The Widow-maker

The Widow-maker.

It used to be an appropriate moniker for the killer coronary.
But we are finding that the heart attack is an equal opportunity killer when it comes to gender as women are nearly as likely as men to suffer from heart attack or stroke.

Over the past year or so, I have known (or known of) a number of people that are close to my age that have suffered a stroke or heart attack. Some of them you might have looked at and thought, "Yeah, they were a ticking time bomb." Others would have caught you by surprise.

It's pretty easy to look at somebody that is severely overweight and say that they're destined for some severe health problems. It's surprising that there are overweight people that are otherwise healthy. It can also be surprising that there are average or underweight people that are in very poor health. Poor habits (smoking, too many fried foods, too much processed sugars, inactivity) can all lead to conditions of poor health. It's absolutely mind boggling that we can starve ourselves while getting fatter and fatter, but it's true...we can.

We can pile on the pounds and still be undernourished or malnourished.

We can eat ourselves to death (and are doing that) the same as we can starve ourselves to death. We can fill our arteries with crap and block the blood flow to our heart and our brain.

...And it can happen at any time.

At my recent flight physical, the receptionist asked me about my recent weight loss (60 pounds in the last year). She wanted to know what it was that finally made me realize that losing weight was important enough to stick with it for a whole year.

I told her that it was just time...and a realization that I was about the same age as my dad was when he had his first heart attack! I was on the same road. I knew that I was a prime candidate for a heart attack or stroke. Over the years, my blood pressure had started to climb. I wasn't on any meds, but I knew there were days when it was too high. I ate crappy foods, didn't get enough sleep, didn't get any exercise and was too busy to hear the quiet, but steady ticking of the clock...sooner or later...tick, tick, tick...BOOM!

It was bound to happen...unless I could dismantle the bomb.

I'm not telling you these things to toot my own horn. It's more like sounding a warning. You already know who you are and what you are heading towards. Are you going to be like the friends I mentioned earlier and wait until you are so close to death that you scare everybody around you, as well as yourself? Or will you take steps to begin to dismantle the ticking time bomb?

You can wait until you're forced to make wholesale changes in your diet and physical activity and have to make them in adverse conditions.
Or you can begin now to make small, but good changes.

Sure, I know that we all have our vices. Maybe yours is smoking cigarettes and mine is eating fatty foods. Maybe one of you sits all day at work and is a couch potato at home. Somebody never eats vegetables and somebody else drinks too much.

At some point we have to assess the damage we're doing and examine the long term risks. What are you willing to sacrifice to continue to indulge in your poor health habits? It might be true that your habits aren't going to have a great impact in the immediate future. But what about the distant future? Is a life of gluttony today worth years of your life later?

I know that death eventually comes to all of us. And for the most part, we don't get to choose how we die.
However, we do get to choose how we live.
And we can choose to live in such a way to promote a good quality of life and to give our bodies a fighting chance against the attacks of diseases and maladies that come with age and exposure to life.

What would you be willing to trade for a few more years with your loved ones? Is there one bad habit that you would be willing to give up? Maybe there is something you'd be willing to do...a little exercise, a daily walk, adding some real food to your diet...you get the idea.

We may not be able to avoid death, but perhaps we can at least live life in a way that we meet it on own terms and in our own time.

Be well,
John <><