It's What's On The Inside That Counts

In the movie Liar Liar the boy playing Jim Carrey's son says, "My teacher said real beauty is on the inside." To which Jim Carrey's character replies, "That's just something fat people say." The kid is not far off, especially when it comes to long term health and wellness. While some of you may be struggling to figure out what this has to do with fitness, let me just spell it out for you: whether you look the way you wish you did or not, you need to exercise for the obvious health benefits. It's disheartening for me to hear about people who give up diet and exercise because "it doesn't seem to work for them." What we must realize is a healthy diet and exercise is essential to long term health and longevity, not just personal vanity.

Don't get me wrong, I believe it is important for us to feel comfortable in our own skin. Having a healthy self-image is vital to maintaining a healthy experience of the rest of the world. But a good diet and regular physical activity extends beyond dropping pounds and chiseled six-pack abs. The truth of the matter is, if you honestly stick with a healthy nutrition plan and continually exercise over the course of months and years the results will eventually follow. We have to stop kidding ourselves and pretending that three or four weeks of a lifestyle change is going undo five, ten, fifteen, twenty and maybe even thirty years of total body negligence. There is something we fail to realize about the human body: it wants to maintain homeostasis.

For those of you who snoozed through Biology class, homeostasis is the ability of a cell or organism to maintain a stable internal environment when dealing with external changes. Basically, once the body is at a point of comfort and stability, it is going to resist altering that position until it becomes absolutely necessary to make adaptations to ensure sustainability. When you carry around 20 or 30% body fat around for most of your life, your body becomes comfortable at that point. Because your sedentary lifestyle and affinity for poor food choices has been the body's environment for ten or twenty years, it has not been subjected to a stimulus or environment that requires it to carry less fat and run with a more efficient metabolism. Essentially what you have to do to see results is create an environment in which your body must expend calories and metabolize fat for survival. This new environment must persist long enough for the body to break its current homeostatic position and adapt to a new form of homeostasis. Therefore, if you have been diligently eating well and exercising for a couple weeks, months or even a year you must be patient as you reprogram your biology.

You must approach your fat loss goals from an evolutionary perspective. If your environment for the last twenty years has allowed you to be overweight, then you can expect to change your environment for a considerable amount of time before it starts to change. With these biological principles in mind, you cannot fail to acknowledge what the diet and exercise process does for you internally. Your heart will grow stronger, visceral fat will decrease, you will lower cholesterol levels, your insulin sensitivity will increase and hyperglycemic conditions will subside long before you begin to see any physical changes. Much like any real change we wish to see in ourselves, even the physical changes start from the inside out. Don't give up on your goals and stick to a long term plan with short goals as check points. When it comes down to it, internal health is what helps you live longer and healthier, not a six pack.