Exercise and Whole Health
A lot of asswholes out there make this harder than it is
You’ve got two sides of the exercise argument.
Note that I said there are two sides “of the argument,” not of reality.
On one side: It’s perfectly healthy to not exercise. Look at these tests, like grip strength, which we can use to prove that a very overweight person is actually fine!
On the other side: If you don’t exercise, then you die, it’s your own damn fault.
The truth is somewhere in the middle.
And because it’s not an all-or-nothing situation, the internet does a really bad job handling it.
The internet is awesome for a few things, most notably streaming movies that I used to own on discs and doing so in a fuzzy, pixelated way, but something the internet sucks at is discussions where both extremes have it sort of right.
The Truth About Not Exercising or Watching What You Eat AT ALL
This is a bad plan.
I mean, I don’t have to tell you that, right?
Let’s talk from a COVID POV, because I feel like there’s a good amount of all or nothing thinking happening around COVID. You should diet and exercise and you’ll be fine OR you should get vaccinated and fuck the rest.
Being fitter when you get COVID is better than NOT being fit when you get COVID, regardless of your vaccination status.
Someone who doesn’t exercise and someone who does may have really different experiences with an illness or injury, and it’s not always going to be the case that the fitter person has the best outcome.
BUT, it’s probably the case that if you are fit, and by “fit” I mean that you are doing some kind of exercise periodically, you’ll probably be better off than the alternate universe version of you who is doing nothing. Bizarro You, the guy who pours milk in the bowl before the cereal, says, “Badbye” as a greeting, and does the opposite of you, fitness-wise.
You want to go into an illness fit rather than unfit.
You want to go into a surgery fitter as opposed to unfit.
If you have to get injured, you’ll recover better if you’re fit.
Where The Other Side Has It Right
I am going to use myself as an example: my immune system SUCKS. When Poonmaster Flex (my lovely partner) gets sick, and I get the same cold, she’s good in 3 days, I’m down for 2 weeks.
And yet, I exercise a lot more than she does. I probably eat better. We both get pretty good sleep.
This isn’t to say Poonmaster Flex is doing it all right and I’m doing it all wrong, I’m making the point that should surprise no one: There’s a lot of this stuff that’s genetic, too. Meaning: some people will never get sick because they just don’t. Two people will perform the same movement, with similar body types, and one will be injured, the other will not.
There IS an amount of this stuff that’s up to chance, whether that’s the chance at play in genetics or the chance at play in how sick or injured you get from one moment to the next, and no amount of fitness can make up for lousy luck.
This is one of those, “Yes, life is, in fact, unfair sometimes” situations.
The “Fitness isn’t a priority for me” side of things has it partially right. That person may not perceive much benefit from fitness. And they may have been dealt a genetic or circumstantial hand that makes them…kind of right.
If I exercised for general health, and if I continued to be sicker longer than Poonmaster Flex, I would probably perceive the exercise as not helping me be healthy, and it wouldn’t be long before I said, “Fuck it.”
Where the Fitness Bros Get It Wrong
Saying that a person who doesn’t take good care of themselves deserves to die, while someone who hits the gym deserves to live, is bullshit.
I’m sorry, but we don’t live in caveman days. This is NOT Sparta.
And it KILLS some people inside, mostly dudes who spend a lot of time flexing in the mirror and carving a perfect beard line (which, I hate to tell you, was not a thing in Sparta). It absolutely destroys a piece of their identity when they figure out, Damn, being fit doesn’t make me more deserving of life.
Harsh truth: nobody deserves life. You didn’t do anything to earn your life. You got it with zero regard for your opinion on it.
I know, it’s difficult. You’re learning, in public, that being fit doesn’t make you morally good, and being unfit doesn’t make you morally bad.
Where the Unfitness Bros Get It Wrong
There are MANY folks out there who use scientific studies, like calf circumference and grip strength, to prove that hefty is healthy. Oh, and thick thighs save lives! That’s a biggie!
What they don’t tell you, though, is that these are generally studies done on older adults.
A lot of grandmas and grandpas waste away slowly before they die. They stop eating so much. My grandma would eat a Milky Way for breakfast. Not WITH breakfast, not AFTER breakfast, FOR breakfast.
These older folks are dealing with a different set of health problems. Losing a lot of weight is an indicator that things are going off the rails. Especially because most of them don’t have weight that needs losing.
So, when you see a study cited that’s about the health benefits of being out of shape, check to see whether the study is REALLY about finding indicators of decline in the elderly. Most times, that’ll be the case.
And a study that shows thick thigh-ed individuals live longer doesn’t really apply if you’re 35 and generally healthy and the study regarded folks in their 70’s on death’s door.
Here’s The Middle
Fitness Bros: Keep doing fitness, you do you. But you need to start measuring the value of other people against a different ruler. If you only see people are fit/unfit, and if you think someone deserves to live a long, happy life based on their fitness, you are fucking it up. And you need to recognize that total control over your fitness is an illusion. My advice to you: find an unfit person who you can respect. Find an unfit person who has value to you, someone who can do something you can’t. Learn that fitness is a facet of a personality, but for most people, it’s not everything they are. See a human being as having value, even if they aren’t doing everything they possibly can to extend their healthy lifespan.
Unfitness Bros: Look, nobody is going to argue that the person who walks 30 minutes 5 days a week is worse off than the person who does nothing. So maybe just walk 30 minutes 5 days a week. And that’s the entirety of my advice to you: don’t look at exercise and fitness as all or nothing. You don’t have to do WODs and 100 pull-up challenges and all that shit to see a lot of health benefit. Just doing moderate exercise regularly will probably make you feel a whole lot better, and it really will improve your odds when you get sick or injured. Plus, you’ll enjoy things more. When you go on vacation and end up walking 7 miles in a day, you’ll enjoy it more if that’s twice your normal daily mileage as opposed to 7 miles more than you walk in a day.
It doesn’t have to be about having abs. It can just be about stacking the deck ever-so-slightly in your favor when something shitty happens.