That’s really kind of a strange way the body works. If you take on unhealthy habits, your body doesn’t immediately fight back and make you FEEL like there is anything wrong. Over time it slowly clogs the arteries, decays your lungs from smoking, increases your heart rate, blood pressure, cholesterol, fasting glucose levels, and not to mention, your waistline.
But through all of that, you continue to think that if all of those bad habits were so bad, then why aren’t I “feeling unhealthy?” So you just continue on with your bad habits and push aside all the warnings the “experts” have about the risks of those bad habits as nonsense in the real world.
I bring this up because I came across an story about an obese woman Marci Williams, who went to the doctor for a physical, with no known “health problems” (because I’m assuming she felt “fine”), and within two weeks she was taking medication for high-blood pressure, started taking insulin because she was diagnosed as diabetic, and her cholesterol levels were off the charts and had to start taking cholesterol lowering medication.
She states that:
"My resting pulse was in the 120-something range," she recalled. "That's a racing pulse for most people, and that was my resting pulse."
She ended up going to a cardiologist and this is rather long quote but I truly love the fact that the doctor didn’t mince any words with her:
"I just knew the minute he walked in this wasn't going to be a very good appointment," she said. "He said, 'You know, you are not going to live to see 50 if you don't lose this weight.' He made it very clear to me that all these things that were happening to me were symptoms of obesity, rather than stand-alone illnesses. His advice to me was [that] we can treat all of these symptoms, but the only way to cure this is to lose the weight." [my emphasis]
The first thing she did was to get an angioplasty to open up those arteries a bit.
Then she started watching what she ate, and had a goal of exercising 30 minutes a day, although in the beginning, that became too much for her and she had to break that up into 10 minute workouts a few times a day.
I think this is a great idea of breaking up the workout into very short little sessions all day and I mentioned that I’m in the process of testing this right now with pushups.
She lost some weight, and the doctor gave her the okay to do some more strenuous exercise, so she joined a gym.
As she continued to drop weight:
...she also shed symptoms. She stopped having to take insulin. Her blood pressure came under control. Her cholesterol improved.
When this all started, Marci weighed around 332 pounds (at 5’ 3”) and her weight now is between 135 and 140 pounds.
I talked about this in a post about a client that I have in my class that was always overweight but then had a heart attack and that really woke him up. He had always ate unhealthy foods, didn’t exercise, but didn’t “feel unhealthy” so he just thought he was mortal to any problems.
But as both him and Marci Williams found out, at some point, these habits will catch up to you and the consequences will hit you like a brick. Thankfully both of them were freaked out enough to make some changes.
I know with my client, and I’m assuming with Ms. Williams, is that now that they are actually following better eating habits, exercising, and watching their weight, that even though they “felt healthy” for most of their lives with their bad habits, they now realize how unhealthy they felt now that they TRULY know what “feeling healthy” feels like.
Which I think is my overall point: don’t assume that just because you don’t feel “unhealthy” (especially if you have bad eating habits, don’t work out, and are overweight) that everything is “okay.” Go to the doctor, get blood work done, ask your doctor for a blunt opinion, and make some changes and see what it feels like to really “feel healthy.”
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