Stop Confusing Health With Fitness

Most of the advice pumped out in the health/fitness industry is much more heavily geared to FITNESS goals, as opposed to HEALTH goals. What we have to differentiate between is that what might help you achieve a certain level of fitness is not necessarily healthy for you.

For example, many workout programs offer a diet that will help you build muscle or lose fat. But, virtually every one of these programs does not actually take health into consideration THAT MUCH.

Newer people, and often even more experienced people, will freely relay advice or talk about how this or that program is the best because it helped them to do achieve their fitness goals. What they don’t realize is their advice might actually be detrimental to someone who values health over fitness.

I have had many people give me the most awful advice for building muscle, such as eating ridiculous amounts of fast food. The rationale was that since I burned fat so easily, I could get away with eating all this junk and it would help me to gain mass. Now, although this practice might actually help me to put on muscle when combined with a workout routine, it is absolutely horrendous health advice. Anyone telling you to eat fast food is just wrong from the get-go…it doesn’t matter who they are.

People often assume that everyone has the same goals as them and give advice freely, without realizing that what the other person wants might be completely different. And more importantly, why would you ever want to value fitness over health? Some people rationalize that being temporarily unhealthy while achieving a certain fitness goal is acceptable, and then once it is reached you can start being healthy again. However, this attitude stems from the belief that health and fitness cancel each other out, or that it is not enjoyable to do healthy things.

To value fitness over health means that you are trying to impress someone, straight up. That is the ONLY REASON that you would ever do things you know are detrimental to your health (unless you’re in some kind of sport or competition that requires you to have a certain level of fitness). When having a six-pack is more important than a healthy cardiovascular system, then you have committed the worst kind of betrayal to yourself. And what makes it even more twisted, is that people will tell themselves that they’re doing it for their own benefit as they think things like, “Oh, all the girls will think I’m hot!”.

Hahaha, wow…but let’s not get off-topic!

Health and fitness are two DISTINCT things. The idea is to formulate goals and create action plans that take both of these into consideration, whenever possible. If one has to be sacrificed for the other, then you sacrifice fitness…not health. Get used to having to make significant corrections to most popular diet advice. Seek information that is grounded in hard evidence concerning HEALTH and then find how you can tailor that to your fitness goals.

By: Mark Swan