Less than 100 years ago a hard working man would spend his day sweating behind a horse and plow. If he wanted to go to the village he would cycle and in the evenings he would do home repairs. His wife would be doing all the housework without appliances and cooking from scratch without a microwave.
The lifestyle of their grandchildren and great grandchildren is so very different. The modern day worker usually sits in front of a computer for most of the day, drives a car almost everywhere, spends the evening on the couch in front of the television and eats highly processed food loaded with sugar, fat and harmful chemicals.
With technology advancing at lightning speed, it is an exciting time to be alive in human evolution. But unfortunately there is a dark side to the comfort and ease of our modern conveniences. It has also contributed to sedentary and inactive life-styles becoming the norm in large segments of the population.
We have become fat, lazy, sick, doctor and drug dependent as epidemic health threats called chronic ‘lifestyle disease’ have paralleled the march of technology. And the worst of it is modern technology has also produced an unprecedented number of sedentary children. The cause…too much food…and too little exercise.
The predictions are frightening; here are some of them: Children born in the year 2000 and beyond will be the first children in recorded history to NOT outlive their parents. One in three of these unfortunate children will develop Type 2 Diabetes before they turn 18. Over 50 percent of them will be obese… over 75 percent of them overweight resulting in them having a predicted shortened lifespan of 20 -30 years.
The human suffering and financial cost of these predictions will be unimaginable as 400 million people are predicted to die from disease that is premature and preventable in the next ten years. Although everyone knows that proper intentional exercise that works the muscular system is essential to health, few adults even bother to do it. It is as if no-one really cares whether they live or die.
Not exercising is as dangerous to one’s health as smoking and yet not so long ago smoking was not considered a health threat. It will be the same with exercise, one day soon not doing enough muscle building and maintaining activity in our sedentary world will be considered as dangerous to one’s health as smoking two packs of cigarettes a day.
We have a new kid on the block called Sedentary Death Syndrome and it has quickly become the third leading cause of death in the US right after heart disease and cancer. But the problem is it is worse that any one single disease as it is actually linked to another 30 odd serious conditions and ailments from diabetes to depression to osteoporosis.
The cause of this villain is sitting and living sedentary, inactive lifestyles and is responsible for 2 million deaths worldwide annually. We are literally sitting ourselves to death. We are an immobile lot; in fact we are the most physically inactive population that has ever lived on this planet.
Yet we evolved to be upright and mobile. The more hunched you are, especially after the age of 50, the more your risk of death increases because the heart and lungs are compressed, reducing oxygen and blood flow. This causes damage to important organs and tissues.
We seem to be happiest when we are doing little other than sitting. After all we sit at work, in the car, on the couch, at the bar, at the movies, on the airplane, watching sport. We sit for hour’s practically comatose watching television, at the computer surfing the internet or playing video games. A screen of any description can hold our interest for hours.
No real surprise that we send our bodies into a downward spiral of inactivity that progresses as we get older. We are developing pot bellies in our 20’s, our arteries clog and our blood pressure zooms. Our blood is laden with harmful fats and our metabolism slows like a dwindling old engine. No real surprise when we succumb to premature and totally preventable disease.
Why have we let ourselves become so unhealthy? We know that proper exercise is not only good for us but has now become a matter of life and death. It is not some frivolous pastime that we find time for when we have nothing better to do.
Without enough vigorous physical activity our body has no way of staying healthy. It needs this movement to stimulate the necessary hormones that instruct every cell, tissue, system and process in the human body to repair, rebuild, renew and replace itself.
It is bad enough that people lead a no exercise lifestyle. But to add many hours of sitting each day into the mix and it becomes a serious health hazard. Modern technology has engineered our world to be ultra convenient and easy so that we can indeed go through life without ever having to do any strenuous physical exertion.
To save your own life and remain vigorous and healthy you might need to do something that might feel uncomfortable and unnatural, especially at first. You need to move and exert yourself but after you overcome your inertia and do some vigorous activity; you will become aware of the immediate benefits to your mental and physical well-being. You will also recognize that this was exactly what your body needed.
If you are forced to sit for long hours at your work at least you can feel a little safer in the knowledge that you are doing something to balance this situation with your proper exercise program. This will go a long way to help balance the sedentary nature of a dangerously low level of activity and help you stay healthy.
If you want to stay youthful vital and above all else well, you have to stay strong. It is so simple to get started on a proper strengthening exercise program and do it 2-3 times a week for just 30 minutes.
Support your exercise program by ditching as much processed food as possible and start replacing it with natural, fresh, whole foods that man hasn’t tampered with and dumped harmful chemicals in. Getting our butts back into the kitchen cooking meals from scratch is one of the most important and beneficial things we can do for the health of our family and ourselves.
Don’t let your body deteriorate from lack of use combined with poor nutrition. It’s the only one you get issued with so it makes good sense to do some basic maintenance so it won’t let you down somewhere down the track.
We all need to start taking some responsibility to protect ourselves and our children from being one of 400 million people that will become statistics. Reclaim what rightfully belongs to each one of us – a health span that matches our life span.
To do this a simple but effective exercise plan is the ticket. Check out my Minimalist Exercise and Nutrition Plan here: Minimalistic Fitness This is no fluff program that can be done in the gym or at home. In just a few weeks you won’t believe how good you feel!
For more tools and resources from Carolyn Hansen to assist you in attaining your goals and achieving the success you desire in life please visit:
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