Adaptation in Humans

Life is ten percent what happens to you and ninety percent how you respond to it.

-Lou Holtz

I really find human evolution amazing and find it even more interesting when looking at the adaptation in humans that we've gone through and continue to go through.

When you think about it, the body so easily adapts to a change in the environment, what kinds of food you put in it, what kinds of movement or stress you put on it, etc.

I have a client of mine who is in his mid-50s that is in one of my classes that came up to me last night and told me that it had been one year since he had a heart attack.

It was a real eye opener for him and he said he felt lucky to have a second chance to turn things around from being unhealthy to being healthy.

He said he had always been overweight and in his words "I thought I was immortal. No matter what I ate or how little exercise I got, there weren't going to be any consequences to that."

But after that heart attack, he quickly changed his mind.

He started eating better, started exercising, and a year later, he dropped between 70-80 pounds and when he went to the doctor the other day for a stress test, the doctor was amazed at how healthy of a transformation he had made in just one year.

That's the amazing part about the adaptation in humans.

Even if you've been living an unhealthy lifestyle for 10, 20, even 30 years, of eating horrible foods, gaining weight, being sedentary, etc., in the big picture, it does not take long for your body to adapt positively when you start making healthier decisions about what you eat and how you move your body for exercise.

It's great to hear that client of mine talk about how much better he physically feels now that he's making better choices about his health. How it puts a smile on his face to be able to chase after his granddaughter that he might not have been able to share time with if that heart attack had been a little worse.

The bottom line is that:

1) no one is immortal to unhealthy choices you make on how you treat your body. The effects might not be immediate, they might not even show up within 10-20 years, but at some point, it WILL catch up to you.

2) it's never too late to start making healthier choices AND if in the big picture, you stick with it CONSISTENTLY, your body will reward you fairly quickly to those healthier choices that you make.

For the most part, we don't control much that happens in our lives. We don't control whether we get hired for a job, laid off from a job, lose our health insurance, or see a loved one get seriously ill.

But the one thing that all of us have control over, is the ability to decide how well we treat our bodies.

Your body is your gift and it's your choice whether you want to treat it well or not.

FRIDAY LINK:

Just a quick link to an article that might surprise you on bad breakfast foods.

www.leanbodytraining.com
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