Fitness is Essential

We’re a culture obsessed with cooties right now.

We’re wearing masks to avoid other people’s cooties. We’re staying home to prevent ourselves from unknowingly spreading our own cooties. We’re hoarding hand sanitizer so we can kill the cooties we pick up in the few instances when we do leave our homes.

We’re cooties-crazy.

But we need to start thinking about disease prevention in areas outside of just avoiding cooties.

The complications we are hearing about when folks contract COVID-19 indicate what those areas might be. If you do contract the disease, it can attack your lungs, your brain, your digestion, and your toes. Doctors are finding more and more ways in which this virus affects the human body.

Many of the areas of the body that are attacked by the virus are ones that are compromised via our lifestyle choices. Someone who is sedentary, makes poor nutrition choices, and is overweight is more likely to have weaker lungs, a weaker heart, weaker kidneys, and a weaker immune system—and thus a weaker system for fighting this disease once contracted. Even if a person had no clinical signs of the heart disease, diabetes, or asthma that doctors have warned all along would complicate this disease, simply being sedentary, eating poorly, and carrying extra weight would still put him or her at greater risk of not being able to recover from COVID-19.

In other words, what we have long thought to be chronic lifestyle diseases are, in the face of this virus, acute complications.

If coronavirus is any example of what kinds of new viruses we could see in the future, it becomes more and more clear that we can’t just think about cooties.

We need to change our lifestyles.

We need to focus on choices that prevent disease, not simply react to it.

And we need to start those changes now.

For a long time, fitness has been considered a hobby. Athletics in general are thought of in this way even today; we file sports under “recreation,” we often resent professional athletes who make money from “a game,” and we still label gym-goers and anyone with muscles as “meatheads.”

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The end results of being fit, however, are not mere entertainment, not mere amusement. Being fit means the absence of all those chronic lifestyle diseases and their precursors. Fitness is thus preventative—and protective. We prevent obesity, heart disease, diabetes, asthma, and all their complications, and we give the body the sound systems it needs to protect itself against attack.

I keep hoping that this health crisis will turn the tides in our views of fitness. The fitness industry has been screaming prevention for a long time now, and most folks haven’t heard us. What gets attention instead are the few fitness outliers who promise pots of gold at the end of short rainbows.

It doesn’t help that the fitness industry is deemed non-essential in our economic system. When our social and political leaders only see health in terms of hospitals and diseases, it’s easy to see why the population at large views fitness in similar terms.

But being fit is essential to this fight.

I hope we learn that in time to win it.