Carbon Neutral Fitprint
January 4, 2009
Wikepedia says that a Carbon Footprint is a “measure of the impact that human activities have on the environment in terms of the amount of greenhouse gases produced, measured in units of carbon dioxide” so therefore, I deduct that a carbon neutral footprint would be one where any environmental impact that we produce would be erased or neutralized, so to speak, by other contributions that we’ve made to the earth to counteract the negative by-products. So for you bidness people, it’s a break-even, where total costs equal sales.
And, since everything my eyeballs see becomes a metaphor for fitness, I have taken the idea one step further. The idea of erasing negatives from the past with positives in the future is also appealing from a fitness vantage point.
Virtually every aging process can be impeded and quite a few can truly be reversed if we improve our lifestyle. This means eating healthy foods, exercising , curbing our stress levels and getting rid of bad habits like talking on the cell phone while driving not to mention smoking. Smokers, wake the heck up. Get out of the dark ages. Smoking will one day be spoken of like we now speak of blood-letting. We used to blood-let in the Middle Ages because we didn’t know any better. But we now live in an age with too much information to not give quitting one more try. If smokers make one change this year, giving up smoking is the one to make. Not smoking is the new smoking. Stopping will lengthen your life dramatically. I challenge all smokers to get out of the dark ages and to stop it right now.
But I digress. Whether you are 72 or 32, your behavior, those little choices you make all day long, makes a huge difference in how fast or slow you age.
And if you had to pick one behavior that would erase more of what I like to call your lifestyle footprint, then exercise should be the Big Foot of changes to physically break even.
Many of the other markers for optimal aging, like sleep, diet, spiritual well-being and genetic predisposition are in fact affected by the percentage of lean mass in your body. Lean mass is directly influenced by how physically active you are.
Think of working out as an investment, such as a retirement fund. We pay a little bit in every day so that, years from now, we are not sitting immobile is a nursing home. Start practicing your good habits today so that your lifestyle fitprint not only remains neutral but so that it actually pays you more in return, and that return is living younger for longer.
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