"It's cheap to be well"

I was doing a Walk Away the Pounds mile the other morning when Leslie gave this fit tip during one of the segments.  It really stuck with me.

I think if you read a wellness/fitness blog that you have either found yourself in a place where you have/want to lose weight or know someone who has struggled with the ups and downs of getting weight off and keeping it off.  Sometimes it's for vanity, sometimes it's for health.  Know if it's for vanity, there will likely come a time in your life where that will switch and it'll be about the health.  I know when the Mr and I were at our highest weights and I was staring 500 lbs in the face, I finally got to the point where I admitted that if we didn't do something and quick, any dodged health problems up to the point would end up catching up with us.  When it looked like that was happening and we were given a reprieve, I knew I never wanted to end up in a situation where we were that out of control again.

Granted, neither of us are at a 'healthy' weight but with over 400 lbs collectively off of our frames, life is much easier.  We talked about this woman who claimed that she was miraculously cured of her headaches when she went on a 'miracle' diet for headaches on a doctor show the other day.  She talked about 'getting rid of all of the junk food in the house' and eating this specific thing and as a 'bonus' she lost 65 lbs.  Well guess what sister, you said the magic words..."got rid of all of the junk food in the house."  We suspect it was less about these miracle combos of food voodoo she touted with the diet author standing next to her and more about the fact that she just stopped eating crap every day.  I thought back to my childhood when my grandma, a nurse, would get very concerned about the headaches I always had.  I got them a lot.  As I looked back and thought about how little I've gotten headaches in comparison (just have them when I sleep wrong or a stress headache where muscle tension is involved) and the difference by far is the diet and activity.  Lean meats, whole grains, fruits and veggies pretty much every day and 25-60 minutes of exercise six days a week depending on the intensity.  Back then, I was a latchkey kid living on pizza rolls, magic fries (remember those??) and bologna and cheese sandwiches and enough activity to not be too out of control but no formal exercise to speak of.  Everything back then was processed because processed is cheap...in the short term.

But when our health became a priority and I wanted ways to enjoy the things we loved without sacrificing flavor, my culinary abilities really blossomed and now we want for nothing.  (Except calorie free frosting and cinnamon rolls...but I digress)  I think about how some people in my family still eat everything out of a box, don't cook for themselves and I see how sick they are and it just confirms to me that what we're doing is right.  Yes, I still buy things in a box but they are usually from Trader Joe's where everything is whole and pronounceable.  But most of our food is fresh and homemade from scratch and I like it that way.  I haven't quite gotten to baking my own bread or anything and let's be real, I likely never will but 85% of what we eat is from scratch six days a week.  I have one family member whose idea of lunch is grabbing whatever takeout their co-workers are going to get.  Then dinner is grabbing a 32 ounce sweet tea from McDonalds on their way home and if they don't grab dinner from there then it's a handful of crackers, a handful of mushrooms, maybe some candy laying around and anything remotely healthy that may have snuck in stays in the fridge until it morphs into a fur monster.  The weekends are spent with their friends who all bring crap over to snack on while they socialize.  They have high blood pressure, are morbidly obese, anemia and are bone on bone in the knees.  Just moderate exercise of walking around the block could've helped when they were more mobile and now it's down to needing a scooter in big box stores because they can't get around without it.  It breaks my heart.  It's been discussed and we all know that we can't force someone who isn't ready.  Now I fear they're getting to the age where they'll start to say "I'm too old to do anything about it" and that isn't true.  I know moving is hard for them but it's better than the alternative which will eventually be that they can't go out at all and will end up on disability.

Then I have my grandparents who eat out basically for two of their three meals a day.  My grandma has gone up two dress sizes and with her lack of activity from meds and grandpa just not bothering to go on small walks or anything with her, it's a wonder she shuffles, her muscles are atrophying away.  We were told early on that diet and exercise could be a MAJOR component in helping to preserve her mental faculties and not to eat out because of all of the sodium in restaurant foods.  But it's like everything else he had to take on was too hard so the places he cut back in care were the things that should've been top priority.  He has also gained back all of the weight he lost and he's 8 years older than her so it's not good for him either.

It is so frustrating when you see people throwing their health down the drain or saying how it's "too expensive" to eat healthy.  Would you rather pay for it up front a few extra bucks or how about a couple hundred to tens of thousands down the road in insurance premiums, co-pays and treatment??

It takes SO LITTLE to reverse risk for disease.  You can reverse your risk for high blood pressure, diabetes and other weight related diseases by losing as little as 10 pounds.  I mean we can all do 10 pounds, right?  Losing weight doesn't have to be "I need to lose another 100 lbs to be at "goal" weight", it can be reducing the risk further in small increments.

The Mr and I have never stepped foot in a gym to lose any of this weight.  It's all been in the comfort of our own home with at home workouts so the "I can't go to the gym, it's too embarrassing" excuse won't work.  You can't say at home DVD's or equipment are too expensive because you have great sites like Fitness Blender and various YouTube channels that let you do them for free with little to no weights.  You just need to walk.  You don't have to walk far to get started.  Walk to the kitchen...no wait, don't walk there...walk to the bathroom.  Then walk to the mailbox.  Then walk to the neighbors driveway two houses down, then four houses down and so on.  It doesn't need to be much.  It just needs to be more than you're currently doing and given how sedentary we've become as a society, it wouldn't take much for many of us to do more than we're doing now.

I'm not saying this to be preachy...I can certainly improve and am trying to on not sharing a blood supply with the couch.  I'm reminding you as the eating season looms large that now is the time to get in a new routine so that in 6 weeks when everyone else is making promises to themselves that they know they might not keep, you will have already established yours.  I'm also trying to save you money in the future because man would it suck to be told "well, you have diabetes (insert any preventable disease here) and you need to lose at least 40 lbs and until then we'll need to put you on meds and re-evaluate."  Do you know how expensive meds are?  Not just that but have you heard commercials for those damn things!??!  They spend more time telling you about the third arm that could grow out of your chest and the 50 other things that could cripple or kill you than the thing it's supposed to help you with!

So let's make a date to walk after dinner or at lunch or to do squats between commercials during a show.  Take your free medicine now so you don't have to take the expensive kind later!

Whose with me?  (Or for the more introspective types, whose thinking about it?)

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