If you make three changes in the words you use when you discuss personal health, it would clear up a lot of nonsense.
- Instead of talking about “losing weight,” or going on a “weight-loss” program, substitute the word "fat." So, you want to lose fat, or go on a fat-loss program.
- When referring to anything associated with medical care, call it what it is: “sickness care.” Do not call it “health care.”
- Finally, don’t refer to physical activity as “exercise.” By definition, exercise is bodily exertion for the intended purpose of attaining and maintaining physical fitness. Physical activity may or may not reach a physiological demand sufficient to qualify as legitimate exercise that generates a change in physical fitness status.
Physical activity.
Exercise.
Fat Loss Rather Than Weight Loss
This is not simply a matter of semantics. Words have power and meaning and, when not used properly, can present profound confusion and ambiguity.
For example, most people don’t want to just lose weight. They want to lose fat. If you just want to lose weight, you may do so with a laxative, starvation, dehydration, amputation or the stomach flu. Not something you intended, right? So fat loss demands a reduction in calories consumed and an increase in calories burned in activity and at rest. Since we are at rest more than at exercise, resting metabolic rate is very significant. Can you increase your resting metabolic rate? Read on….
Anyone can also lose fat and maintain or increase total body weight. How? By changing one’s body composition. Muscle weighs more than fat because it is more dense. Therefore, if one is exercising with resistance training it is entirely possible to gain weight while losing fat and therefore becoming leaner. A little confusing, huh? Read more about this in future Somadynamics posts.
In short, though, because of the fat-loss/weight-loss confusion, many people rely on a weight scale to measure their fatness. It’s a crude measure and often misleading. Weight scales do not measure fat, only total body weight. If you are engaged in regular exercise, particularly muscle building exercises, this can be quite misleading.
Sickness Care Rather Than Health Care
When is the last time you or a family member paid a visit to a physician to talk about your health? Never? Of course not, so why have we become so accustomed to call medical care “health care?” And does it really matter?
I think it does matter, and here is why: Health is the absence of disease and when we become accustom to referring to the sickness care profession as health care, it implies health is something we can purchase by paying a visit to our family physician. There is no such thing as “health" insurance. "Health" insurance is really coverage for episodes of illness. This is no small issue. Because the only way you can really insure personal health is to ensure it by taking responsibility for yourself and family members. It’s definitely a “Do It Yourself” thing.
The entire national debate about financing sickness care (a.k.a., Obamacare) is focused on how to pay for the chronic, degenerative diseases that represent about 90% of the sickness care sought by obese, inactive and aging Americans. We are all aging, but whether we do it while eating too much and exercising too little is a personal choice. To change the equation, everyone must take personal responsibility and get off their butts. Will we do it? Will you do it? Don't know. But if we do, we must first get our language straight:
Sickness care is not health care!
We can never achieve a reduction in morbidity and mortality rates from chronic disease until, as a culture and a nation, we learn to take care of our own health. Earth shaking, right? Finally in all of human history, what we do for ourselves is more important that what others do for us.
Individual citizens must be educated, trained and motivated to care for their own health instead of abusing it and then expect society in general to take care of them when their highly predictable, self-induced chronic disease presents itself. Most Americans are on a one-way trip to premature disease and distress — all self-induced.
This is not an earth-shaking, cerebral breakthrough. What is earth shaking is that we have known this simple fact for several generations but remained committed to relying on the sickness-care professions and their industries to fix us.
Exercise Rather Than Physical Activity
I’ve been around long enough to remember when the term “physical activity” crept into the language of exercise physiologists. It was in the early Seventies when I was Director of Program Development for the President’s Council on Physical Fitness and Sports. At first, it seemed rather benign, almost quaint. But then it became more and more frequent — about the same time that “exercise” seemed to be, well ... just too sweaty.
When I began to object, a friend took me aside to explain that exercise was turning people off because "they didn’t like to do it." It reminded too many people of grizzled old P.E. teachers ordering little kids to “take a lap,” or that awful President’s Physical Fitness torture test. So, like a lot of other things that happened to physical education in our culture, "physical activity" seeped into the language and made things, well, just a little easier. But not better.
Yes, all exercise is by definition physical activity — but not all physical activity qualifies as exercise.
Getting out of a chair is physical activity. Is it better than sitting for endless hours watching TV or behind a keyboard? Sure, but it’s not exercise.
Exercise demands effort, generates oxygen debt, sometimes provokes sweat, increases pulse rate for a sufficient time and frequency to produce a glorious physiological training effect that is absolutely the best medicine by far for all the chronic disease conditions to which our sickness care industry depends upon.
So from this day forward, think exercise — and go a step further. DO IT!