DUBAI // How do you measure how healthy you are? For many people this means stepping on to the weighing machine and watching anxiously as the number of kilogrammes rises or falls.
But fitness professionals in Dubai are trying to change this mindset and educate people that being healthy does not begin and end with counting calories and worrying about the size of your waist.
“While it is important to manage your weight, it is a misconception that the number on the scale is an indicator of overall health and wellbeing,” said Stephanie Pech, from Natural Nutrition Dubai.
“Adding to the confusion is the large amount of misinformation promoting different diets, weight-loss programmes and products and the portrayal of unrealistic body images. People generally know that eating too much sweet food isn’t healthy and they seem to think by choosing low-fat products they are making a healthy choice.”
Ms Pech said certain kinds of fats – such as those in nuts, avocado and cold-pressed oils – actually help to improve a person’s overall health and lose weight at the same time.
“Proper nutrition and exercise are the foundation to a healthy lifestyle. When you focus on eating a balanced diet, living an active lifestyle, the extra weight will come off naturally,” she said.
Educating people not to equate being skinny with being healthy could be a challenge, said Victoria Tipper, a nutrition coach at the Dubai Herbal Treatment Centre. She teaches her clients the concept of health improvement rather than weight loss.
“Visceral fat is a great indicator of health. This is not the fat that we can pinch [subcutaneous] but the fat that surrounds our organs, and there is a direct link with risk of metabolic disease as this fat increases,” she said.
“You may appear slim and look healthy to others but if you are restricting calories alone, thus neglecting exercise, then it is likely you will have low skeletal muscle percentage, combined with a higher body fat percentage and more visceral fat than you should. Increasing muscle mass in the body boosts the metabolic rate, which is what everyone wants to achieve.”
She said other factors, such as sleep, were as important as having a healthy diet. “Sleep quality is a great indicator of health,” she said. “Being healthy is less about your weight on the scales and more about how much energy you have throughout the day, how happy you feel, having the strength to take the stairs at work instead of using the lift and having no major digestive complaints.”
Carolyn Coe from OP Integrated Lifestyle, a health and fitness centre in Dubai, said women were conditioned from an early age to view weighing scales and airbrushed images in magazines as synonymous with health.
“Weight loss is one of the lowest-priority measures that we consider when we are helping our clients to make life, fitness and health changes,” she said, adding that health factors such as time spent in nature, rest and sleep, happiness and stress levels, human interaction levels, nutrition and mobility should also be considered.
Page Rossiter signed up for an eight-week Sweat fitness programme, run by Charlotte Mathers at Smart Fitness, that includes workout sessions, body composition assessment and measurements every fortnight, and nutritional tips.
The classes are an alternative to rapid weight-loss competitions.
“It’s not being about the weight on the scales it’s about our body composition, gaining more muscle,” said Ms Rossiter, who works as a life coach.
“I look at how I feel, how I’m sleeping. I have more energy, I look at how my clothes fit, there are a lot of different ways to see results. I’ve been learning discipline and it’s a lifestyle change.”
mswan@thenational.ae