A healthy lifestyle includes, among many other elements, engaging in physical activity. Global anti-obesity campaigns tend to rely on two main pillars: diet and exercise (physical activity).
The terminology of exercise and/or physical activity is sometimes controversial among specialists. While physical activity is a “vigorous” action that can include walking to work, taking the stairs instead of the elevator, or cleaning the house, exercise is conceived more as kinesthetic activities designed to train the musculoskeletal system, such as gymnastics, sports, or functional training at a gym. In either conception, physical activity provides not only health benefits like improved endurance, strength, flexibility, and prevention against chronic degenerative diseases, etc. It is proven that exercise generates endorphins, the brain chemicals responsible for happiness. In other words, exercise helps us relax, think better, concentrate, and gain a sense of achievement as we overcome our own limits. However, as with most things in life, excess inevitably leads to an unfavorable condition.
For many people, training becomes the single most important activity around which their daily life revolves. Often, this obsession and addiction to exercise is accompanied by disorders in body image perception. Among these distortions are, for example, feeling “obese,” having poorly defined muscles, or the need to specifically increase certain body parts—in most women, this concerns legs and glutes, and in men, the chest and arms. This distortion of self-image is accompanied by constant dissatisfaction and unrealistic expectations about bodily appearance. Alongside this obsession, an eating disorder develops that attempts to hyper-control everything consumed, and guilt is usually felt when one does not eat “what should be eaten.” In a medicalized society, this disorder has been classified as “vigorexia.” However, we must ask what lies beyond these postmodern obsessions: Could it be the result of individualizing societies that place personal success or failure on individual responsibility? Is there an element of how certain physical appearances are worshipped as a reflection of personal success, in contrast to the obese body, which is often socially stigmatized? Does our reductionist thinking about food—calories and nutrients—contribute to an obsession that creates dissatisfaction and, paradoxically, is anything but healthy?
Balance is the word that resonates and repeats in all these matters: balanced diet, balanced physical activity, but in reality: what is balance? Is it a number or a percentage, as nutritionists often calculate? The balanced lifestyle has been the subject of philosophical debate since the Greeks, with many interpretations. It is a question that goes beyond measurements and standardizations. Finding balance is part of a lifelong quest that ultimately opposes the extremes where dissatisfaction and frustration are present.
Originally published in El Economista
— This article was originally published in Spanish by Liliana Martínez Lomelí. Translation generated with AI from the original text.