| NEW FITNESS A DIMENSION OF THE NEW MEDICINE by Ken O’Neill, MA ISSA | | Director of Physical Training, Sebring Clinic
There’s no great challenge in understanding the extremes of disease and excellence. What’s been missing until now in traditional medicine and public health education is a robust sense of preventative, sustainable fitness for living.
NEW MEDICINE
Our New Medicine is a rational departure from the old, standard way of practicing. We connect vital matters of health with prescribed physical activity, nutritional education, aesthetic treatment, and other therapies as the partial or full remedy so that physical care is no longer monotherapeutic but, rather, fully integrative.
NEW FITNESS
Partnering exercise physiology with medical practice, nutrition, and other therapies, we gain a spectrum of health and healing options for sustainable living that generate New Fitness based on recovery from health threatening conditions through peak performance for each individual.
NEW MEDICINE for NEW DISEASE
Medicine gained credibility in the 19th and 20th century by triumphing over illness and death from infectious diseases due to microbes, developing immunization and anti-biotics. With discovery of viruses, viral immunization virtually eliminated polio within a single generation.
Throughout the 20th century new types of illnesses developed, replacing microbes and viruses as leasing causes of illness and death The new illnesses are collectively known as Chronic Degenerative Diseases. Those diseases don’t suddenly happen: instead, slow, steady processes of subtle, behind-the-scenes degeneration slowly compromise health and vitality. Since degenerative diseases aren’t caused by microbes or accidents, for a long time it was convenient to explain their causes ‘genetic’ — as disorders ‘running in families.’ But the majority of chronic degenerative diseases were unknown prior to the 20th century. President Dwight Eisenhower was treated while in office for coronary thrombosis by pioneering cardiologist Dr Paul Dudley White. White readily admitted that when he graduated from medical school in 1911 coronary thrombosis was unknown. Scientists hold genetic changes take upwards of 100,000 years to set in: Chronic Degenerative Diseases have barely a century of impact. Their causes have to be simpler and closer at hand.
Chronic degenerative diseases include type II diabetes, chronic obesity, osteoporosis, hypertension, elevated blood lipids, peripheral circulatory diseases, among a growing palette of symptoms. Taken together, they amount to a huge, costly epidemic. Television advertising for prescription and over the counter drugs highlights the magnitude of the new epidemic. The role of New Medicine is to treat New Diseases — Chronic Degenerative Diseases.
UPSTREAM TO THE CAUSES
Chronic Degenerative Diseases can’t be spread: they aren’t communicable disease you catch from someone else. Instead, factors in your life are causing you to slowly, steadily fall apart. Only when you reach a crucial phase in falling apart will you know so: visible symptoms include gaining or losing bodyweight, loss of energy and enthusiasm, growing sense of weakness and instability, even depression.
During the 1980s, Rosenberg and Evans did pioneering research concerning muscle wasting (sarcopenia) at Tufts University. The investigated the long held idea that muscle wasting is a normal part of aging, finding instead that muscle wasting is a major cause of aging. Inseparably associated with muscle wasting is a condition known as Metabolic Syndrome. Chronic Degenerative Diseases are essentially another term for Metabolic Syndrome — included are type II diabetes, elevated blood fats, hypertension, arthritis, osteoporosis, and obesity.
Traditional medicine treats various aspects of Metabolic Syndrome as if they were stand-alone diseases by not seeking causes upstream of current conditions. That results in fragmentation of cause from effect, compromising comprehensive treatment.
Evans & Rosenberg’s work didn’t end with relating sarcopenia to metabolic disaster. They found that metabolic syndrome and muscle wasting can be stopped and reversed, as well as prevented — without using drugs, and by totally natural means. Their work aimed at resetting metabolism by as much as possible restoring your baseline metabolism.
