7 Days - New Body, New Life
Saturday
Aug272011

The Wild Ride and The Seven Gettits - Conclusion

IN CONCLUSION

The best weapons for fitness are those same weapons that battle disease.  The “panacea” medical approach considers interventions such as drugs and surgeries, but the medical field has neglected to recognize the power of responsibility and self-care.

While nothing that I do today has invalidated anything I’ve done with clients in the past, I continue to learn, and the “new strategies” I’ve learned to employ simply stack upon the foundational elements I’ve held to all along.  Today, it isn’t only about changing carb intake and increasing training intensity to get great abs.  With the degradation of our food supply, the toxic load we’re faced with, and the increasing stresses our society imposes upon us, we need new responses to handle unprecedented reactions.

If you want to shed “those last five pounds,” or “get your energy back,” if you want to “increase endurance for better running times” or “reverse the inflammation your doctor identified in your arterial system,” the same approach proves valuable.

-          Eat clean and often

-          Exercise strategically

-          Manage your environment

-          Commit to downtime and fun-time (with family)

-          Get outside in fresh air

Sounds simple?  It isn’t, at least not at first.  In closing, allow me to briefly revisit each of those bullet points adding a few words of clarity to each point, and then, it’s in your hands.  Here we go . . .

Eat clean and often (not easy – it requires a new understanding of food choices), exercise strategically (combining resistance with core movement, tapping the anaerobic threshold, and staggering sympathetic with parasympathetic response), and manage your environment (make careful choices when it comes to furnishings, cleaning supplies, or technology that you bring into your home).  Commit, not only to down time, but to fun-time, and get outside in fresh air (the park between the buildings in downtown Manhattan where trucks drive by with gray exhaust every eight seconds doesn’t count), and watch how it all starts to fall into place.  Fat goes away for thrilling aesthetic change.  You begin to feel better, function better, and better ward off dis-ease, and you feel a wonderful sense of control, not only over your health, but of you life!

Do you Gettit?  I hope you do.

I invite your thoughts and feedback.

-          Phil Kaplan

Note: you can download this entire piece as a pdf file