8 Ways to Know If You're Fit

A major health headline was a study dispelling the notion that you can be both fit and fat. Last fall, the wires were abuzz with citations about the dangers of being thin and fat (so-called "skinny fat"). With a national obesity rate of over 30 percent, we know that we're overweight. But if thin isn't the indicator of fitness, and you can't be large and fit, how are we supposed to tell if we're healthy? Let's decipher what these studies indicate and sort through the murkiness about what it really means to be fit.

Can you be fit and fat?

The latest issue of Archives of Internal Medicine reported a study of 39,000 women that suggested that fitness isn't the only indication of one's risk for developing heart disease. The subjects were between 50 and 60 years old and were tracked for 11 years. Nearly 1,000 got sick. The study showed that overweight women had a 54-percent greater risk of developing heart disease than those with similar exercise patterns who were not considered overweight. It also concluded that women who exercised, heavy or not, were two-and-a-half times less likely to get heart disease.

However, the study wasn't fastidious in its parameters. It relied on self-reporting and used the BMI (body mass index) scale, rather than actual fitness tests, to determine the subjects' fitness levels. This is where the study becomes questionable.

We tend to like things that come in simple-to-understand terms. Therefore, the government decided that we'd use the BMI scale to decide how healthy we are. It simply assigns you a number based on your height and your weight, leaving out such trivialities as lean muscle mass, body fat, basal metabolic rate, and other medical parameters. You may surmise that we all come in different shapes and sizes, so something as simple as BMI could be inaccurate. Your hunch would be correct.

While BMI can be a decent indicator across similar groups of people, it doesn't account for athletic body types. Using the BMI scale, almost every wrestler, bodybuilder, and NFL player would be classified as obese. And while heavier people, fit or not, induce more strain on their hearts, there are many other factors to consider prior to categorizing them as being vulnerable to health risks. Without knowing these other factors, it's difficult to make hard conclusions, especially when you consider that those with lower BMI numbers may be "skinny fat."

At least it was clear that those who exercised, whether heavy or not, greatly reduced their risk. The conclusions of the study seemed to miss out on something very interesting—a comparison between thin women who didn't exercise and heavy women who did.

Can you be skinny and fat?

Trying to answer the above question, we'll refer to a study from London's Imperial College showing that those who appear skinny to the naked eye but are unfit are still at risk to a rash of health problems.

Since 1994, Dr. Jimmy Bell and his team conducted MRIs on nearly 800 people, creating "fat maps" that show where they store fat. As it turns out, people who don't maintain their weight with a combination of exercise and diet keep huge fat deposits around their internal organs. The scientists theorized that excessive inner fat can confuse the body's communication systems, leading to heart disease, insulin resistance, or type 2 diabetes.

Again, fat and active people had a much lower mortality rate than the skinny and sedentary. This means that, as far as your health is concerned, a fitness test is a much better indicator than a scale or what size dress you fit into. As Bell explained to the Associated Press, "The whole concept of being fat needs to be redefined."

What does it mean to be fit?

Webster's tells us that fitness is "the capacity of an organism to survive and transmit its genotype to reproductive offspring as compared to competing organisms"; Dr. Fred Hatfield, in his book Fitness: The Complete Guide, gives us a more layman's view by defining it as: "Your ability to meet the exigencies of your lifestyle with ease and room to spare for life's little emergencies." Both definitions refer to functioning in the present as the main indicator, meaning that all these studies on heart disease in aging individuals probably aren't even the best bases to use to make conclusions about an individual's state of fitness.

Fitness is, in the simplest terms, your ability to perform in the world. We all have different goals and agendas and, in the end, we're all going to die. But there are a few things that we all share, no matter what kind of life we lead. If we consider the eight parameters below, and if we can perform them decently, we can consider ourselves to be fit. And, more than anything else, a fit life is probably a lot more fun than a non-fit one.