Health/Fitness Archives

Health & Fitness

Shiva Raj / May 4, 2026

This is the first of a series of articles that will pertain to, amongst other relative issues, Health & Fitness. I’d like to begin by saying that, if words were not just utterances or fancy combinations of various pitched sounds artfully choreographed for the representation of communicative exchange for humankind, then, let me say that Health and Fitness, due to their “synonymous” relationship, would form the perfect marriage. Although no one sets out to deliberately find ways to be unhealthy or unfit. Many have and will, however inadvertently, take such a path. Even if such steps seem deliberate it is merely a false illusion. To embrace the wondrous journey of Health and Fitness requires a fairly well-balanced mental disposition. Now before I hand over to you my take, from personal experience and much research, I’d like to paraphrase something I’ve heard, and maybe you have as well, many times before. “Look at them, they’re in great shape and, they don’t work out or watch what they eat.” No matter how much that statement may appear as true (whatever level of truth it may encompass) IT’S FLAWED, and here’s why. We’ve all inherited our physical state from the genes of our predecessors -parents, grandparents, etc., etc. I’m going to exclude environmental/fast food influences for now. Whether “exo’ endo’, or mesomorph”, you were dealt one of the three along with behavioral traits. So, the next time you see someone who ” appears to be doing nothing to obtain a great figure”, remember this: They inherited that which has been passed onto them. The road to Health and Fitness is preceded by a mental state of determination and goal-directed thinking. Good health, cognitively speaking, is preceded by clear, rational, and non-self-centered thinking. What comes from positive thinking is the neurophysiological “building blocks” for the making and maintenance of one’s health. Blood. Nothing holds up the “report card” of health better than blood. Your blood screams out what’s going on with every part of you. Too much sugar- it will show up. Too much salt- ditto. The conditions of your organs, to a degree, a blood test will tell. So, regarding your health get diagnostically checked out by having a simple blood test for starters. By doing so you will not be in the dark but have well illuminated and factual information to work with to get you on your personal road to Fitness. Now let’s take a close up of fitness. Have you ever gone to a gym and worked out? There’s no place that’s more exhibitionistic, voyeuristic, and fetishistic than the gym. Kinesiology 101: Understanding Muscles. By just having a basic understanding of muscles (how and why they work the way they do) gives you an edge over those who blindly pull cables and unthinkingly curl dumbbells. Plan the day before what and why and how why you will do what you’ve outlined. Visualization. Visualization is a very powerful mental medicine. To achieve you must first believe. Set realistic goals and, upon achieving them congratulate yourself by creating a quote that reflects what you did to achieve it. Compete hard but only against self. Human beings are divided in every sense of the word. Compete hard by striving to unify the disharmony in yourself. And last, Love more and avoid searching for reasons to hate. Thank you. Aka Dr. MEIME.

