Being Healthy isn’t an optional extra in life!

It took me a long time to wake up to this simple truth. I was kidding myself for years that I was still “healthy”, well for my age.

My general health had been reasonable for years and I hadn’t really had any illness to speak of since my mid 30s. The odd cold I guess, but that’s about it. I wasn’t unwell but I didn’t feel healthy either.

But the sad truth is my health was in serious decline. My resting heart rate was creeping up, my energy levels were sagging, my mental alertness was diminishing, my joints were creaking and it took an age to recover from any arduous activities. And my waist was expanding, relentlessly!

My Waist to Height Ratio told me what my BMI Score Didn’t

Of course our body weight is the easiest measure we can consider as we try and determine our state of health.

But a healthy body weight is determined by a host of factors including age, gender and of course our natural overall bodyshape or somatotype. The natural body shapes range from naturally tall and slim, the Ectomorphs, to Mesomorphs and then to Endomorphs who are naturally much bulkier. Your somatotype is determined by your DNA and we all sit somewhere along that scale.

A number of different measures have been developed to try and take all these different factors into account including:

• • • Body Mass Index Score, BMI
    • Waist Circumference, WC
    • Waist to Hip Ratio, WHR
    • Waist to Height Ratio, WHtR

They can all provide useful information about the state of your health but each measure has some limitations. However, the Waist to Height Ratio does provide a measure that can be applied universally as I explain in my book. And the key marker is the 0.5.

A ratio greater than 0.5 indicates increased risk of a host of possible diseases. A ratio below 0.5 indicates decreased risk. This marker applies regardless of gender, age, ethnicity. It has a universal application.

But the measure does not cover every possible disease and must still accommodate individual characteristics. So two peoples’ individual level of risk may vary as their ratio exceed the 0.5 marker. A small increase for a naturally slim build like mine indicates a bigger increase in risk than it would for a more heavily built individual. But it is consistent in that an increase in the ratio above 0.5 indicates an increase in the level of risk for both of us.

So coming back to my BMI Score.

Waist to Height Ratio – the big wake up call

In Feb 2013 I had to face up to my new reality, my waist was past 36 1/2″ and that meant my Waist to Height Ratio was up to 0.52, well beyond the critical 0.5 mark. I was into serious health risk territory and I cover this in detail in:

Your Waist to Height Ratio is the key indicator to health risks – and this simple but effective meaure highlights how you don’t have to be obese to be in the high risk to health territory

Taking my health seriously again – starting with my diet and getting moving again

I jumped straight in looking for ways to improve my:

1. Diet & Nutrition

I was embarrassed to find I had let good eating habits slip away but luckily I found it easy to rebuild them and really enjoy my food again. I’m not the slightest bit interested in any sort of restrictive diet. For goodness sake, if life is an adventure then the food you eat should be part of that too. Whatever your food preference there are lots of great foods out there.

We all need the same nutrients – we can get these from all sorts of food choices and preferences

My own Food Pyramid and A Diet You Can Live With – 3 simple diet hacks you can use anywhere, whatever your food preferences

I’ll come back to my 3 simple diet hacks and how these made eating well so easy a little later. All I’d say right now is that I was really annoyed and disappointed with myself that I’d let the hard earned lessons from my 30s slip away.

2. Diet & Anatomy

Diet & Nutrition isn’t just about the food we eat. I had learnt a few difficult lessons that it’s also about how the body works, our anatomy.

The small intestines – our second brain

How did we get here?

3. Getting moving again

The human body is designed to move but I had stopped moving! I told you how was stuck in a mindset thinking I could just flick a switch and step back 20 years. How I turned this around is covered in more detail in the Fitness & Strength section but there is one key post to get things started:

Pets, bird watching and walking again – I still chuckle when I think about how these random things helped me get moving again

Taking my health seriously again – sleep, recovery, and maintenance are all important too!

Every year my journey seems to get faster and I seem to find more areas where I can tweak and sometimes radically change the things I do. In some ways I’m probably trying to make up for lost time, all those years slipping into inertia. But now I just have so many things I want to do, there is not time or energy to waste. So over the coming months I will try to add posts on more topics including:

Maintenance – becoming pro-active about managing wear and tear, like my right knee as well as dealing with injuries, like my L5 Facet, just seemed to fall into place.

Sleep – without a sensible sleep pattern I was always tired and lethargic.

Recovery – becoming more physically active also meant I needed to allow myself a bit of time to recover and grow again.

Rebuilding Good Eating Habits and “A Diet You Can Live With”

I mentioned letting some good eating habits slip. Well back in my 30s I had succumbed to a tropical illness I had picked up working in some pretty grim areas of Papua New Guinea. With the help of a Harley Street specialist, Dr Younis, I had recovered and although the illness remains as a virus I was able to normalise my eating habits again.

I found going back to these lost habits was not just easy but also a relief. I didn’t have to fret or worry about calories or follow some restrictive regime. I just used three simple hacks to help me make good choices about my daily nutrition.

My own Food Pyramid and A Diet You Can Live With – 3 simple diet hacks you can use anywhere

Food is an adventure again

There are times when all this was easy and fun and other times when I would lose my way again as work and other life pressures got in the way. But the benefits constantly outweighed any extra time or effort and now being pro-active about my Health & Diet is just my new normal. And best of all, food is an adventure again.