Re: Do We Really Need to Exercise....

Robin King said:

"Gandalf Parker" <[email hidden]>
wrote in message news:[email hidden]...
| "Robin King" <[email hidden]> wrote in news:Yrj%e.346371

Quoted message said:

[email hidden]:

| > A philosophy you don't see much nowadays...
| >

Quoted message said:

Sounds interesting but its in a doc file

Gandalf Parker

Here's the article:
-------------------------------------

Do We Really Need to Exercise and
Eat Low Fat To Get Into Heaven?
Jonathan I Robison PhD, MS
Healthy Weight Journal, Sept/Oct 2000:74-75

Health is much more than the absence of disease or behavioral risk
factors for disease. We need to shift towards a more holistic
conception of what it means to be healthy, taking into consideration
the social, emotional and spiritual as well as the physical aspects of
the human experience.

Our culture's at times almost religious fervor regarding the
importance of weight and exercise to health is making this difficult.
Can we truly say that someone is not "healthy" because they choose not
to exercise and eat less than 30 percent of their calories from fat?
Is a person with anorexia nervosa who eats virtually no fat and
exercises constantly healthy? How about someone who hates their job,
is in a failing relationship and abuses their children? Is he healthy
if he works out at the gym 5 days a week and has a body mass index of
less than 25?

Fat And Fit
The latest research on the relationship between fitness, weight and
health is good news for the 55% of U.S. adults now classified as
overweight and/or obese by the latest "downsized" national weight
guidelines. It turns out that when physical fitness is controlled
for, weight has little if any bearing on longevity. Fat, fit people
actually live longer than their thinner, unfit counterparts.1

So what about all those studies that suggest that fat people die
young? One of the problems is that none of them take physical
activity into account. Epidemiologists call this a "confounding"
factor. Just because there is a relationship (or correlation) between
weight and mortality, it does not necessarily follow that one causes
the other. As an example, there is a relationship between baldness and
heart disease. Bald men actually have an elevated risk of heart
disease. This does not mean however that you can lower their risk by
giving them a hair transplant! Baldness does not directly cause the
increased risk. It is actually a higher level of testosterone in bald
men that leads to hair loss and also to an elevated risk for heart
attack.

Although some studies have suggested early mortality for larger
individuals, none of these studies considered the potential
"confounding" effects of exercise. More recent research shows that,
when this is done properly, weight has little if any bearing on
longevity. As Steven Blair, one of the world's most respected
researchers in the area of fitness and health says, "the kinds of
diseases we see in overweight people are the same diseases we see in
sedentary and unfit people of all sizes." 2

Health and Morality
Armed with this new information, some health experts have adopted a
new approach to the issue of weight and health. This new approach is
succinctly stated in a recent article in the New York Daily News
entitled: "As long as you're fit, it's probably OK to go on living
large." (3) While the intent of this article and statements like it
may be positive, on closer inspection there are some real problems.

To begin with, what about larger people who choose not to exercise? Is
it still "OK" for them to "go on living large"? For that matter, what
about people of any size who choose not to exercise? Do they still
deserve our respect as worthwhile human beings? This is more than just
a matter of semantics. The pursuit of fitness has now become a moral
issue in this country. Added to our obsession with thinness and the
constant pressure to eat the "right foods" this can only serve to
increase the prevalence of dangerous dieting practices, body hatred
and eating disorders.

Furthermore, this incessant focus on diet and physical fitness as the
principle determinants of health is misleading and keeps people from
addressing other areas of their lives that may have more impact on
their overall well being. In one of the largest studies of
centenarians (people who live 100 years) being conducted at The
Harvard Medical School, one of the major findings is that:

"No pattern of diet or exercise appears among the centenarians; some
are vegetarians, some eat lots of red meat; some are athletes and some
do nothing strenuous." 4

Centenarians are rarely obese, never morbidly obese.

Quoted message said:

Finally, for those people in the helping professions this "diet +
exercise = health" approach will perpetuate a common misunderstanding
of what our work is really about. We will continue to focus on trying
to "motivate" (convince, persuade, cajole) people to change their
behavior as the misguided mainstay of our profession. Instead of
"getting people to lose weight" we will now shift our emphasis to
"getting people to exercise." This will continue to distract us from
what the real work of "bringing people together as citizens and
community members to decide for themselves the kinds of lives they
think are most worth living" 5 at the cost of a continued lack of
effectiveness and diminished credibility as a profession.

Future Directions
While it makes sense for people of all sizes to find ways of moving
their bodies that are enjoyable and fulfilling, neither weight nor
fitness are the most telling predictors of the quality of human life.
In our fast-paced, stress-filled culture it is perhaps an easy place
to put our efforts - easier than working on relationships or community
building or spiritual awakening. In the long run, however, this
myopic focus on physical health will only serve to trivialize the
complexity and wonder of our human existence.

Our bodies, our fitness and our food should not be our paramount
concerns. They have nothing to do with ethics, or relationships, or
community involvements, or with the human soul or spirit. They have
nothing to say about the meaning or purpose of life.They give us no
purpose beyond ourselves. It is a religion appropriate only for a
people whose ideals do not extend beyond their own physical well-being
and whose vision of the future-and of the past-is strangely empty.
Surely Americans can produce a worthier creed. 6

We can do better! Taking the emphasis off people's weight as a primary
determinant of their worth or their health is a good beginning. Let us
not make the mistake of simply replacing weight with another narrowly
defined criterion, but rather seize the opportunity to explore a more
all-embracing understanding of what it means to be healthy.

Instead of focusing on the control of behavioral symptoms in an
attempt to avoid death and disease, we can redirect our energies
towards helping people understand and heal the life issues that almost
inevitably underlie their behavioral struggles and illnesses. We can
begin this process by redefining health. Rather than the absence of
disease or the creation of the perfect body or the accumulation of
some ideal list of "healthy" behaviors perhaps we will see that:

Health can be redefined as the manner in which we live well despite
our inescapable illnesses, disabilities and trauma.Health (whatever
else it might be) is something that happens not so much in the absence
of illness as in its presence. 7

It is more than likely that we will all struggle with emotional,
spiritual and physical issues during our lifetime and it is inevitable
that we will die. Understanding and living skillfully and
compassionately with these inevitable struggles, rather than
perpetually searching for the latest "holy grail" of "optimal health"
, may come closer to what it truly means to be healthy.

References
1. Barlow CE, Kohl HW, Gibbons LW, Blair SN. Physical fitness,
mortality and obesity. International Journal of Obesity 1995; 19
(supp.4): S41-S44.
2. Fraser, L. Who's The Healthiest of Them All? Health Magazine
1996;May/June:80
3. Ferrara S. As long as you're fit, it's probably OK to go on living
large. New York Daily News. Published 1/25/2000 San Jose Mercury
News.
4. New York Times, Tuesday June 1, 1999
5. Buchanan D. An Ethic For Health Promotion: Rethinking The Sources
Of Human Well-Being. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000.
6. Seid RP. Never Too Thin: Why Women are At War With Their Bodies.
New York: Prentice Hall, 1989.
7. Morris, David. Illness and health in the postmodern age. Advances
in Mind-Body Medicine 1998;14:237-251.

There is only one peer-reviewed study in the referenced material (#1)
and a newer and more thorough study shows that unfit thin women have a
lower mortality rate than fat and allegedly fit women (Am J Epidemiol
2002 Nov 1;156(9):832-41).

If you spent half the time exercising as you do trying to rationalize
your laziness and gluttony, you would be in pretty good shape.