Muscle wasting has become more pronounced with growth of the industrial and technological revolutions divorcing us from hard labor as well as bringing more leisure time for passive, sedentary activities, along with transition in foods to denatured, nutrient lacking substances. The Tufts’ work stimulated hundreds of other research studies confirming Evans & Rosenberg.
The NEW FITNESS
Up until now doctors have recommended exercise programs to their patients. Yet measurement of fitness and health are not part of annual physical examinations. Standard testing hunts for disease; in absence of disease, you’re normal or fit or healthy — all as a condition on absence of disease. In that respect, those ‘normal’ terms are empty since they’re not tested for some degree of healthiness or fitness.
From working with myriad people over the last 50 years, it’s obvious that both fitness and exercise mean different things to different people. It’s also obvious those who need the most work generally want to do the least amount of work! The New Fitness is part and parcel of The New Medicine, and is not only measurable but measurements are used to monitor your progress.
Traditional medicine to some extent advocates exercise and fitness. Because exercise physiology is not part of medical education, advocating fitness is loose, not to a standard. In fact, exercise recommendations are hinged on what a given doctor may know! Not so with the New Medicine.
Evans and Rosenberg found one activity alone is sufficient for restoring metabolic sanity: strength training or resistance exercise. That kind of exercise has a very specific meaning. And activities such as running, gardening, going for walks, and aerobic equipment in gyms does NOT count. Muscle wasting is loss of type II strength muscle tissue, and only strength training will cause restoration of metabolic balance and health.
Strength training does not mean getting big and bulky like a power-lifter. For most people, resistance training progressively works your muscles enough to cause gaining back lost muscle. As you gain back muscle, your calorie demand increases, hence causing loss of body fat.
In New Medicine, Fitness is a component of care — not something recommended as an extra if you have time or interest. Think of strength training in the same way you think of diet in New Medicine: it emphasizes full care instead of partial care/ partial deficiency of care. Without strength training — as in Traditional Medicine — your condition will never completely return to normal. Orchestrating strength training, diet, and other conditions of prescribed care brings about optimal restoration of health.
INSURANCE INVESTMENT OPTIONS
Do you invest in life insurance or death insurance? In either case, how do you measure your return on investment to ensure you’re getting the biggest bang for your bucks? Death insurance — or End of Life Insurance — pays off when you’re done and gone. Living Life Insurance provides tangible, living returns on investment — measurable as increases in passion, energy, and motivation in living your life with gusto. Clearly, then, Living Life Insurance investments are practical, applied to prevent Chronic Degenerative Conditions from eating your life away, eroding your vitality, stripping you of your birthright. Living Life Insurance gives immeasurable payback in independence, personal power and vitality.
On an average basis, here’s what you can expect from initial restoration training as your Living Life Insurance practice:
30 days – increased energy and enthusiasm, better/deeper sleep, a growing appetite for protein rich foods
60 days – even though body weight very often hardly changes, pants sizes drop and inch or two, enthusiasm grows, energy becomes even more heightened, you realize you’re getting stronger.
90 days – clothes fit much differently, energy enhanced, libido enhanced, look forward to working out as play instead of a chore, hungering for basic clean nutrient dense foods, wanting to learn more about training and spend more time in working out. Sense of biological age (as distinct from chronological age) shifting, feeling much younger.
GAINING AND SUSTAINING FITNESS
People come to me all the time wanting to know what they can expect by way of results from training. Unfortunately, there’s not an iron clad universal answer: the good news is this, Fitness Individuality rules.
We use a set of ten bio-markets to assess your beginning level of fitness, then monitor those over the course of time to measure progress toward desired, highly valued states of conditioning.
The various markers all aim at something basic and primal: resetting by restoring your biological blueprint’s metabolic standard. Once on the way to reset, you’ll feel improvement by lessenly of tiredness, lessening of depression, those vague muscle pains without any sense of origin just seeming to go away, insomnia replaced by deep, restful sleep, lassitude giving way to energy, and alienation shifting to enthusiastic motivation. | |
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