How Much Money Is Your Health Worth?
Consider You Have A Terminal Stage Illness.
You might be thinking this is kind of dramatic. Well, it is indeed! It needs to be. While this has an obvious answer to most people, the actions do not seem to follow. If someone asks you that, you would probably say that your health is worth all the money in the world, and you are right. This vessel that we call Body is the single most precious asset we will ever have in life. Yet, a small percentage of the population does something about it.
To understand the issue, first, we need to know why this happens. If you are a healthy adult with no restrictions, why do you exercise? The answer should be: To maintain it. In other words, we train so that things stay the same for longer and longer. However, under the hood, we humans do not go very well with things maintaining, as modern society became hardwired to instant gratification. With the ever-growing fitness industry, rates of obesity, neurodegenerative diseases, diabetes, and heart-related issues are skyrocketing. Something is clearly not working.
I can blame whatever or whoever I want, but it is my responsibility to take care of my health. I have the power to make daily decisions and to guide the course of my life. Perhaps it is time to take a step back and dissect the underlying reasons why we cannot seem to live healthier. The title of this story tries to encourage us to put ourselves in a dramatic situation for a reason. People often do not realize how they are treating themselves until they make a full stop to think about it. Are we seeking fitness for the wrong reasons?
I believe one of the key elements here is to understand that exercise and movement play a much deeper role in our lives than just a means to an end. As a consequence of this epiphany, we start to develop a different relationship with habits, dramatically reshaping the course of life. We are facing consistent fads and trends in the fitness world, with only profit as a goal.
Deleterious words like hacks or workout consistently shape the way we approach our Fitness. They deliver a distorted meaning to healthy living. I would recommend the average practitioner to abolish these words from their vocabulary. Seriously. While in technology, hacking something might have a positive meaning as a fast way of reaching the desired goal, in fitness, it often means to achieve something with less dedication. When we exercise, our goal is to make it a habit, and not a quick fix. There is no quick fix. There is no hack. There is just plain discipline.
Workout, on the other hand, destroys one of the very first foundations of movement and skill. To become better at something, we practice it. We don’t work ourselves out. In the last decades, the fitness community developed this hurtful idea that becoming exhausted in training is to become better, which is scientifically unreliable. Living by the quote “No pain, no gain” might be one of the most damaging things a beginner in exercise can do. Instead, we urgently need to develop a little bit more of self-reflection to answer what we ultimately want from our exercise practices.
If you take a deep look at your behavior on a day-to-day basis, you will quickly notice that social commitments or work-related appointments are seldom exchanged for a healthier alternative. Work or leisure always comes first. When life gets slightly off-track, healthy habits are the first things to fly out the window, cause it’s easy. I have been guilty of that many times over. We generally pay no mind to that because it is hard to see the consequences 10–20 years ahead, but the curtain will fall. Hence the need for critical thinking.
All these details are influencing us daily, and the industry itself cares only about profit. Nonetheless, each one of us is to blame. It lies upon ourselves to make the decisions of what tomorrow is going to be. I urge you to brush off the dust, understand your underlying motives, be consistent with your actions, and treat your vessel wisely.
Address your way of life before regret comes knocking on your door. When the time comes, be the one who said: “I lived my life to the fullest, I did the things that truly made me happy”. Breathe and move with intent.
Strength to you!
