No Excuses Unless There Is
Most physical fitness specialists or therapists will tell you that you can live a healthier life with regular exercise. Strength and endurance are available if you make the effort to obtain them!
Walking, pushups, sit-ups, planks, climbing stairs, and other forms of body weight exercises that require very little equipment are available to us all.
There are no excuses to not be healthy unless you are not.
Will you find an excuse not to be healthy?
Upon retirement, I had bad knees. Then, I got them replaced. Now, I have no excuse!
Where There Is a Will
So much depends on our will to move. Do you want to live long and healthy?
When you do experience ailments, you should try to define them as temporary or needing further medical advice or attention. Often, as with my high school track experience, we can just walk it off to stretch sore muscles and put ice on it to stop the pain. Beyond that, you need the help of a professional!
Beyond the training effect (the sore muscles), you need the motivation of why and how to experience better health.
Be consistent. That is harder than it sounds because it starts in your mind. You must tell your body to move. Then, things will get better!
Measure Twice
With any weight loss program, self-started or otherwise, frequent stops on your bathroom scales will give you good feedback about your diet and exercise.
Your weight is important. Your bone structure was designed to carry a limited weight to reflect good health. Added weight means added stress to your joints and your organs.
Unfortunately, there are no built-in body alarms when your body mass becomes unhealthy. But you can go online and find a BMI Calculator. If your Body Mass Index (BMI) score is over 30, you are considered obese. That should worry you. That should be a motivation to change that calculation with diet and exercise.
Measure often and chart your progress.
Plan to Protect Yourself
Annual physicals are a good way to protect yourself against ongoing health concerns.
Carry health insurance for two reasons. First, to help pay for annual checkups, which include doctor exams, blood work, and any needed follow up exams.
Second, in case you have an injury or an illness that you cannot cure yourself, like “walking it off”, you will be able to afford the cost of the doctor visit, treatment, or hospitalization.
A hospital stay with tests like x-rays or MRI, could cost tens of thousands of dollars. Do you have that much in savings?
Reduce your risk, carry health insurance.
We All Must Face Pain
Even the healthy can get sick. You are almost certain to experience a bad cold or the flu. Then, other ailments like Covid-19, pneumonia, and various other infections are hard to recover from without medication.
Our poor diet may eventually increase our chances to be prescribed cholesterol drugs, pain medication, blood thinners, and a host of other medications.
Are you trying to eat better?
Easy Not to Do—Exercise
Diet and exercise sound like a cure-all! And, with a lot of our physical problems, it is a go-to way to get the condition resolved.
The problem lies in our view of the cure. We ignore the benefits that could come from it most of the time, since we have a lot of other important things to do. We fail to give it a priority.
Dieting and exercise are easy not to do!
But what if we changed our priorities and studied what we really need for a good diet and regular exercise.
That sounds like a good bet to me!
Defense Budget
Whatever you decide to do, you need to fit it into your budget. I suggest you invest in both time and equipment. Dieting and exercise will require both.
Walking shoes and more fresh fruit and vegetables sounds like a good start. They could become your first line of defense.
Allocating time for exercise will be a good defensive use of your time.
Arranging for good health insurance will be like building a wall to protect you from potential hurtful financial events.
Hedge Your Bet
I wish I could say that you will never experience health issues and pain and other discomforts. But I do suspect that you and I both must work through those unwelcome health concerns.
Dieting and exercise can be a tool you can use to fortify your bet on good health. They become a hedge against health concerns. They can lessen the odds of you experiencing bad health issues.
As part of my attempt to help you build a better mindset for money, I include blogs related to the health aspect of personal finance. If you can stay healthy, you can save on medical treatment expenses, medications, and health insurance.
With good money management, you can hedge your good health bet by using a high-deductible health insurance and contribute to a Health Savings Account (H.S.A.).
With good health practices, like dieting and exercise, you can realize current savings for medical expenses to help accumulate value in your H.S.A. for assistance later when you need it to cover deductions on major health treatments. That is a hedge against out-of-pocket expenses.
Medical advances are making your possibility to live a long life more realistic.
Hedge that bet by your willingness to eat a good diet and a commitment to regular exercise. Sometime pain may limit your ability to do so. Being in good shape will help your recovery time!
I want you to win with your health. But do not bet that you will not experience health problems.
That is why I suggest you have a good health insurance policy. You will be very happy when you lose your good health bets!