A Silly But Profoundly Meaningful Insight

For those desperate to lose weight with little or no effort, I offer 2 viable options. Why not cut off a limb or two? You only said you wanted to lose weight. You didn't say you wanted to look better! I know, I know. When you said you wanted to lose weight, what you really meant is that you wanted to look better naked. Or perhaps merely fit into a favorite wardrobe from your leaner years? Point taken. O.K. I haven't given up. I'll try one last time. How about moving to the moon? The gravity is only 1/6 that of earth's in which case you could lose over 80% of your weight instantaneously, with absolutely no effort! Except that you must find a way to get to the moon! However, I can't help but wonder about a very detrimental trade-off. Though you would likely be ecstatic about your weight loss, I would guess you would look even bigger because the air pressure on the moon is non-existent and therefore your body would bulge out much like a hot-air balloon does as it gets higher into the atmosphere where the air pressure lessens. Once again, my point is that it is not really weight loss per se that you seek. It is looking better! Of course for obese people, looking better will necessarily involve weight loss. But this is incidental to taking steps to look better. Many people out there, especially women, would do themselves good if they engaged in strength training which would likely increase their weight. However, what must be kept in mind is that muscle is much denser than fat and other bodily tissues. Additionally, it is "shapelier" and hence more attractive. Therefore, though weight may increase, the increased density of a leaner, tighter body is actually smaller. As such, if you were to imagine placing yourself in a tub of water, though your weight may have increased, you would actually displace less water than before because you are smaller. The key to looking better includes a combination of diet and intense exercise of relatively short duration. Notice I did not say exercise of frequent and long duration. This is very deliberate. More does not necessarily mean better. In fact, oftentimes it is detrimental.

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!