Exercise Won’t Make Up For A Bad Diet…
By Tim Bean
It was personally interesting to me to hear Bill Clintons address on CNN recently about child obesity. It his address he reflected on his own lifelong battle with weight, but said that he had always been very active and done lots of exercise.
(Who doesn’t remember the television images of President Clinton jogging in the morning with a trio of secret servicemen forming a phalanx around him?)
And yet in 2005 he had to have a heart by-pass operation and, more recently, a stent operation to clear arteries that had completely blocked up! How has this come about?
Well, in his own words it was a combination of childhood eating habits and his bodies propensity to produce “bad” cholesterol.
And that’s what I find so interesting, as this echoes exactly my own history coming from a state of morbid obesity in my mid twenties.
But here’s what I found: You can limit the amounts of bad cholesterol your body makes by changing your diet and getting the right type of exercise. But if you don’t change your diet, doing the exercise won’t fix that.
Sure you may lose weight and trim up from the exercise, but on the inside the war still rages against fatty build-up in the arteries – and your body is losing!
You see, having a lean body, or a fit body, isn’t necessarily the same thing as having a healthy body. You can do all the exercise you want, but if your eating habits are bad and continue to remain that way as you age, it will surely catch up with you.
You need to lift weights to build healthy strong muscles and bones. You need to run to keep your heart and circulation in good order. And you need to eat for good health. You need to eat for longevity. You need to eat for great business performance.
Healthy eating isn’t just about what you don’t eat. We all know the bad things we should be cutting out of our diets that aren’t doing our body any favours. But how many of us focus on what we DO eat? Research says, “Not Many!”.
To protect your health, longevity and performance we need to focus more on foods that have high nutritional value, that are fresh, that are organic and free from chemicals and toxins. We need to eat more whole foods, more uncooked foods (What, you never heard of a salad?), and more high-fibre foods that aren’t grains.
And don’t think for a minute that you can get away with a bad diet by adding these so-called “Cholesterol-reducing” sugar-shots and spreads to your meals. They say they are effective because they contain plant sterols and phenols. But guess what? PLANTS contain plant sterols and phenols – and they haven’t been cooked, baked, beaten and treated to within an inch of their lives to provide them to you.
A single cup of fresh organic broccoli contains the same amount of plant phenols as 2 tablespoons of “cholesterol-busting” spread. But guess which one will protect your health, and which one will undermine it?
