What kind of dirt is your health & fitness planted in?

If our health and fitness were a seed, what kind of soil are we asking it to grow in? If we keep it surrounded by fast food, sugar, cigarette smoke, and a constant stream of pharmaceutical drugs, can we really expect it to produce good fruit? Is this not like expecting a recipe for a chocolate cake to produce a vanilla one?

Becoming a product of our surroundings is pretty exciting if we think about how rapidly our body builds another generation of cells to replace the trillions of cells that make up our body, or how our muscles adapt to the stress we put our muscles under during exercise by making them larger, stronger and with more tone, definition, and capability.

Garden of disease: If we could have a time-lapse video of a person who gets off work from a job he or she has a bad attitude toward (and who goes home each day after work and drinks alcohol until bedtime with a fast food supper, topped off with a muscle relaxer and sleep medicine,) it’s not hard to imagine what this person may look and feel like in six months.

Garden of health and fitness: if this same person starts waking up earlier, eats a healthy breakfast, packs a healthy lunch, starts treating their job and people he or she works with, with appreciation, gets off work and hits the gym, it’s not hard to imagine the huge difference that could be made in even a 3 month period! After 6 months, even more benefits start appearing, and after a year, the changes would be so stark that it almost would look like someone turned back the aging clock on the person. It’s no different for an individual than it is for a plant that is put in fertile, moisturized dirt vs. hard, nutrient-deficient, dry dirt.

Imagine how a tree would feel if it were not getting much water and the nutrient level in the surrounding dirt was very low. We would trim the pale, blighted leaves and branches off to make it a healthier tree. That’s how our body feels if we cut, medicate and radiate without changing what is actually causing the problem. It’s like smashing the check engine light on our car and then acting like the problem is gone.

Example: taking a pain pill for a hurting hip (instead of using a crutch) and then walking around like this body part isn’t hurting. This body part wants you to limp and take the pressure of its regular load off of it for a while and let the inflammation and our other healing mechanisms do its duties. It does NOT want us to take anti-inflammatory medicine to mess up the healing process and pain pills to disconnect us from what it is going through. If you have to take a pain pill, at the least, continue to lighten the load on the hip.

Each choice we make, (whether it’s clogging up the oxygen we breathe, with cigarette smoke vs. clean air, bad diet vs. healthy diet, active lifestyle vs. sedentary lifestyle, sunshine vs. chemical sun blockers, sodas and other high sugar, fructose, aspartame drink products vs. water, and social isolation vs. social connection) determines the soil our health is rooted in.

Our health and fitness has roots, and it is planted squarely in the lifestyle habits we choose and oft times the environment we select. This defines the outcome much like nutrient-rich soil and hydration does for a plant. Each choice we make determines the dirt our health and fitness are planted in.