The Tragedy of Delay

I don’t normally read the Daily Mail but this story somehow caught my eye. It is a sad narrative, no, more than sad, tragic, because, if you are reasonably affluent in the developed world, your health is in your hands and you can improve beyond imagination even into your older years.

It is so easy for all us to put off until the tomorrow that never comes, all the things we are going to do to make our health and our life better, but, tomorrow, as every older person knows, sneaks up on you awfully quickly leaving all those things undone unless we remain vigilant.

Like most other folks, I spent a good part of my life thinking “I’ll start tomorrow,” or “I’ll start on Monday,” or even, “I’ll start on the first day of the month.” There is no more fallacious thinking than this. If you aren’t working on making things better, those things are not merely staying in place, they are getting worse. Habits are being ingrained, dopamine reward systems are keeping you tied to the same dismal behaviours and change becomes harder and harder as the days pass.

There’s no need to be perfect and consistency – the holy grail of behaviour change – is never completely achieved. But you do have to get up each day and dust yourself off and keep trying. I never write off any idea, no matter how the experts deride it (the experts always find error in something that does not mesh with their professional indoctrination). I’ll try anything that makes sense to me. The experts, the ones who bleat about “health at every size” and “all foods can fit,” have failed us thus far so I feel no compulsion to listen to anything they have to say.

I don’t know about you, but I have no desire to end up like Miriam, full of self-loathing, and confined to a wheelchair because I just had to have that vanilla slice.