Fitness February?!

Not sure if it’s a thing, but I’m going to declare February as “Fitness February”! Most of us start strong starting with New Year’s Day but as the weeks go by, we kind of lose steam. And by fitness, I’m not talking just exercise in a gym. I’m talking about the whole thing. Going back to the definition of Fitness; “the state of being fit or in good physical condition”. To me, this means exercise, nutrition AND mental health, because it takes all of those things in different amounts to be in good physical condition. If I wanted to define “good physical condition”, that is a condition of homeostasis. And what is meant by homeostasis is “the body’s automatic, self regulating process of maintaining a stable balanced environment to function correctly” (being healthy or fit).

If I’m going to be 100% honest, is that I’m still learning. There is always something new to learn, including about ourselves. I was not feeling fit at all recently. I was eating what appears to be a healthy diet to most people. There was nothing that seemed odd about what I was eating. I was reaching my macros. I was eating a good amount of fiber. I was exercising 5 days per week. I ended up very sick. It was a food intolerance and I had recognized it as an intolerance to MSG. Only none of the labels on any packages of food I had eaten had MSG in it. What I hadn’t understood was which foods had NATURAL MSG in it. And yes, it is abundant in nature as well as chemically added to food to taste UMAMI. I ate lots of salads with tomatoes. I had natural parmesan on my pasta (not the shelf stable ones with extra chemicals claiming to be grated parmesan cheese either). I had deli meat that was only cured pork and salt (no extra ingredients, not even sodium nitrate), plus my normal protein yogurts and fruit. I was sick for days with gas, feeling sick, unable to eat (first sick day only taking in 700 calories and sleeping for the whole day, plus tea), and barely making it through yoga classes. It took so long to recover from this sickness with not moving as much, and having to work my way to fit larger amounts of food every day until I got to the amount of calories I needed to sustain and then power my body through workouts after the sickness passed. So what happened was, my body was telling me there was something wrong through extra gas and having slow or delayed bowel movements and feeling sick.

So the lesson is, don’t ignore your body when it’s telling you something is off. A body in homeostasis is more “regular” and does not have uncomfortable symptoms like gas. In doing my research, even healthy foods like tomatoes, aged cheeses, cured ham even with no nitrates, even soy sauce with no added MSG, walnuts, shiitake mushrooms, etc have natural MSG. A food intolerance does not mean you can’t eat foods that can cause an intolerance reaction at all (unlike an allergy where even small amounts can cause real damage to your body), it means you have to be careful of the amounts of these foods and balance it better so you can still enjoy some (just not to an extreme). So it’s balance (like the basics behind homeostasis itself) that we need to learn, just as we need to learn that all or nothing thinking never works for healthy eating or exercising - too little results in fat gain and possible physical damage and too much results in fat gain and possible physical damage. Learn and know your body (and everyone’s body is different - there is no blanket best way that works exactly for everyone-the next person over could eat all the stuff I was eating that made me sick and they would be perfectly fine and then some). Food intolerances are pretty common, but if you have one, take note, because if your body is TOO BUSY trying to digest something that it’s overloaded with, it’ll work on trying to digest and eliminate the substance causing the intolerance INSTEAD of digesting the nutrition from the food and delivering it to your body as fuel and recovery.

So as some of us “lose steam” after a month into the new year, declaring February as “Fitness February”; I want to remind everyone not to give up, even when we have obstacles (like food intolerance “attacks”-because that was what it felt like). We find out things, we learn, we make adjustments with really good educated guesses. We get back on, because consistency beats perfect pretty much every single time. There is no perfect. We are human. Learn and have grace, forgive the fact that you aren’t perfect.