How Much Responsibility Should We Take For Our Health?
We each are responsible for our own health
We each are responsible for our own health. If we do not look after it then nobody else will - not our parents, our partner or our doctor. Many of us go through life without taking full responsibility for our health. We drift along until something goes wrong and expect our doctor to fix it up.
Most people take more care of their car than their physical body yet it is the only place we have to live and we only get issued with one in our lifetime. You need to do some maintenance on your car if you wish it to keep running reliably and the same goes for your body. Think of your doctor as being the breakdown service and proper exercise and healthy eating as the day to day maintenance.
It is easy to use excuses for not taking care of ourselves "I just love my food too much" and "I know I am overweight, but I have tried to diet and it didn't work". And of course the classic "I don't have time to exercise". These are nothing more than excuses we make to ourselves and of course the loser is ...us.
We often think our doctor is always there to look after us. But the problem is your doctor does not look after your health. Your doctor only looks after your sickness. Even if your doctor says you are well it not does mean you are not heading towards disease. It is only when symptoms of disease appear can your doctor identify them but they may have been smoldering away for years and even decades under the surface.
Our health is important and we tend to take it for granted until we find ourselves out of it. Then it is "give me all the tests man I don't want to die" or "do whatever it takes - money is no object". The problem of course is that there are no cures for nasty chronic 'lifestyle diseases' like heart disease, cancer and diabetes and dozens of others. Modern medicine can at best only manage them in some form or another but the sufferer's quality of life is lowered for the rest of their lifespan and may well be cut short as well.
Most of us do not realize that it is what we do and do not do each day that dictates how well we remain especially as we grow older. Often people say they look after themselves yet 8 out of 10 people do not do enough strength building and maintaining exercise. So someone is not telling the truth. You cannot be truly healthy without proper exercise - it is simply not possible. You may think you are ticking along okay but somewhere down the track there will be a price. Are you prepared to pay this price?
Even proper exercise alone will determine how fast or slow you are aging and whether you remain healthy and well or become weak, frail and prone to disease. So doing enough exercise that works the muscular system will totally govern how that last third of life will be spent. We can either spend it climbing a mountain or rotting in some nursing home somewhere having someone else feed, dress and bathe us.
Whether you want to be bursting with strength and energy in the last third of your life or one of the walking unwell that makes up 50 percent of the population is totally in your hands. Bit of a no brainer really isn't it?