

    Nutrition is a concept that should be as important to our educational process as our ability to count. The ability to recognize our nutritional requirements, find the foods we need to fulfill those requirements, and differentiate between healthy food consumption and “unhealthy” eating habits is not an option. Not for a healthy, happy, long, and quality life

    What we should absorb as we travel along life’s daily path is a way to incorporate good nutrition into our lifestyle. There is generally just as much room for good as there is bad, it just so happens that bad nutritional habits hold more appeal.

    Bad nutrition receives more advertising dollars than healthy nutritional options, and is often more visible. But that doesn’t mean it’s any easier, more convenient, or cheaper. Habits, generally take about two weeks to make the switch from conscious action to unconscious thought. Two weeks is not long, it’s not long at all for decisions that will affect you for the rest of your life. It’s also not long for the potential reward that comes from setting an example your children can follow, and you can be proud for them to follow. You teach them daily about the good habits you want them to develop, and then you demonstrate a bad one in your nutrition choices. C’mon, mom and dad, let’s practice what we preach.

What Role Does Our Intelligence Play in Our Health?

    This is a double sided coin. Does health affect intelligence? Yes. Does intelligence affect health? Yes. This is one of those wonderful situations where the cause and effect works both ways. What happens in one area, will generally affect the other.

    It is a known and proven fact, that the eating and health habits we use as children, directly affects our level of development. This includes the brain. Protein, one of the most important basic life building blocks, works directly in the brain’s development. No protein, no proper development.

    Well, it doesn’t take very much intuition here, to notice if the brain doesn’t develop to optimal operation levels, you will not have a health conscious individual. Generally, you do not have individuals develop to become productive, prosperous citizens, and certainly not healthy, productive, prosperous citizens.

    Past the consideration of intelligence development, our level of education and intelligence plays a tremendous role in our ability to educate ourselves about the health options we should exercise. With generations prior to the 20th century, physical energy expenditures used up whatever nutritional resources you had provided earlier. Physical work and a real lack of nutritional supplements kept the body in constant need of nourishment. That is a time past. Today, with the advent of the computer, physical activity is no longer a part of the work equation. We no longer lack for vitamins and minerals, thanks to the boom in the vitamin market.

    Today, we must determine how much nourishment we need, how much physical exercise we need, and how best to accomplish those ends. Calorie needs, nutritional needs, physical needs, and education about those needs now is information we should all understand, at least as it applies to our individual self.

    Our level of income directly affects our health. Did you know that? How much money you make helps to determine how healthy you will be. Doesn’t really make sense, if you don’t’ look at the broader picture. In the big picture, however, here is the view: you are educated, have a degree, and are exposed to tons of information during your college years. You are exposed to health classes, athletes, and all sorts of professional people who already understand the importance of health in your life.

    You graduate college, your income levels are quite nice, and you have the opportunity to purchase magazines, health and fitness of course. Can you see how your education and intelligence levels affect your health now? This is a generalization that has proven itself time and again. All you have to do is observe your developed countries versus the third world, underdeveloped countries. Standard of living and health are directly related.

    If the evidence presented above is not enough to satisfy your curiosity concerning the role intelligence plays in our health, take the time to visit the US Census. This information is available through the internet. There you will find all kinds of statistics, from income averages in areas of the United States, to education levels in those same places. Also available is information related to the household. Check for yourself. You can see a direct relationship in many areas of the country between income levels and health statistics for that area.

What Makes Us Well?

    Wellness refers to the condition of good physical and mental health, especially when maintained by proper diet, exercise, and habits. Nutrition refers to the nurturing of our body, in our ability to keep it healthy and functioning as it is supposed to do. Our ability to provide the body with all the necessary food, vitamins, and minerals so that we continue to thrive in our daily life processes. But what makes us well?

    The first place to start would be with the examination of your eating habits. Since we are a product of what we eat, if our eating habits are unhealthy, or do not provide for the nutrition we need, we’re not going to be healthy individuals at the end of the process. Do you take in more calories than your body needs? Are you supplementing your vitamins and minerals to make sure you are getting your recommended daily allowances? If you’re not making the most basic of efforts to take care of your nutritional needs, you aren’t a well individual.