Community, Grooming, Health/Fitness, Lifestyle, Videos

The Epidemic of Male Body Hatred

Shiva Raj / May 4, 2026

“If I could look like that guy who played Thor, I would be happy.”It’s a common belief among men of our age. Put more honestly, “If I can’t appear confident, sexy, intimidating, competent, and super-human, I’m worthless.”We compare ourselves to others in the gym. We come away from movies wanting to exercise for eight hours. We would rather jump in front of a truck than take our shirts off at the pool. We feel pathetic and small. We look at ourselves in almost every mirror we pass. When alone, we flex — not because we like what we see, but because we don’t. We have spent hundreds of dollars on pre-workout, weight loss, and weight gain supplements. We research the best way to bulk, shred, diet, and binge.Maybe this doesn’t resonate with you. But if it does, you are not alone. We have been fed a lie. I know this lifestyle. It’s a locomotive — and too powerful to be stopped by a single blog. I hope to shed some light on what we’re actually trying to achieve with each rep, each yard, each stabbing “You’re pathetic” we put ourselves through.Aspects of Male Body Hatred Health is not the issue here. There is a huge gap between being healthy and meeting our culture’s ideal of “hot.” And in that space lies any and every resource for a man to hate his body.“A man who hates his body is really searching for love.” A man who hates his body is really searching for love — a fundamentally relational search for intimacy with self in the form of confidence, intimacy with the opposite sex in being sexy, intimacy with the same sex in intimidation or acceptance, intimacy with authority in competency, and ultimately intimacy with God, in appearing worthy. The lie is that performance offers intimacy at all — it is, in fact, its foil. Yet this is the path we choose.A man’s hatred of his body takes place in terms of five relationships because he is searching for intimacy in each of these relationships.1. To our selves, we want to be confident. We want to love ourselves — to look in the mirror and think, “I look amazing.” We look — “I’m fat there, small there, weird there” — and emotionally destroy ourselves. We want confidence. Confidence on the basis of body image relates to intimacy in a very special way. If we are ever rejected, we want the confidence to say, “They are wrong for rejecting me.” We search for self-confidence so that we can temper our experience of rejection if and when it happens.This drive for self-love is driven by self-hate. It is a dialectic of inordinate self-praise at our own progress, and then emotional self-mutilation for our failures. In self-love, we are able to dismiss rejection as misinformed. In self-hate, we are able to preempt rejection with introspection. And we hope to find intimacy at the end — at the six pack.2. To the opposite sex, we want to be sexy. We want women to love us. We want to walk by women, and have them think, “He’s so hot.” We want women to lust after us. We hear women, even Christian women, talk about wanting to marry Channing Tatum or Zac Efron. Whether it’s accurate or not, we buy that even Christian women want a man to have a certain kind of musculature — not “muscly” or “big,” but cut — with lots of angles on every part of the body. We want to be able to seduce, to be “swoonworthy,” to embody the full form that media sells as “sexy.” It’s an obsessive and driving ideal.So, I go out for a run. I get home, and run again. What sort of performance earns the adjective sexy? “Certainly another run. Another set. Am I sexy yet?” We don’t speak it — Christians don’t even talk about it — but it drives us.3. To our peers, we want to be intimidating. We are primally competitive. We want to be the biggest, the most intimidating compared with other men. It can be reduced to “sizing up” another guy, but can have results as broad as “I’m amazing” and “I’m worthless.” We want to know that I could steal this guy’s woman, beat him up, and I want him to know that too. And if I feel like another guy could do that to me, I go to the gym. I purge. I go online. I buy a supplement. And, for many of us, we would simply settle for being accepted as one of the group.4. To our fathers, we want to be competent. “A dad’s disapproving glance is a surefire way to help a man hate his body.” A dad’s disapproving glance is a surefire way to help a man hate his body. When I was 13, my father, in commanding wisdom, patted his traps and said, “Girls like this muscle to be big.” End of story. For the next ten years: supersets of shrugs twice a week at the end of my workouts. We look to older men and feel the need to measure up — to compensate in body what we know we lack in spirit and mind. We want to know, “I can replace you on this earth when you go. I can take the mantle. I’m strong, like you. Please tell me I’m strong, like you?”5. To God, we want to be superhuman. Every male portrayal of God or the godly in art history is jacked. The statue of David. The creation of Adam. Even Jesus has a six pack. A six pack. Vascular. A youthful head of hair. We think, “David must have written Psalm 102 about P90X, because this guy is shredded.” What place does 18% or 25% body fat play in God’s story? And what about the scrawny, the skeletal, the scraggy? Neither quite fit in God’s grand history — at least how art portrays it.And so, men are given the

Health/Fitness, Podcast

Mind your kidneys!

