Example Of Essay On The Importance Fitness To Health

Physical fitness encompasses many areas of life. Its basic meaning is that the physiological mechanisms are working non-pathologically in light of the age of the individual. There are several components of physical fitness. Diet and metabolism make up one part. Another part can be thought of as cardiovascular health and muscle tone. Hygiene and freedom from disease make up a third component of physical fitness. The ancient Romans said: mens sana in corpore sano, or sound mind in a healthy body. Increasingly it is being shown that physical fitness contributes to mental health.
One of the key quantitative measures of physical fitness is the Body Mass Index. BMI is calculated as mass(kg)/height m^2 and places people into categories of underweight (<18.5), normal (18.5-25), overweight (25-30), obese (30-40), and morbidly obese (>40). Diet and metabolism are key components of mass, as excess calories are retained from the diet and stored as fat in the body. Different people have different basal metabolic needs. Taller people and people with more muscle mass will require more calories than a shorter person or one with less muscle mass. Furthermore, a pregnant or lactating woman will require additional calories in order to carry a healthy baby. Finally, the caloric needs of adolescents going through puberty are also particularly high. People who eat more than their basal metabolic needs will get fatter, unless they do something do physical activity to increase their metabolic demands.
Cardiovascular exercise and muscle building exercises are excellent ways of increasing basal metabolic demands. By persistent cardiovascular exercise, one strengthens the hearts musculature and improves the circulation generally. Muscle toning exercises increase physical strength and flexibility. While performing weight lifting exercises, microscopic muscle fibers are damaged in the process and the subsequent healing results in the larger, stronger muscle. A larger muscle requires more calories to maintain, and the person with the larger muscle will need to eat more calories. An exceptionally muscular person might have a large BMI that would inappropriately place them in the obese category, while their physical fitness would be excellent and their health problems might be drastically different than a person made morbidly obese by KFC and TV.
Fitness is also dependent on the hygiene and disease state of the individual. In cases of complete neglect of hygiene, there are often problems in other parts of the individual’s life. Research has looked at a linkage between tooth tartar and the calcified buildups in the arteries. Developed from this is the theory that atherosclerosis might be partially caused by similar bacteria that create tooth plaque. The lack of mobility and excess fats and triglycerides in the body as a result of an unhealthy diet, have all been associated with the development of arterial plaques that have been linked to heart disease. Inadequate dental hygiene is thus perhaps linked with heart disease.
Finally, recent research has shown what humans have intuitively always known; best expressed in the Latin maxim mens sana in corpore sano, or sound mind in a healthy body. It is difficult to say whether the mind precedes the body or vice versa. It is clear that in people with mental disease often forsake their health. Aside from direct eating disorders, different disease states alter the effects of the mind and even alter the metabolism of the body. A person with major depressive disorder may not exercise, eat unhealthy foods, and not brush his teeth from apathy. And consequently be fat, unhealthy, and definitively not physically fit. These components of health are all intertwined and an improvement in one particular area often goes with improvements in the other areas too.