    Next, you might want to look at your exercise habits, if there are any. If there aren’t any exercise routines to examine, no wellness. Everyone, no matter what their age, benefits from exercise. Whether it is organized exercise activities, free weights, or simply establishing a personal routine, exercise is an excellent wellness tool. It keeps our bodies conditioned, our mental sharpness working at top speed, and thanks to the physical aspect, we get a boost to our cardio health, extra calorie burn, and more oxygen to those cells!

    Being able to deal with and handle the daily stresses of life keeps us well. Making sure we take the time to accommodate our needs for stress relief, such as downtime, therapy time, massage time, or simply take the time for a nice, hot bath. The body tends to retain stress in the muscle of the shoulder and back. Taking the time to relax, do relaxation exercises, and combine this with physical exercise for the entire body, and you shouldn’t have any trouble maintaining a state of wellness.

    Our personal habits either keep us well or prevent us from being well. If you smoke, drink, or lose sleep to excess you’re not the well individual you could be. Smoking, drinking, and loss of sleep work to our detriment, and it takes extreme discipline to stop. Smoking fills our body with carcinogens, and works to keep us tired and lethargic.

    Giving ourselves adequate time to devote to all areas of our physical needs, from our nutritional intake needs, to our physical fitness needs, to the need for quite time contributes to our level of wellness. How well we allocate time for these needs, and the choices we make in fulfilling these needs, keeps us well.

    There are so many occasions to stop and question our efforts at maintaining optimal health, that we usually don’t even take the time to begin the examination. But it is beneficial to our overall health, the quality and quantity of our life, to make every effort to be well, healthy, individuals.

Metabolism: What Is It?

    The dictionary defines metabolism as the sum of all biochemical processes involved in life, or the sustaining of life. In application concerning our health, metabolism is related to the intake and use of food. In reference to the case in point it is our ability to utilize our food to the fullest extent.

    Some people have really high rates of metabolism. In other words, when they consume food, their bodies burn it up almost as fast as then consume it. Then there are those of use who use our food intake so slowly, as to not even notice that we’re burning calories. These people who burn quickly are often slim and trim, the people who burn more slowly are the people with a tendency toward obesity.

    The body’s metabolism is a unique process for each individual person. No two people metabolize food at the same rate therefore no two people have the metabolism. We all use our calories at different rates, with different results. Our metabolism, like our fingerprints is unique to each of us. But the need to understand and accommodate this metabolism is an issue that we all face.

    All of this metabolic process is related to our calorie intake, our vitamin and nutrition needs, our thyroid and endocrine production, and how well all of these processes come together. For years, people have sought ways to raise the metabolic rate. If you can raise someone’s metabolic rate, you are then better able to control the burn of calories, especially for overweight or obese people. This would make the goal of better or improved health a much easier reality for those people. Efforts to date have produced very little results. There are foods that we can consume that naturally raise our metabolic rate, but not to a great extent. What we need is a way to directly alter the rate. We need to be able to raise our metabolism to a point where we can actually see a benefit.

    What determines our metabolic rate, as far as our genetics? Generally, we tend to inherit the same tendencies for metabolic rates, body frames, and other related body functions from our parents. Thus, the origin of “well, she comes from big people; naturally she’s going to be big”.
Right now, the greatest results in raising our metabolism come from exercise and building our muscle mass, while reducing our body fat. Adding more muscle to the body, in turn causes us to burn more calories, and this helps to elevate our metabolic rate.

    Our metabolism functions also depend on how well we have taken care of our nutritional needs. The process of burning calories and creating energy is a delicate one, and one which must be carefully tended, or it can become imbalanced. It is often through these natural imbalances that we tend to “inherit’ our metabolic rate.

    I believe through careful analysis, and attention to each person’s unique needs, we could bring about a more natural balance of the metabolic burn vs. the calorie intake. To a level where optimal health and weight control are in equilibrium.

What Are Your Nutritional Needs?

    Nutrition as it applies to our daily lives means that we take in what we need to maintain our body’s healthy state. Nutrition has become an important word thanks to the involvement of the USDA in our daily food requirements, and the FDA’s involvement in determining what is and is not dangerous for us to consume.

    But what is our responsibility in the nutrition game? Do we understand what our nutritional requirements are, how to fulfill those requirements, and how to look for real nutritional value in our foods? I’m not sure that nutrition has been successfully addressed in its own right. We hear nutrition in relation to our vitamin intake, our fortified cereals and milk, and in the context that we need “nutritional value” from our food choices. But what really is nutrition when applied to our daily bodily functions?

