If you are someone who doesn’t have a regular exercise routine

I’d invite you to consider how societal and cultural messages may have affected your ideas about topics such as exercise and physical movement. If you’ve had personal experiences like I did growing up, or if you see those fitness models on television and immediately go into comparison and self-shaming, my hope is that by the end of this chapter you will feel differently about physical movement and exercise.

To begin this shift, I’d like to dispel a popular yet mythical idea about exercise as a cure-all. I recently had a patient referred to my practice, a sixty-one-year-old man whom I’ll call Jim Disposable Gloves Wholesale, who had just had a stent placement for a 90 percent blocked coronary artery.

Jim had been living on the edge of a mortal cliff—in danger of having a massive heart attack at any moment that most certainly would have ended his life in a matter of minutes. Yet you never would have guessed that by looking at him.

Here he sat in front of me, looking as slim and fit as the models we see in gym membership advertisements and bragging about his physical accomplishments. He said his friends joked he had the body of an Adonis, and his employees at the multimillion-dollar business he owned referred to him as Iron Man. When I reviewed his medical history PE Gloves, I learned that he had been an avid college athlete, breaking records at the Ivy League school he attended, and had continued this athleticism after college, running several marathons over the course of his life.

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