FE #4

In todays Newsletter you’ll find:

• Welcome back to the journey.

• What’s happening in the research corner?

• Why live intentionally?

Before we begin, I’d like to thank you for subscribing and embarking on these new Fitness Endeavors together.

Fitness Endeavors is about the journey, the process each individual must take working towards achieving their own personal Health and Fitness goals. For those that have come along the journey from the beginning that may sound familiar, but the reality is that with every single step along the way, you make a choice to stay on the path, to keep going and to continually work to improve yourself in so many different ways. Your journey will look exactly like no one else, and the struggles will be yours to bear, and the victories both big and small will also be yours. You will have the option to share the ups and downs of the journey with the fellow humans of your choice. Life is often more tolerable when you can share the experience with those your value. This may need to be a topic unto itself. It can be a challenge allowing even a friend or loved one into your daily ups and downs but if you choose correctly you just may find that it can accelerate your path to success.

I'm different than most people. When I cross the finish line of a big race, I see that people are ecstatic, but I'm thinking about what I'm going to do tomorrow. It's as if my journey is everlasting, and there is no finish line. ~David Goggins

Cholesterol- Blood cholesterol to be more specific is a waxy, fat-like substance made by your liver. It is a vital part of our bodies chemistry and is needed to make many hormones including testosterone and estrogen, along with fat-dissolving bile acids.

When Ansel Keys published his Seven Countries Studies in 1953, it was ground breaking. One of the biggest take aways for years was “there is a relationship of the diet to the concentration of cholesterol and allied substances in the serum and to the death rate of the adult population.” As often happens with health and nutrition, certain things “stick” and get repeated and somewhere along the way most accept the concept as truth without every truly diving into the science. This becomes even more difficult when you introduce money and personal egos into the equation. The original data set that was studied contained 22 countries overall and produced a weaker correlation than what was eventually published. So whats a scientist to do but pick out 7 countries that provide a stronger correlation to prove your point.

Often times in nutrition and fitness we fall victim to a form of “group” think, a situation where we repeat ideas we’ve been taught without ever questioning the validity of such a statement or the science behind it. In 1991 Russell L. Smith, Ph.D in consultation with Edward R. Pinckney, M.D. published their second volume of an analysis of the Seven Countries Study entitled Diet, Blood Cholesterol and Coronary Heart Disease: A critical review of the literature it is an extensive review of the origins of the focus on cholesterol levels as well as the industries that grew out of the research and the money that followed. When you click on the above link you will be taken to an extremely big document, but for a brief overview the author created a list of “101 REASONS WHY DIET AND BLOOD CHOLESTEROL LEVEL ARE NOT THE CAUSE OF CHD” CHD= Coronary Heart Disease Scroll down to page 1-32 for the beginning of the list. Some of the ones that stand out the most are

“11. Blood cholesterol levels increase very little in men during adulthood but a great deal among women and yet CHD occurs 10 to 15 years earlier in men.”

“12. Blood cholesterol levels of vegetarians increase with age even though they maintain a vegetarian diet.”

Obviously there are 98 other examples given and explored in the publication, but suffice it to say we will be retouching this topic in greater detail in future newsletters.

The purpose of this brief overview is just to introduce the idea that making choices for our health because that’s how its always been done or something has become common knowledge, is all the more reason to seek to find a more thorough understanding of how it came to be. Even though we would hope that all scientist have our best interest in mind and many doctors for that matter, it unfortunately isn’t always the case and ultimately we must take full responsibility for the choices we make. We can make our choices by exclusively trusting another’s opinion or we can do some digging our self to seek a more thorough understanding of the matter for ourselves.

Time: Our most valuable resource! We all have a limited amount of it, and to top it off we don’t ever know even how much we have. We must choose each day what to do with our time. It could be making the time for a workout or making time to cook a home cooked meal, but regardless of what it is we should work to think of it as an intentional choice in what we are doing.

Another important factor when thinking about living intentionally is who do we spend out valuable time with. It may sound cliché, but often times as one ages and we all experience loved ones passing on, the importance of who we spend our time with becomes more and more clear.

It’s easy to get in a routine of the mundane and we all may be guilty of it at times, but work to take stock of just how much time is being spent intentionally and how much of your time is just slipping away without you even realizing it.

Live Intentionally

The number one reason to start with Fitness Endeavors is because you will no longer ever be on your journey alone. You will be part of a community that is on the same journey as you. Each individual may be at a different place on the journey but none the less, you don’t walk alone.

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The Fitness Endeavors Newsletter will be a constant source of inspiration, as well as information. You will find stories from individuals just like yourself, stories of tragedy and heart ache to persistence and triumph. Fitness Endeavors is about the ups and the downs, the choices we make every day, some right in line with our goals and others not so much, but either way we keep forging ahead knowing that as we continue on the path, we learn to enjoy the struggle, the small victories, we learn from the mistakes and we constantly keep learning and growing as individuals. We value sharing our wisdom along the way, and bringing others along on the journey with us.