Exercise - a Panacea within our reach? (introduction)

The other day I went to a talk by a physiotherapist, ostensibly concerning lower back pain but in reality largely covering the perils of inactivity and how it affects our body in general and our lower back in particular. It is amazing to hear what can go wrong from simply failing to move regularly, and how serious some of the consequences can be, especially when the speaker is not trying to sell you anything.

Our life has become more and more sedentary, with technology often anchoring us to a workspace for most of the day so that we barely move other than to satisfy our basic needs; we often also work out the easiest way of doing that, so as to require minimum physical exertion. When this is allied to our increasing use of labour-saving devices in every aspect of our everyday lives you can see we are very much 'homo inactivus'.

There is another factor, however, complicating this seemingly simple equation: It is, I believe, a fact that more of us are exercising today than ever before, yet there are also more of us suffering either from obesity or from lifestyle-dependent diseases like type 2 diabetes. Our speaker, a young, slim man, made it abundantly clear that structured exercise - such as in a gym - is only part of the answer, that we should tweak our day to day existence to move more and so improve our health. Most of the things we need to do are simple, straightforward and surprisingly effective.

Exercise in all its forms, structured or unstructured, should be about improving our quality of life by boosting our fitness, and so our health. The path we choose - and hence the results - is down to us, our willpower and what we want to achieve; it does not have to involve anything extreme, nor hardship, and we must understand accept that results come in time and in small measures.

As we are constantly urged to be more active, we are also tempted to consume more and more that is fattening, unhealthy or unnatural. Despite the popularity of cooking shows on television and the plentiful availability of good raw materials, many of us regard cooking fresh food as a bit of a waste of time, unproductive, and prefer ready, easy solutions. This has obvious, disastrous results not only for physical health (due to the poor quality or nutritional value of what we consume) but also to our psychological state as eating and relaxing as part of a group (family/peers/friends), that most civilising and civilised activity, is lost to solitary eating in front of the computer.

Yes, we live longer than ever before. It is my belief that we should be looking to improve the quality of this at the same time. Please allow me to return to this subject shortly in order to discuss it in more detail.