Shiva Raj / April 30, 2026

New data suggest that millions of patients most at-risk for life-threatening kidney disease are unaware they have it because they are not tested according to clinical practice guidelines despite their risk. The study, by authors from the National Kidney Foundation (NKF) and Labcorp, appears today in the journal Diabetes Care. New data from National Kidney Foundation and Labcorp show Millions of patients most at-risk for kidney disease but unaware they have it simply because they aren’t being tested for it.The common eGFR test alone is insufficient for kidney disease detection, said NKF Chief Medical Officer Joseph Vassalott. New data from National Kidney Foundation and Labcorp show Millions of patients most at-risk for kidney disease but unaware they have it simply because they aren’t being tested for it.The common eGFR test alone is insufficient for kidney disease detection, said NKF Chief Medical Officer Joseph Vassalott. In the study, “Chronic Kidney Disease Testing (CKD) Among At-Risk Adults in the U.S. Remains Low: Real-World Evidence from a National Laboratory Database,” investigators reviewed laboratory ordered CKD tests from more than 28 million patients with diabetes, hypertension (also known as high blood pressure), or both, that were tested by Labcorp between 2013 and 2018. Researchers found that 80.3 percent of these patients had not received testing according to Kidney Disease Improving Clinical Outcomes (KDIGO) guidelines: a urine test, known as the albumin-creatinine ratio (uACR), along with a blood test, known as the estimated glomerular filtration rate (eGFR). The combined tests are known as the Kidney Profile and test protein levels in urine and waste in the blood. By measuring these levels, physicians can gauge kidney function and damage. “The common eGFR test alone is insufficient for kidney disease detection,” said NKF Chief Medical Officer Joseph Vassalotti, MD, and co-author of the study. “Both the eGFR blood test for kidney function and the uACR urine test for albumin, a type of protein, should be performed at least annually for at-risk patients by primary care physicians and other clinicians who manage diabetes and hypertension, such as endocrinologists and cardiologists.” An estimated 37 million adults in the United States have kidney disease and about 90 percent remain unaware of the condition. The top risk factors for kidney disease are diabetes and high blood pressure, as well as obesity, heart disease, and family history of kidney disease. “This large retrospective analysis provides real-world evidence that rates of guideline-concordant CKD testing in at-risk patients remain low and did not improve much over the studied period,” said David Alfego, PhD, Labcorp senior data scientist and the paper’s other co-author. “As the at-risk population grows because of increases in diabetes, hypertension and obesity, it is imperative to identify and treat early kidney disease.” Kidney disease often has no detectable symptoms by the patient, and too often patients only find out they have the disease when their kidneys fail. Yet, most at-risk patients are not receiving regular and complete testing for the disease, especially in the primary care setting that represents the front-line in CKD detection and management. Early detection is critical to slowing the disease progression. Lifestyle changes, dietary modifications, medical management of risk factors, and therapeutics that protect the kidney can slow kidney disease progression and help protect against cardiovascular complications that are associated with advanced kidney disease. “Kidneys don’t get the attention they should,” Dr. Vassalotti said. “Kidneys don’t cough. Kidney disease is largely asymptomatic, so patients don’t realize they have it. Since most people living with kidney disease are seen in a primary care setting, these professionals have an opportunity to improve kidney diagnosis that will in turn increase awareness and patient engagement and inform therapeutic interventions.” Removing barriers to proper testing while also raising awareness among adults about the need for the annual Kidney Profile are also critical to reversing the underdiagnosis of the disease, the study concluded. In 2019, NKF launched the Are You the 33%?® awareness campaign with a simple quiz to determine kidney disease risk and tools they can use to talk to the primary care physicians. The campaign is part of NKF’s mission to raise awareness and decrease prevalence of the disease. To read the study visit: https://care.diabetesjournals.org/lookup/doi/10.2337/dc21-0723. The authors of this study are: David Alfego, Ph.D., Jennifer Ennis, M.D., Barbara Gillespie, M.D., Mary Jane Lewis, B.S., Elizabeth Montgomery, B.S., Silvia Ferrè, Ph.D., Joseph A. Vassalotti, M.D., Stanley Letovsky, Ph.D. Kidney Disease Facts In the United States, 37 million adults are estimated to have chronic kidney disease (CKD)—and approximately 90 percent don’t know they have it. 1 in 3 adults in the U.S. is at risk for chronic kidney disease. Risk factors for kidney disease include: diabetes, high blood pressure, heart disease, obesity, and family history. People who are Black or African American, Hispanic or Latino, American Indian or Alaska Native, Asian American, or Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander are at increased risk for developing the disease. Black or African American people are almost 4 times more likely than Whites to have kidney failure. Hispanic or Latino people are 1.3 times more likely than non-Hispanic or non-Latino people to have kidney failure.