One of the biggest things that I have noticed about exercise and fitness over the last 10 years is what little people know about their current health status before they start an exercise and fitness plan. I’m not talking about the physical assessment you may do at a gym when you consider height, weight, body fat, and blood pressure. I am talking about an individual person’s chemical makeup (blood, urine and saliva as well as body composition). If you don’t know where you are starting from how do you know how to get to where you are going? In my professional experience, this is one of two reasons most exercise programs soon plateau or just don’t work at all.
The first problem is that most diet and exercise programs concentrate on the scale and not the overall body composition. All to often I see someone lose weight but actually lose muscle mass and water which makes them more unhealthy then when they started. We want you to lose weight but we want you to lose fat not muscle or water. The reason for this is because higher muscles mass equates to higher metabolism so when you get the weight off you keep it off. Another problem in today’s world is that almost everyone is OVER stressed. Being stressed causes your Adrenal gland in to go into a “fight or flight” mood which increases Cortisol and shunts everything away from your sex hormones like estrogen and testosterone.
There are three phases of adrenal deterioration: 1) alarm, 2) resistance and 3) exhaustion. The first two phases will see an increase in Cortisol and the third will see a decrease. This sets off a tidal wave of complications initially it will raise your blood sugar levels causing you not only to become fatter and increase cholesterol which increases your chances of heart attack or stroke but it will also make you insulin resistant increasing your chances of diabetes. Second if you have your heart rate too high when you are working out and you are in one of these phases you will make this situation worse. I believe two tests are imperative if you want to maximize your time, money and effort in achieving your fitness goals. One is something called an electrical Bioimpedance Analysis and also an Adrenal stress index panel which are both offered at our office.