Free to Be Healthy

I was watching TV on a Sunday morning when I ran across a show that caught my attention. This show was a news show on a network channel and has been on the air for a number of years. The show rotates topics of national interest and this particular show was right up my alley.

They were discussing the obesity epidemic in America. Much like we discuss each week, they covered many aspects of the problem and even tried to offer solutions. As I watched it was easy to see not only the significance of our current situation, but also how we have gotten into it in the first place.

That is where I started to become alarmed. It is one thing to be an individual that has struggled to reach goals. I deal with that every day. As a health coach, I deal with people trying to lose weight, quit smoking and every goal you can think of that falls within those categories.

What I have realized over the years is that I’m not just dealing with each person. I am dealing with a national problem. Sure, I’m only working with one person at a time or a small group of people at most, but we all live in a society that has continued to create our own epidemic.

Health has become more elusive as a healthy lifestyle has been supported less over the years. It is cheaper and easier to eat the food that has the least amount of nutritional value. It is easy to be inactive and will only get easier as we continue to find new ways to make things more automated. We have gotten to the point where the leading causes of death are things that we are causing ourselves.

The show wasn’t simply painting a negative picture of our culture. It was actually explaining how we developed the economy with needs that lead us down this path. There were some very interesting aspects of our situation that really made me think. The most interesting part is that we are both the cause and the effect of the changes that have taken place.

Technology has played a big role. With more automation, we are able to get more done by doing less work. As that has become the expectation, we began to demand more work from each person to keep up with this high-output expectation. Industries that were more service oriented began to do the same with hours, demanding more time from each employee. As time became scarce, a new way of eating became the norm- fast food.

Now that we have less time, food comes to us much more quickly and we are able to stay on track with the busy schedule. Marketing and Advertising took this to another level. We were shown hundreds of options and how they would make our lives easier and more pleasurable. It became nearly impossible to avoid the messages of all these products.

Our waistlines and medical check-ups began to show this quickly. As we all know, the quickest, most impulse-driven choices aren’t always the best for us. This has been clear for some time and we are really seeing the consequences.

There were a few figures discussed on the show that really jumped out at me. One of them is the fact that smoking and obesity are now the top two causes of preventable death. That means that cigarettes and French-fries are killing more people each year than guns and car accidents. It is not surprising when you think about the fact that heart disease is now the leading cause of death in both men and women.

Those are medical figures that may or may not hit home for you. I must admit, they don’t always hit home for me either. I can appreciate the significance of the numbers, but when I look in the mirror, I’m not thinking about my risk for heart disease. Even when I am working out, I’m not “lowering my morbidity”. I’m thinking about feeling good. I’m simply living healthy.

Feeling good and living healthy are easier said than done, however. As I have discovered by talking to thousands of people about their health and how they could improve it, I have learned that knowing something and doing it are completely different things. There is even a difference between wanting to do something and doing it. That is where the most shocking figure came from as I watched this show.
A recent poll revealed that 60% of people want to lose weight. This number seems high until I thought about the obesity rate in our country. Over 60% of all Americans are overweight, so it makes sense that they would want to lose weight. So what are they doing about it? There lies the biggest issue. Of those 60% of people who want to lose weight, only 30% of them is actually trying.

That number just shocks me. Every time I see it, say it, write it or even think it, I can’t believe that there are so many people that want to do something but are not doing it. What is stopping them? What is keeping them from doing what they want to do? Are we not in America? Is this not the land of Freedom?

I still think it is. I think we are living free. There are still problems with this freedom. As the show illustrated the economic changes resulting from the changes and in turn causing more changes, we are being shown many options. The problem is that the options that we are choosing are not always the best for us. That is old news. I don’t need to tell you what is good or bad, healthy or unhealthy.

I just want us to start asking ourselves the question: who is making choices for me? Are you making choices for yourself or is the advertising world making them for you. We have an amazing gift in our freedom. The problem is we are not using it to help ourselves. How else, would we be able to assert the fact that we want to do something, but still not do it.

What is even more interesting is the fact that a whole new industry came out of this shift. The health and fitness industry is huge and continues to grow. Despite our declining health, we spend billions every year on weight loss products. Does that make sense? We are paying to be less healthy.

I’m glad the industry became a reality, or I wouldn’t have a platform to run my business. It is important that we have products and services to help people live healthy lives. I think the problem still lies in our choices. It’s not just how much we are spending, it is what we are spending it on. What is valuable and what is not?

Every day in America we put forth a great deal of effort to not put forth an effort. The new tricks and schemes that promise to bring us results just leave us in a worse position than we started from. When you try something and it doesn’t work, that is very discouraging. It now becomes even more difficult to try something else. Eventually most Americans just stop altogether and become one of the 30% that wants to lose weight but “can’t”.

What do we need to do? We need to start using our freedom to help ourselves. The choices we make have to be for us and not for the sake of time or convenience. If you want to be sick, tired and die a miserable death at a young age, by all means, do that. But I don’t think that any of us want that. We want to be healthy. We want to enjoy life. What is more enjoyable, the above circumstance or getting up 20 minutes earlier and exercising?

Change may seem difficult. It may even be difficult for you to get started. I get that. I’m not saying it should be automatic. What I am saying is: use the freedom you have to choose what you want. Not just short-term things like: I’m tired this minute so I want to eat chips on the couch. I’m talking long-term like: I want to feel good each day, so I am going to do things that help me feel good each day.

When it’s in writing it sounds much more black and white. That is why I wrote this article. After watching a show that illustrated so many of our issues and how we got into them, I really felt that I needed to put these thoughts on paper. Now that I read them myself, it makes it much clearer that my clients are dealing with their own issues, but they are also dealing with our cultural issues. That culture starts at the national level and trickles all the way down through every structured group along the way, such as communities, workplaces, schools and families.

I realize now that we need to start building healthy environments, not just by providing healthy options. We need to take it a step further and help people understand what they want. What choices they have and how they can make it work for them. After all, we all want to be healthy, right? So what is stopping us from being healthy? The environment may provide choices that are not ideal for us, but we are all making those choices every day. Let’s start thinking about them a little more carefully and we will all be better off.