I’ve just had the unpleasant and undignifying experience of my first ever tummy bug. It was yuk. I hope to never have to go through that again. But as I come out the other end of it (no pun intended), I am ever so grateful for the restoration of my good health.
A lot of the time we don’t know what we have until it’s gone. In fact, all too often we take our health for granted. It’s hard to truly and whole-heartedly appreciate something that permanently co-exists with us – our health – until it is somewhat compromised, or possibly even stolen from us.
It’s seemingly ironic that the very machine we countlessly rely on to transport us through life, is the very one we actually maintain the least. We get our cars regularly serviced, our pets vet-checked, and our houses cleaned. Why do we do this? To save us money and heart-ache in the future, and to extend the working lives of those very things. Yet we don’t gift our most valuable machine – our bodies – with the treatment and respect it absolutely needs and deserves.
In fact, many of us are doing the very opposite; we trash and insult our bodies. We gorge ourselves on highly-processed and low-nutrient foods, expose ourselves to poisonous stresses and toxins, and fitness programmes are frequently put on the back-burner. We continue to not do what we know will gift us a better quality of life. The result – more obesity, more lifestyle-driven diseases, and more preventable deaths than any other generation has ever seen before.
Get off your high horses people. You are not invincible. You are not superman or superwoman. You live in a very fragile body and that body will only give back to you as good as it gets from you.
They say there are two natural motivators in life: 1) To move towards pleasure; or 2) To move away from pain. It seems many of us are currently too comfortable with our lifestyles whilst being supremely naïve about just where those lifestyles are taking us. It seems that many of us are perhaps waiting for the agony that a chronic or, dare I say it, terminal diagnosis will provide that may actually spur us into leading the lifestyle we already know we should. Is that honestly what it’s going to take?
Read the list below:
- You sit down for more than six hours every day
- You do less than 2 days of structured exercise per week
- Fruits and/or vegetables are not a part of every meal
- Your waist measurement exceeds your hip/butt measurement
- You have been carrying an excess of more than 10kg of weight for more than three years
- You laugh less than three times a day
- You sleep less than six hours a night
- You drink less than a litre of pure water each day
- You feel stressed daily
- You always feel ‘busy’
- You regularly eat ‘comfort’ foods
- You feel that you are not the one controlling your world
If you can comfortably tick more than three of these boxes, then you need to get comfortable with the fact you are you quite possibly digging yourself an early grave. And don’t for a minute let the ‘it won’t happen to me’ thought cross your mind. It’s not a matter of won’t; it’s a matter of when. If you wish to be able to meet your grandchildren, if you wish to live the greatest life you can with your romantic partner, and if you wish to not succumb to the downward spiral of some awful life-threatening illness, then I beg for you to do something about it today.
Don’t make me have to run after you with a spikey, red-hot three-pronged garden fork! Stop taking your health for granted. Jump onto a bandwagon of health today, before something more sinister confronts you tomorrow.
Please email corinne@fitfixnz.co.nz
