Are Health And Fitness Interchangeable?

People commonly express puzzlement when a seemingly healthy person drops dead of a heart-attack at a young age. Several issues probably explain this kind of occurrence to a large degree. I will preface this by noting that the planet Earth includes among many other things 6+ billion living and breathing human beings. As such, probability begs for unusual and unexpected outcomes. Next, health and fitness are not interchangeable! Many assume a healthy person is necessarily fit or an unfit person is necessarily unhealthy. Certainly there tends to be strong correlation between these variables, but there is nothing that precludes fit people from being unhealthy, for example. One may imbibe in dangerous recreational and steroidal drugs and be on the cover of a fitness magazine. But this person could be a ticking time bomb in disguise! On the other hand, one may be extremely healthy by paying careful attention to his diet but be weak with little or no muscle tone and hence be unfit. I think the reason health and fitness correlate strongly, so much so that many view them interchangeably, is that more often than not healthy people dedicate themselves to exercise and unhealthy people dedicate themselves to laziness. To digress slightly, one could just as easily suppose this causality be reversed. As in, many exercisers dedicate themselves to being healthy and many lazy people dedicate themselves to being unhealthy. But suffice it to say, human behavior need not require either of these to happen. There are healthy people who do not exercise the least bit. Conversely, there are unhealthy people who exercise obsessively. These unhealthy people with an obsessive compulsion to exercise typically abide by the creed “I live to eat”. As a result, it typically gives them license or entitlement to consume anything and everything with reckless abandon only because they “work out”. In doing so, this sets them up to be even more unhealthy than if they did not “work out” simply because by not “working out”, they would likely be more careful about what they consume and as a result be healthier. And the final “wild-card” variable that is perhaps the most commanding factor in a person's health and fitness is inherited genes. You can either thank mom and dad or curse mom and dad or whatever you may, but in the end, there ain't nothing you can do about this!