Adults|Spoken|Upper-Intermediate|14. Healthy lifestyle

sedentary [ˈsedntri] — spending a lot of time sitting down, and not moving or exercising very much

1. healthy

2. clean

3. stressful

4. unhealthy

5. exhausting

6. relaxing

7. active

8. polluted

9. stress-free

10. sedentary

• well-dressed — wearing fashionable or expensive clothes
• well-paid — earning or providing a lot of money
• well-mannered — having good manners
• well-preserved — a well-preserved building or object is old but still in good condition
• well-built — with a solid, strong body
• well-off — having a lot of money
• well-to-do — having a lot of money
• well-informed — having or showing knowledge or information about many subjects or about one particular subject
• well-balanced — sensible and emotionally in control

🔹If you feel (a bit) under the weather, you feel slightly ill but not seriously ill. However, sometimes people say this as an understatement when they feel very ill but want to hide how bad they feel, e.g.

— Mum, you look terrible! What’s wrong?

— Oh, it’s nothing. I’m just feeling a bit under the weather.

🔹If your doctor or other specialist gives you a clean bill of health, they say that you are completely well and have no medical problems. Although bill in this usage means document, in the UK this is not typically a real document and you are not actually given anything, e.g. even if the doctor only says the words You’re fine, you can still tell other people that you were given a clean bill of health.

🔹If you are at death’s door, you are near death. This is often used to talk about how people look, e.g. When we saw her she was so pale. She looked at death’s door.

🔹If you are going down with something, you are in the early stages of an illness. You can go down with a cold, flu, an infection, etc. As there is often some uncertainty about whether one is really ill or not, the expression often collocates with I think or I feel like, e.g. I think I’m going down with flu.

🔹My back is killing me means that my back is so painful that I can hardly stand it. Other parts of your body and some illnesses can also be used with this expression, e.g. my leg, this indigestion, my headache, etc.

🔹When there is a (nasty) bug going round, there is a very infectious illness in your office, school, local community, etc. and lots of people are catching it and becoming ill. The expression is often used to explain why there are fewer people than normal at work, e.g.

— Where is everyone? I thought there were ten people in this office!

— Yes. There’s a bug going round.

🔹When you are in good shape, you are very fit and healthy.

🔹A hypochondriac is a person who repeatedly believes that they are ill or worries that their health is much worse than it is. Their condition is called hypochondria. If a hypochondriac hears someone talking about an illness or reads about it in a book, they are likely to think that they have it.

• frostbite — a medical condition in which parts of the body, especially the fingers and toes, become damaged as a result of extremely cold temperatures
• provided — used to say that something will only be possible if something else happens or is done
• nonsense — ideas, statements or beliefs that you think are ridiculous or not true
• a convert — a person who has changed their religion, beliefs or opinions
• an iris — the round coloured part that surrounds the pupil of your eye

1. Well, a rugby player I know told me how it helped him get over his injuries more quickly, so I thought I’d give it a try. So you have to take off all your clothes, except for a pair of shorts and a mask. Unless you wear a mask your face will get frostbite! Then you go into this incredibly cold room. My first session just lasted three minutes. Five minutes is safe provided you get out quickly. If you stayed another three or four minutes you’d be dead! It has helped my knees a lot, but I know it won’t last forever. You should have regular sessions otherwise the pain comes back.

2. I had tried so many things to help with the pain in my back but nothing seemed to work until I went to the clinic. I wasn’t really a believer, in fact I thought it was nonsense, but I was ready to try anything as the doctors couldn’t find what’s wrong with me. It was strange lying there as someone stuck needles in different parts of my body. I noticed a big difference after one session, and after the third one the pain had disappeared. This doesn’t mean that I am a convert to any alternative treatment, but this really worked for me.

3. Well, the theory is that any kind of weakness or injury appears directly in the iris. It has an interesting history, a Hungarian doctor noticed that when a bird, an owl I think, hurt itself a black mark immediately appeared in its iris. Of course this was easy to see as owls have such large eyes. As the bird got better, the mark went away. The doctor then developed a map of the iris that related to different parts of the body to help with diagnosis. This is all very well, in theory, but a couple of recent experiments showed that the technique was only reliable half the time. This is a shame because it sounded a really interesting theory!

4. It’s based on the idea, you know, that an illness can be cured if you take — in a medicine or tablet — a little bit of what caused it. Like if someone is allergic to something. The trouble is, I just don’t see how this works in practice. I mean, they use such tiny amounts that it’s a bit like putting a spoonful of salt in the Atlantic ocean! It’s an interesting idea, and I’d like to believe it, but common sense tells me that this can’t possibly be true. All the same, there are loads of people who think the treatment really works, and believe that it has cured them — but maybe they would have got better anyway. We just don’t know.