You're Not Everybody. You're You.

I’m tired of experts giving rules and guidelines for everybody to follow.  They seem to ignore the fact that I’m not everybody.  I’m me.  And you are you.  And we are all different.  Health advice is the worst offender.  Why should we all drink 8 glasses of water a day when some of us weigh 300 pounds and others weigh 95 pounds?  The “experts” tell all of us not to eat after 8:00 even though they have no idea when we go to sleep.  Breakfast is the most important meal of the day and it supposedly boosts your metabolism to help you lose weight but when I eat a full breakfast, I eat more the rest of the day and I gain weight.  Some fitness trainers think that we should do cardio before weights but how do they know what’s right for each individual person? 

I’ve taken grip strength tests which are supposed to give an indication of overall health but people with smaller hands can’t get the same amount of leverage so I don’t see how it can be a fair assessment.  When I have encountered numerous sports injuries, doctors have repeatedly underestimated the extent of my injury because my joints don’t swell up as much as they do for most people.  Then there’s body fat percentage.  I have a feeling that certain ethnicities can be healthy with higher percentages of body fat than are normally deemed to be acceptable.  Our bodies are all different and we come from different ethnicities and gene pools adapted to different environments.  I wouldn’t be surprised if for optimal health our diets should be tailored to our ethnic background.

One size of advice does not fit all and it’s annoying to keep hearing such presumptions.  Perhaps more research needs to be done to figure out how different we really are.  We’re not all westerm European Americans, so guidelines need to be open to the idea that guidelines for a healthy Hispanic person should not be the same as for a person of African descent.  I have seen some progress on this though.  The Body Mass Index (BMI) has finally been scrutinized and a new metric of waist to height ratio is being advocated.  They researched its effectiveness across multiple ethnic groups to validate its accuracy.  Until more research gets done, we all need to have the mindset to be open to the idea that we are all different biologically.

+ Atul