The individuals profiled include a diabetic, someone with brain cancer, a breast cancer survivor who hardly exercised a day in her life, and someone who was a regular in his hospital for recurrent cardiac issues. And they all reached the conclusion of "hell, I have this body... it's not always going to be here... might as well make the most of it!"
Don't you think we should strive to arrive at this conclusion a tad before we're right about to kick it? I mean, it's commendable to reach it at all, but, well, I think people can do better than that.
Ever since I was old enough to register these things, my dad was on cholesterol and blood pressure meds. He's 6'2", 180 lbs at his heaviest, and eats like an Israeli - tons of veggies and fruits, olive oil, lean meats, etc. There's no explanation except genetics. That's it. He could get more exercise, but he walks at least a little bit every day. I always was and continue to be his mini-me. I look like him, I act like him, I like the same foods as him, etc. There's a pretty good chance that along with having exactly identically shaped feet, we also have identical genes for blood pressure and cholesterol management. The former has given me textbook perfect gait as analyzed by running specialists, and the latter will likely put me on cholesterol and blood pressure meds by 30 or 35.
That's how it is. There's also a nice cocktail of colon cancer, stroke, and diabetes on both sides of my family, so there's that as well. My relatives die in their 80's, but still.
In high school, I remember thinking, "Well, there's no way out of all that... I might as well give my body the best fighting chance to avoid all this crap for as long as possible." I was 5'9" and barely 120 pounds at that point, and it never entered my head that because I was skinny, I was home-free from all this health stuff. I had a biology teacher in high school who lost his father when he was 17 to a heart attack because he had uncontrollably high cholesterol. My teacher was slim and ate well, but he had the same thing. He was treating it with meds, diet, and exercise because he didn't want his son to suffer the same tragedy.
It's very foreign to me, this absolute idea of skinny = healthy. Skinny = a higher chance of being healthier longer, but there's nothing absolute about it. And, you know, anyone might keel over at any point, or get a diagnosis of cancer, or some equally tragic thing, but I've always found it easier to be able to do the best I can so if that's ever me, I can say, "Hey, I gave it my best shot, and imagine how bad it might have been if I didn't try at all."
So, there's all that heavy shit. But it's infinitely easier to deal with if you sit down and really give it some thought. And science and nature aren't perfect, either, so we're equipped to deal with moderate assaults. Civilizations have been imbibing alcohol, getting sick, and eating weird things for thousands of years, yet we manage to reproduce and live. Instead of using lead as a sweetener or bloodletting, we have aspartame and Botox. We're a pretty silly bunch of animals, that's for sure.
(To stick it to evolution and nature, what's with all the junk DNA? There's all the retroviral DNA we've accumulated over the course of time for no apparent reason mixed in with our functional DNA. We have SO MUCH junk DNA it's ridiculous. The energy expenditure in replicating it all along with our functional DNA when cells divide is astronomical. But we keep it. It's there. For some reason or another. No one knows. Nature and evolution are big nebulous terms we like to throw at things we don't understand. (The difference between science and religion is science continues to poke at the misunderstanding and religion is content to let it lie.))
So, you know, all anyone can do is their best. Nature is weird. We're weird. It's a total crapshoot, so absolutes never did work, they never do work, and I don't see them ever working in the foreseeable future.
I'm going to the gym.
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