A good friend of mine put together this wonderful assignment on being an e-patient. The idea is that students should become informed about the medicine and treatments available to them should they fall ill. There is more to it than that, but the general gust is about becoming informed consumers in all aspects of your life. That assignment got her students thinking about cancer, and being a part of those conversations got me thinking about health and why we (read: me) are unhealthy people in the first place. I don’t feel like we are very proactive in our healthcare. I’m not talking about coverage, I’m talking about taking good care of ourselves. I suppose I am a culprit more than most, because I am blessed with a good metabolism and decent health, so I take advantage to eat like a pig and exercise not at all. I fear that if struck with some major malady, I would work like a beast to get healthy and fit. I fear that by that point it will be too late, yet I struggle everyday to convince myself to exercise and be healthy. Every day I lose that fight.
People don’t do optional, especially when optional means working harder. It is a matter of priorities. Would I rather spend 30 minutes a day working out or would I rather spend that time playing video games, reading a book, catching up on work, watching Breaking Bad, writing, or any number of enjoyable things I do. The gym makes it more of an obstacle when you calculate real vs. perceived time. Real time includes travel time, change time, and minor factors such as escape time (the time it takes to extract yourself from your home when you have kids who insist on going with you). So a half hour at the gym could mean an hour or more in real time.
This sounds like an excuse to be lazy but it is more of a rationalization of value. In a society predicated on immediacy, exercise is an irrational act–unless your life is at stake. Eating healthy–cooking food and the like–is equally irrational, given the number of expedient options both available and steadily reinforced through the mass media. It is more likely you will see 10 commercials about fast food options on any given channel (especially kid channels and food channels) than you will a commercial advertising the benefits and availability of healthy options such as salad. In short, we are programmed to be lazy junk food eaters. We are programmed to value such things before the healthier option and it is economically reinforced by the ease of financial access to unhealthy options vs. healthy options. An apple will cost me twice as much as a Twix bar. A monthly gym membership can be the cost of a single video game, and a full year membership will buy me a ps4 and an xbox one. Why then would I be inclined to make the leap to healthful living before I actually need to?
I spend hours each week thinking about this. I once sat for a full 5 minutes trying to decide if I wanted to do push-ups or not. Ultimately I didn’t do the push ups and instead ate some lemon cake. In the short term the cake was good, but my gut is bad, and my boys do find occasion to make fun of me when topless. Maybe that guilt will motivate me. Nothing else so far has.