What is health?
How do we know if how we are currently living/eating/training is serving us?
We have quantitative measures we can try to do, like blood labs etc. But we also look qualitatively.
We have things like body composition or BMI – we are over conditioned to look at this for signs of health. It is important, but not to the extent many think. In terms of health, having a 6 pack isn’t necessarily make or break.
We also have a few others, which I’ll call the Big Four for now. These are some qualitative signs that we can think about straight away, that give some solid clues as to whether we are on the right track or not with our nutrition and lifestyle setup.
- Sex drive. This is a big clue of the state of our nervous system (including is our diet working for us). Consistent, sex drive. Sure, it’ll vary a little person to person, but more often than not, when we are stressed, this desire will almost immediately drop.
- Breathing – Are you a chronic mouth breather? What does your natural breathing state look like?
- Sleep – do you sleep through the night? Do you have trouble getting to sleep? Do you have trouble sleeping through? Do you wake up still feeling tired? Again, like sex drive, this will drop very quickly when we become sympathetic dominant (long term, low level stress).
- Anxiety – there is a lot around anxiety these days, many understand that it changes with work, or types of training, or sleep. Anxiety is not our default. For many of us, we can do a lot with food, breathing work and how we move/exercise to down-regulate our nervous system and help this.
Having a few of these qualitative feedback methods can help us to understand our bodies more. Rather than rushing to fix each individual problem that pops up, we can start to see patterns that give clues about the deeper state of our whole system.
We get to tweak our training program, our nutrition and lifestyle factors, how we move and breath to see feedback pretty quickly in a number of these areas.
