Physical Intelligence - Day 79

As I move towards the last 10 days of this log, my primary objective is what happens when this log is over and ensuring that what follows this log is a major lifestyle change.  Engaging a challenge for a certain number of days may elicit some behaviour change, but lifestyle is not a challenge, it is a way of life - but a conscientious challenge may contribute to a way of life.

Lifestyle can also drastically change due to an unwelcome shock, but just because crisis appears, it does not guarantee we will make that shock transform us to a new way of life. The healthcare system saves so many people from their unhealthy lifestyles - giving people a second chance but the data shows that a surprising number of people revert to their former ways and return to a unhealthy lifestyle.  That has been articulated well in Alan Deutschman's book Change or Die.   Our way of life can swing from unhealthy to healthy and back to unhealthy.

There are three possibilities in terms of a healthy lifestyle

1. IGNORANCE

2. LIFESTYLE

3. OBSESSION

The first condition is I can revert or regress back to an unhealthy life and play dice with my own life.  The second condition is to see my way of life as a healthy way of life.  The third condition is to become extreme in my ways.  Rather than an athletic lifestyle it can become an obsession, which is better than ignorance but has associated dangers with it, if anything dangers that are just as life threatening as ignorance of health.

I am absolutely far removed from the warning about exercise addiction that Jan Brett addresses here, and while she offers an opinion about exercise addiction, what she is addressing is our internal motivation and being consumed with body image, the same mentality that also produces eating disorders.  Exercise addiction in men may take them in a different direction such as taking steroids and stuffing chemicals into their bodies to speed up muscle mass, and to speed up muscle mass it requires exercise addiction.

In 10 days time the big change will be moving from health ignorance to healthy lifestyle.  What I don't want is to get to healthy lifestyle is to cross over to unhealthy obsession.  That definition of unhealthy is TOTAL lifestyle not just eating right and living right - and a total lifestyle is incorporating physical intelligence as an intelligence.  Just because we use the word intelligence as a part of what we study or practice, does not mean that it is actually intelligent. 

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