Looking After Your Own Health

The person I hold responsible for my own personal health is me. That has to be the truth of the matter doesn’t it? There is nobody else you can honestly blame if you are not as healthy as it is possible for you to be. As it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be. The buck stops with the person you see in the mirror.

What I try very hard to do, is not to eat at all during the day, on week days. I have drinks, and there again I am trying to hold back my coffee addiction and to that end I have just made up a jug of iced tea, no sweetener in that. I have a second brew from the speciality mix on the desk now. I buy tea from a shop in Burgundy (OK, I am tea snob as is my husband). Milk does not feature in these beverages hot or cold.

Steve and I have a big salad on the table for dinner and we have salmon or chicken or something as light, perfectly cooked by himself to his own unquestioned whims. The top favourite main ingredient of the salad is Lambs Leaf as we call it in the UK, or Feld Salad as it is called in Germany, Nüssli and Rapunzel are other names for the same thing around Europe. We vary the dressing and quite often I make that myself.

 

Very often I have told friends that even living in the same house as Steve is actually fattening because he falls of the wagon every now and again and wants me to join him so that he doesn’t feel so bad. We are on the straight and narrow right now, because we are at the start of the triathlon season and as you get older you need to try to make it easier for yourself any way you can. One way, is to get whatever training you can get done in, in whatever time you have available and the obvious other way it to try to keep your weight down to a sensible level.

 

The other day, I did tell Steve that I still love him with the love handles because my love for him is not about appearance, it is about the person he is, and I like the person he is. We like each other. We are without a shadow of doubt best friends; we are the person the other wants to be with a much as possible. We share major likes and dislikes. So the image we see of each other is not off putting. The truth remains though. We could both do with being lighter. So our five days of eating very healthily, is coupled with our inner monsters that dream of a cake in the tea shop on Sunday morning after our run and a bag of jelly snakes each when we go to a movie.

Steve does not drink any alcohol at all and never has. He never did start that with the rest of the guys, even though he went with them to the pub after swim training in his teens. I do like a glass of wine with a meal but don’t have one with every meal and anyway, I am a serious lightweight drinker, having had quite enough hangovers in the very distant past, including one that lasted three days after a friends twenty first birthday party. A gang of my friends thought it was about time they made sure I got drunk. For a while I tried to do what my friends did but I was always so ill afterwards that I soon dropped out of that pattern. I have never understood why anybody would go out and get drunk intentionally.

My efforts are devoted to trying to keep doing the sport that I love, including trying over and over again to drop a few more pounds. One failure is not absolute and I will stick at it and get back on the healthy wagon each time there is a bump in the road. Let us be sensible; I am seventy seven year old and that is no time to relax and give up just because I am not the pretty young girl I once was. That is a huge danger isn’t it; to say ‘Oh what the hell pass the crisps and slob out’. Not for me.

On Tuesday, I went to see the nurse at the doctors surgery just to get her to take a look at the nasty gash on my shin and decide if I should keep it covered or let it dry out in the air. That should have been a five minute appointment but for all the talk about the state the NHS is in, she did an amazing thing. She checked on my records and gave me a serious dressing down about not coming in often enough. She took my blood pressure. She had a lot to say. She made a couple of appointments for tests that I had not had. I was surprised actually, because of course, I think I am pretty damn fit for my age and she agreed with that, she knows what I do but argued that that did not mean I could forget my age and ignore all the normal tests that are recommended.

 

So in that light, I can only pass this message on to a couple of friends that I am worried about you because you are overweight and you are waaaaayyyyy younger than me. Get your act together, because you my friend could be a lot better at your sport if you were lighter. I know people who have stopped participating in the sport that they so enjoyed for years because they are overweight, too heavy to continue; and let us not be politically correct here, lets stop all that politically correct nonsense and use the ‘F’ Word. Fat. The weight did not stop you enjoying your sport, YOU did.

Our friend shown here is Anthony Forsyth. We have known him since he was racing as a junior. He is now a Pastor, he is married and has five children and runs in 100 mile races. He was like many of us over weight for a while back there in the past.