It’s easy to get caught up in the daily news of our “fitness obsession,” and to spend more time focused on that instead of helping our own bodies to get in the best shape they can. As we grow older, we experience more change and it seems that the changes are getting harder to keep up with.
It’s easy to see that our lives are constantly evolving. Our physical bodies, our minds, our relationships, our relationships with our own bodies and our bodies of others, and the way we relate to them all change. This is the perfect time to consider our relationship with our own bodies.
I’ve noticed that I become more aware of this over the years. We know how our bodies change. We have a good idea of what we need to change. We know that when we’re old and in our mid-60s we may no longer need to take medications, but we can still have them without feeling bad. But we don’t know what we need to change, or how much, or how long, or what to do to make it happen.
Body awareness can be a difficult concept to grasp. I have a body that is about 5% the size of mine, and that is a very good thing. But I’ve noticed that my physical size may change, and if I keep on eating the wrong food and not exercising, my body will change. That is, unless I was lucky enough to grow up when we were allowed to exercise in the parks and gyms, then it was a very different story.
If you can imagine it, you can change your body. And if you can change it at a young age, it seems you can also change the way your mind works, and that could be a very helpful mental health thing. We recently ran a study where we compared a group whose diet was more consistent with what we think is the ideal diet for optimal health vs. a group of people whose diet was more inconsistent and unhealthy.
The study showed that people who ate more consistently and who did so for longer had bigger improvements in a bunch of measures of health. We also found that this was due to an increased ability to focus on long-term goals. So in other words, your ability to be more consistent and healthy may be the result of your mind working harder.
The two groups were similar in age and gender. But the differences were dramatic. The group eating more consistently had significant higher baseline scores on nearly all the measures of health, including life satisfaction, health optimism, and health locus of control. And they also had significantly fewer unhealthy behaviors (smoking, drinking, overeating) and they didn’t use tobacco or alcohol at all, compared to the group whose diet was less consistent and unhealthy.
It’s not surprising that eating a consistent diet can improve your health and lower your risk of chronic disease. But the effect seems to be strongest among people who are also exercising regularly and have a good idea of what foods are best for them. So it makes sense that diet and exercise both have a positive effect on mental health.
But the results show that exercise and diet (and exercise in conjunction with a healthy weight) have a huge positive effect on mental health even if people don’t exercise. This suggests that if you’re not exercising, you should be eating better, not smoking, drinking, or overeating.
Exhale is another word I really like in the title of this article. It’s one of those words that sounds so positive, but it means you’re exhaling. Exhale is the word that means you’re exhaling in a way that makes you feel good. It’s a word that’s often used to describe how you feel while breathing. The problem is that this word often has a negative connotation.