FITNESS FROM ZERO TO 100

By Cathy Kantony

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Fitness and a physically active lifestyle are keys to Looking Good and Feeling Great (LGFG), and LGFG is one of the biggest keys to Enjoying Your Body (EYB). EYB is our word for wellness, with wellness being a step or two beyond simply being healthy. (I just love using initials for things. They make everything sound so corporate or governmental.)

Being healthy is nothing more than an absence of illness or disease. Wellness is a consciously created Advanced State of Physical, Mental and Spiritual Well-Being (ASPMSWB).

By LGFG we mean more than cosmetic beauty. We mean beauty that comes from the radiant glow of ASPMSWB, with your entire body in the shape that you admire, and every part functioning to give you the ultimate EYB experience.

Some people wanted me to name this column "Fitness from A to Z," but I like from "Zero to 100" because I wanted to get site visitors to write fitness articles for everyone from babies to people over 100. We would love to get an article to publish by anyone who has stayed fit well into their eighties and nineties. Wow! Longevity is one of the rewards of maintaining ASPMSWB.

There is a lot of good fitness information out there, and over the next months and years we'll search high and low to bring it to you. What is often missing, however, are inspirational stories that will get the Couch Potato, Procrastinating Easy Riders (COPPERs) to get with the program and start LGFGing.

Enough with the initials, already! I am just making fun of my colleagues that I left back in corporate America when I retired at 48 years old, but that's another story. Back in Corporate America they used to call me CK (Cathy Kantony). I was the highest ranking female executive in LTEL-OSD (Long Term Equipment Leasing--Overseas Division).

You should have seen me back then--no frizzy hair, mostly business suits. Now I lay back and, when I feel like it, write and edit for Soul Vibrations Digital Universe. As a kid I dreamed of being a writer. At SVDU we are in a mad search for stories from our visitors about real people who changed their lives by getting fit. We also want articles from experts on every phase of the fitness game for folk from zero to 100, with all stops and conditions in between.

If you are a:

• Fitnesss Guru
  
• Professor in a Physical Education Program
• Personal Trainer
• Yoga or Ti Chi Master or Mistress (Is that right?)

• Physical Therapists

Or any one who might get the COPPERs (one last set of initials) up off of their duffs.

Because I have these corporate organizational skills the site managers here ask me to organize the Look Good Feel Great portion of the web site.

This means that slouching around without getting in shape is 2 1/2 times as dangerous as driving an automobile, unprotected sex and drug abuse combined.

If my corporate scare tactics won't work then:
FITNESS CAN IMPROVE YOUR SOCIAL LIFE
Being active means you're bound to meet more people. Your exercise routines can become a main component of your social life. Beyond dancing, bike-riding, hiking, rocking climbing, swimming, and jogging provide opportunities to meet people and share play time with people you know. The gym has become as much a social institution as a place to get in shape.

According to all kinds of tests people who are fit usually have a more favorable impression of their body image, which creates higher self-concept, personal confidence, social motivations, better family relationships and higher moral, ethical and physical personas. So much for tests--those ship-shape corporate executives do not have higher any-of-this than the general population, in my experience. But fitness does improve self-concept. You know what I mean--Look Good, Feel Great, and Get More Dates!

Okay, here's one that really works:
EXERCISE REDUCES ANXIETY AND DEPRESSION
People getting on your nerves, life full of anxiety, too much pressure on the job, even the commute has you full of tension - Go jogging! Ride a bike! Hit the gym! Learn Yoga! In short exercise. There are hundreds of causes of tension but exercise is a kind of universal loosen-upper. It takes your mind off of stuff. It funnels your energy into useful directions. It distracts. It does all of those self-esteem things for you that in themselves reduce anxiety.

The right kind of exercises - Yoga for example or muscle relaxation and breathing exercises focus on reducing the symptoms that are warnings that anxiety or stress is breaking down your health -- heart pounding, racing or skipping a beat., chest getting tight or painful, jaws clenching, nostrils flaring, body numbness or tingling, dizziness, light-headedness.

Depression - I know about depression. When I was in my corporate job I was diagnosed with it. I had many of the experiences that the National Institute of Mental Health regard as symptoms.

