How to Get Fit

I got great news - you can trade your body for a new one!!! Sorry that is either in the next life or in Science Fiction. Rather like in a marathon you end with what you started and so with the marathon race we call life, we start with our body and we take the consequences of our actions (or inactions) and we continue with them through life.

The fact is, through medial science and improved nutrition we can live longer than ever before. Soon there will be a sizable community on earth who are over 100 years of age and that is amazing. But what sort of quality of life can we expect? For the majority of us who are unfit it will be a very low quality of life indeed.

I am not a fitness freak. I cannot run long distances, I do not pump iron. I do love walking. It probably helps that my mother and father never owned a car and never drove. I surprised my wife some years ago when she had been training hard to walk a marathon and wanted someone to walk with her a long walk (over 12 miles) as her final preparation for the marathon. I walked with her on a 16 mile walk with next to no preparation and completed the walk with very sore legs the next day.

 Yes, I was more overweight at that time, than I am now but I did it. If your wife, mother or children planned to do a walking marathon, could you even keep up with them on a bicycle for 16 miles, let alone walk it?

We live in a world where food is freely available, and the more we feed our bodies the more they crave. We must get our cravings under control and see where they would lead us if not kept under control.

Chapter 1 - Don't exercise!

What are the consequences of not exercising? I know that I don't want to run the next marathon in Beijing, New York, or London. I may walk it some day. I just want to be able to walk to do the shopping, and see the places I have not seen and not be unwell.

There are 3 sets of consequences to being unfit and overweight. We may try and avoid them by driving everywhere, even short distances, but we cannot get away from our basic lack of fitness and lack of self-control.

There are short term consequences, long-term consequences and things we just cannot do that we may want to now and then. You may feel I am being hard on you, but far better that I am hard on you now than illness is hard on you later.

Short-term consequences

There are certain short-term consequences of being overweight and unfit that will be obvious to you.
Those who are overweight find it hard to walk. Sometimes we even see them in electric carts doing their shopping and I wonder how the carts can move with all the weight they are carrying. It may be simply that when you try to walk that the effort is just too much. No wonder there are a large number of coffee shops in shopping malls as they are a haven, so you don't need to walk too far.

Then it goes on the breathlessness when you are walking. The number of people I see today that are carrying oxygen supplies with them at sea level. I can understand it at Lhasa where you are so far above sea level, but the human body is designed to walk. You cannot breathe properly as you are too heavy.

The next sounds vague, but you suffer from joint and muscle pain, from the weight you are carrying. The joints and muscles grew to carry your weight but now they are carrying far more. You are your own worst enemy and all these problems hinder you having the exercise you need.

The final two of this very nasty line-up are lack of sleep and tiredness. You are tired as you cannot get a good night's sleep. You cannot breathe at times and it wakes you up, you cannot sleep properly as you are so heavy.

Long-term consequences

Medically speaking from the research that comes into the public domain, all these complaints have increased likelihood when someone is overweight and unfit. The two very often go together. The more overweight the person, the more these increased likelihoods become certainties for you and your family to cope with. Look at your parents as see the complaints that they suffer from, are likely to hit you and hit harder, if you are more overweight than them