I don’t really have many regrets, but I do have one fear of a very specific regret . It hasn’t happened yet, but here’s the scenario: I see myself in the hospital, having just had a heart attack or stroke, or at the doctor’s office learning that I have developed Type 2 Diabetes, and now I have to take medicine and adopt a whole new lifestyle. And in any of those situations, I see myself asking myself, “Why didn’t you do something about this when you had the chance? Why did you wait until you got sick, when you knew all along that there were things you could have done to prevent this?”
Now, granted, I’m not saying that ALL people who develop health conditions in their old age could have necessarily done anything to prevent it. Sometimes it’s just going to happen. But to be honest, so many people get sick as they get older because they’ve just been making so many poor lifestyle choices for so many years. I don’t want to be one of those people, and I don’t want to find myself in that hospital bed or in that doctor’s office kicking myself because I knew there was something I could have done to prevent it…and I just didn’t.
I’ve been dabbling off and on for years with trying to live a healthier lifestyle. My efforts go up and down, back and forth, and sometimes I do better, and sometimes I do worse. But now as I am in my 60’s…now…now…NOW is the time to stop dancing around with these issues and make the changes I’ve known all my life need to be made.
Now, to be clear: I’m not advocating a complete turn-around to becoming some sort of health nut that runs ten miles a day and only eats sprouts and organic vegetables. I don’t think it’s necessary to go that far. But I can certainly go further than I have gone already, and even more important, I can be more consistent about it than I’ve been in the past.
My hope is that in this blog I can document the small changes I’ve been making, and use those small successes as building blocks to even larger successes, so that eventually, living a clean and healthy lifestyle will be completely natural.
I’ve come so far already, but I have much further to go. I have so many ideas in my head regarding strategies for good health, but I don’t know that I’ve ever put them all down in one place. NOW will be the time, and this blog will be the place.