• Persistent sad, anxious or "empty" mood
• Feelings of hopelessness, pessimism
• Feelings of guilt, worthlessness, helplessness
• Loss of interest or pleasure in hobbies and that were
  once enjoyed, including sex
• Decreased energy, fatigue
• Difficulty concentrating, remembering and making decisions
• Insomnia, early-morning awakening, or oversleeping
• Appetite and/or weight loss or overeating and weight gain
• Restlessness, irritability
• Persistent physical symptoms that do not respond to treatment, such as
  headaches, digestive disorders, and chronic pain
• Thoughts of death or suicide, suicide attempts
  
  

There is a great web site, HelpGuide.org for understanding the relationship between exercise, anxiety and depression. Of all the important things that the site says, about the most important is that play is an antidote to depression:

"When you're depressed, the whole body is depressed, and it translates to the cellular level. The first objective is to get your energy up, and you can do it through play. It’s one of the most powerful ways of breaking up hopelessness and bring energy into the situation."
Dr. Carl Simonton

One thing I had to learn is how to not "work at" playing. True play is activity where nothing anxiety-producing is at stake. I used to "work at" exercising. I even "worked at" going on a vacation. No wonder I was depressed.

BEING OVERWEIGHT CAN BE HAZARDOUS TO YOUR HEALTH
Exercise and an active lifestyle are just as important as diet in the fight against obesity. And survey after survey reports that most health risks are greatly intensified by obesity. These surveys also show that Americans are among the fattest people on earth. Dr. Jennifer Zebrack, Assistant Professor of Medicine (General Internal Medicine) at the Medical College of Wisconsin, reports that 34% of all Americans are overweight.

A May 2005 study in the New England Journal of Medicine contends that rising childhood obesity rates will cut average U.S. life expectancy from birth by two to five years in the coming decades - a magnitude of decline last seen in the United States during the Great Depression.

You name the health condition or hazard and there's a 90% chance that obesity will make it worse -

• High blood pressure and high blood cholesterol
  
• Coronary heart disease, stroke, congestive heart failure
• Type-2 diabetes
• Osteoarthritis
• Gallstones
• Low back pain
• Heartburn
• Gout
• Obstructive sleep apnea and other respiratory problems
• Some types of cancer, including endometrial, breast, prostate and colon
• Complications of pregnancy
• Poor female reproductive health such as menstrual irregularities,
  infertility
• Bladder control problems (e.g., stress incontinence)
• Psychological disorders including depression, eating disorders, distorted
  body image and low self esteem
  
  

So severe are the health threats that obesity poses that there is an association, American Obesity Association (AOA), on par with the American Cancer Society with no other purpose than waging war on obesity. There is the possibility that an individual can have exercise- or even diet-resistant obesity, but in 2000, poor diet including obesity and physical inactivity caused 400,000 U.S. deaths--more than 16 percent of all deaths and the No. 2 killer. That compares with 435,000 for tobacco, or 18 percent, as the top underlying killer, says the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

EXERCISE CAN LOWER THE RISK OF CORONARY ARTERY DISEASE (CAD)
Coronary artery disease (CAD) is obstruction or narrowing of the arteries that supply flow to the heart--and its complications remain the most common cause of disability and death in the United States. In the US, CAD claims more lives each year than the next 7 leading causes of death combined. The major diseases that result from CAD are chest pains (angina pectoris), myocardial infarction ("heart attacks"), congestive heart failure, and sudden cardiac death. CAD is a multi-factorial disease where genetic and environmental factors interact in complex ways to create the disease.

The relationship between exercise and the heart is a complex one and a visit to the website of the American Heart Association "www.americanheart.org/" is a worthwhile trip

There are many reasons why fitness and an active lifestyle are important to the prevention and the treatment of coronary disease. In addition to a heart happy diet www.deliciousdecisions.org/ a heart happy exercise program is essential to Looking Good and Feeling Great.

EXERCISE CAN LOWER CHOLESTEROL
Almost any kind of exercise--aerobics, weight-lifting, jogging, swimming, hiking, and dancing for about 30 minutes between three and five times a week elevates HDL (the "good" cholesterol) levels, therefore removing excess LDL (the "bad" cholesterol) from the blood.

Cholesterol must "attach" to protein particles in order to circulate throughout the bloodstream and nourish tissues. When too much LDL cholesterol circulates in the blood, it can slowly build up in the inner walls of the arteries that feed the heart and brain. Together with other substances it can form plaque, a thick, hard deposit that can clog those arteries.

Medical experts think that HDL tends to carry cholesterol away from the arteries and back to the liver, where it's excreted from the body. Some experts believe that HDL removes excess cholesterol from plaque in arteries, thus slowing the buildup.

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