Please don’t say “this job is making my blood pressure go higher.” Or, “this job is giving me an ulcer.” Or, “Mexican food gives me heartburn.” The only accurate way to express what is happening to your body is to say “I haven’t made the correct decisions to keep my blood pressure down.” Or, “I don’t know how to reduce my ulcer pain.” Or, “the way to stop heartburn is to stop eating the food that causes it.”
It is difficult and perhaps very difficult to make our body happy, but it is well worth the effort. It takes accountability to have a healthy body. Note that I did not say beautiful or well formed, I said a healthy body.
Part of the challenge of maintaining health is that in our culture we equate youth and beauty with health, but in keeping with the old adage, “don’t judge a book by its cover” looks can be very deceiving. I know young people who have never eaten anything but MacDonald’s and have very well formed bodies. The well-formed body belies the fact that the body is unhealthy.
Most importantly, don’t surrender your body to any other force. When you say that something outside of you is forcing your body into an unhealthy condition, you are, in effect, allowing that force to control you.
This is not to say that if you choose, you will be completely healthy forever. It means that in so far as you are able, it is up to you to maintain and improve your health. I recently watched a YouTube video with a young man who has Cystic Fibrosis. He understood his disease and he understood that his role included taking responsibility for completing treatments every single day of his life. No one can say that he could have done anything to avoid Cystic Fibrosis, yet he takes a very responsible role with his body and his disease.
It is not even possible anymore to blame your weight on the food manufacturing or restaurant industries. You have to be illiterate and possibly even blind and deaf to not understand the connection between sugar, alcohol, animal fats, chemicals and a loss of health.
I believe that this is why so many people speak a language of irresponsibility – folks do not want to say, oh yes, it is I who have eaten and drunk to the point of disease and death. Folks want to say, that it is someone else who did it to them.
Don’t be that person. Be the person who stands up and says, my body belongs to me. I am in charge of what goes into my body. I am in charge of how active I am. I am in charge of the chemicals that I ingest. You can do everything in YOUR power to make your body healthy and live long enough to enjoy retirement and grandchildren. Or if not that, then perhaps travel and friendship, it is up to you…All of it.