    Today, we must determine how much nourishment we need, how much physical exercise we need, and how best to accomplish those ends. Calorie needs, nutritional needs, physical needs, and education about those needs now is information we should all understand, at least as it applies to our individual self. If you will visit your local doctor, library, or fitness center, there is massive amounts of information available to help educate and to help you make good health choices, no matter what the age group.

    Nutrition refers to the nurturing of our body, in our ability to keep it healthy and functioning as it is supposed to do. Our ability to provide the body with all the necessary food, vitamins, and minerals so that we continue to thrive in our daily life processes.

    How do we determine that we are providing the essential nutritional needs? That knowledge comes by educating ourselves about what our individual needs are, the needs of our family, and then taking that knowledge and applying it to the foods we buy, that we prepare, and that our families consume.

    Quite often, our vitamin and mineral needs outweigh our caloric needs. In those instances, we turn to manufactured vitamins and minerals to fill the gap. This is a part of our nutritional needs, also.

    Nutrition is one of the most complex areas to gain useful knowledge about, because there are so many components, and because each person has their own individual needs. Women needs differ from those of men, and older women’s needs differ from those of a young girl. As we age, our needs constantly change; therefore continual education about nutrition is a fact of life.

    The nutritional needs of a cardiac patient are different than those of a healthy, middle-aged hiker. Can you see the complexity of the situation now? What we really need is to develop a scale that determines the nutritional needs of our bodies on a cellular level, so that as we age, as our physical condition changes, or our health changes, we can recalculate our needs, based on cellular changes and content in our body. Individuality is the key to understanding each person’s nutritional needs, and then working to educate ourselves is the key to fulfilling those nutritional needs. Good nutrition should be the ultimate goal of every person alive.

Wellness Terminology

    There are many words today associated with wellness. Many of those terms are new for readers, and some of the terms are interchangeable between fitness, wellness, and health. So let’s take a minute to explain some of the terms you may see from time to time.

    Wellness itself is defined as the condition of good physical and mental health, especially when maintained by proper diet, exercise, and habits.

    Meditation, an exercise recommended for everyone, but especially those of use with hectic, stressful lifestyles, is defined as an engagement in contemplation, especially of a spiritual or devotional nature. Meditation has been shown to be an effective method of lowering blood pressure, relieving stress, and promoting overall good health, by simply reflecting upon our day, and finding happiness within ourselves.

    Fitness refers to the condition of our physical body and mental fitness would of course be addressing our mental state. Often we will join and participate in fitness centers that provide personal trainers, and stationary fitness equipment. There are numerous pieces of equipment available that perform many different exercises to address specific areas of the body. The best time to learn about this equipment is during the orientation session of the fitness center you have chosen.

    Exercise covers a lot of ground. There are so many forms of exercise that we can only try to cover some of the more popular and well defined programs. There are aerobic programs that focus on heart rate and your cardio health. There are water aerobics that again focus on your heart health. Weight training and free weights are used for building muscle mass, and sculpting the body. Walking is one of the best exercises available, as it doesn’t jar our bodies, but uses all parts for toning and building heart rate. Running, swimming, jogging, and skiing are all forms of exercise, but not recommended for the novice.

    Your nutritional needs refer to the physical supplements of vitamins, minerals and calories needed in order for you to sustain optimum physical health. Much discussion is centered on this topic right now, because our nation faces obesity problems of epidemic proportions.
Alternative therapies refer to the alternative medicine options such as chiropractic care, acupuncture, herbal cures, and holistic medicine. Of the examples given here, chiropractic and acupuncture are becoming more widely accepted as complements to the traditional form of western medicine. Studies are conducted often that support the evidence that chiropractic care and acupuncture are effective forms of medicine.

    Herbal cleansing and healing are terms used by many of the natural healers to describe what ingestion of certain herbal combinations can provide for the body in the effort to bring it back to optimal health, or to sustain optimal health.

Today wellness is used not only in conjunction with health and fitness, but also wellness of the mind, body, and spirit. There is an ever increasing movement among the health conscious citizens, that wellness should include not only our physical being, but our mental and spiritual health. The only true form of wellness must include the entire person.