In the eyes of many, only the beautiful and the glam are found in gyms. Why? Because only they look good enough for the gym? Wrong. Because the fashion industry says thin and made up is good and most of us get suckered into that. Come to the gym I go to. I’ve never seen so many shapes of people in one place – round, pear, gourd, lumpy, apple, Spongebob, stringy. You name it. All of them beautiful in their originality.
When we tell people that health is more important than looks, everybody nods sagaciously and agrees. When it comes to the crunch, we all tend to be like lemmings and follow the leaders; and when we think we are too fat too thin too ugly too short too tall, we think less of ourselves and become walking self-fulfilling prophecies of failure.
Looks do not matter. Seriously, they do not. Why worry, fret and spend on something so flitting that few people have in the first place? Being fit and healthy is what counts. If you’re already fit, fantastic. You can always be fitter. Fitness is for life. Don’t stop just because you think you’re too old for it.
Impossible, you think? Why? Is it because being super fit means having to look like a Calvin Klein model? No. Being healthy is about taking care of three things: your physical fitness, your mind and your spirit. That’s holistic health and one of the keys to happiness. I’m going to concentrate on starting a fitness regime in this post. There’s really no big secret to it:
Decide whether you want to be physically fit and commit 110% to it. Why 110? Because most of us, no matter how determined we are, tend to have about 10% slack or down time. Put in 110% and you have 100% commitment. Go the extra mile. It’s not hard. All you have to do is take that first step.
Fitness is a path, a journey. It MUST be part of your lifestyle. If you’re going to treat it like a diet – i.e. a temporary thing, don’t bother. What’s going to happen is you’re going to end up in an exercise-diet-stop cycle and end up nowhere.
Know this: fitness comes first. Looks come last, if at all. It’s better to be big and fit than skinny and unfit. In a study of 5,400 adults, weights and cardiovascular risk were compared. The results showed that half of the overweight subjects and one third of obese subjects were metabolically healthy. That means that these overweight people had healthy levels of good cholesterol, blood pressure and blood sugar (read more here). This DOES NOT mean that you can now go ahead and be unhealthily overweight. It does mean that you can be fit and big at the same time.
Make time for healthy food and exercise. Make it part of your daily routine. Do it so regularly that not doing it feels strange to you.
Exercise can be anything – walking the dog, running, group fitness classes, taichi or yoga classes, martial arts lessons, tennis, go-carting (I hear it’s pretty intense), swimming, sex. Anything that makes you move your body and gets your heart pumping over an extended period of time. Variety is best; but whatever you do, you have to love it so that you look forward to doing it regularly all week. I do 4 different types of group fitness class in a week, plus swim and jungle-trek (whenever I can). I love all of it. I recently learned how to kayak. Whilst I don’t do that regularly, I love it enough to want to do more of it.
Start slow and build up.
Watch what you put in your mouth. You ARE what you eat.
Minimize sugar. Bad oils give you high cholesterol. Sugar makes people fat.
Don’t starve yourself. Only people who want to look thin starve themselves. There’s something very wrong with that frame of mind to start with. Look around you. Number one, 99.9% of people around you DO NOT look like super models. Number two, many super models are not that healthy. Number three, there are things called Photoshop and make-up to make people look super beautiful in magazines. Get over it. You are beautiful already without having to compare yourself to other people.
Keep at it. Love yourself enough to take care of yourself. Exercise is health insurance. Don’t scrimp on it.
Consider this: people from 5 generations ago never talk about diabetes, high cholesterol and obesity. Why? Because they led an active lifestyle by default. In Borneo, people farmed and hunted a lot. I believe it wasn’t much different in the West. We’ve been so successful at getting ourselves out of back-breaking manual labour that we now have to pay through the teeth to be as healthy as our ancestors. For that matter, most of us don’t even make it that far.
I’m off to the gym.
Photos courtesy of Tigre sin Tiempo and Alternative Wellness.
Opened my email last night and whaddaya know, got an invite from Kenny Sia to Level Up’s Relaunch, a celebration of their expansion after 17 months in the fitness business in Kuching. It was Kuching’s largest fitness centre. Now it’s even largerer than ever with brand new additions to their machines, group fitness rooms and classes.
