On Cheating, Coasting, Comfort, and Rewards
How I Fell Off the Wagon (Healthwise) and My Eventual Wake-Up Call
My entire journey of health and the quality of my later life is full of pitfalls and potholes. Have you found that staying the course with your health practice—whether it’s exercise or diet—is sometimes very hard and not in obvious ways? There is resistance inside me that I’m sometimes barely able to detect. Here is a story of one of those episodes that happened a few months ago.
I felt on top of the world last November when my book came out, and I started this newsletter and website. I knew it was going to be more work than I was used to in my “time rich” life. But I also knew that without exposure and getting my message out there the book wouldn’t get enough circulation.
I enjoyed lots of congratulations from friends and family as well as celebratory dinners and drinks. Publishing my book was a tremendous milestone that brought attention and a feeling of accomplishment. I allowed myself more alcohol than I am used to, and the social scene provided more “reward” food in the form of desserts and comfort food than I usually eat on my own. An element of “congratulations, you’ve done it” came from others and from within me. All the attention felt good, yet it took extra time to be social and impacted my training schedule as well as my diet. It was eerily like how I used to celebrate successes earlier in my life. As Stevie Winwood sings, I felt I was “back in the high life again”, with comfort and rewards having been “earned.”
And then came December, the skiing vacation with my daughters, and the holidays, during which I always put my passion for health aside and do what others are doing at the table, namely drinking more and eating whatever is available, which doesn’t always present a healthy choice. I wasn’t able to do much of my regular exercise during this time as well. I remember shrugging it off, thinking: “Oh well, you can afford it with how healthy you are. Live a little.”
Come January, after more than two months of eating, drinking, making merry, and not moving as much, with only a few days at a time to let my body heal from what I was doing to it, I started to feel sluggish and lacked energy. My joints were becoming slightly stiff, and my sinuses were blocked regularly. I knew from my first detox a long time ago that these are sure signs of lower immune function, resulting in inflammation in my body that my immune system was not able to clear out. At the same time, I could feel myself getting used to a lower level of activity and more carbohydrates and alcohol in my diet. I felt uncomfortable and caught between two worlds: my new world of health and my old world of unhealthy “success.” I stayed with the discomfort and didn’t try to hide it.
A Shift in Consciousness
Then one day I was reading a passage from Younger Next Year: A Guide to Living Like 50 Until You’re 80 and Beyond for research for a newsletter article. In Chapter 5, “The Biology of Growth and Decay,” one of the authors, Dr. Harry Lodge, describes how the stress caused by exercise is high enough to trigger rebuilding and renewal. This is so-called good inflammation. The opposite, lower-level inflammation, the kind we get from processed food, worry, or a sedentary lifestyle, is too low to trigger the rebuilding response and, in turn, leads to slow decay. He describes it as a steady drip, drip, drip, never knowing when the bucket will be full and overflow (see my “Tipping Point” article). The short and sharp levels of inflammation we get from exercise and recovery clean out the damaged cells and lay the foundation for recovery and rebuilding whereas the steady drip of lower-level inflammation burdens and eventually overwhelms the immune system, which can lead to illness.
This passage woke me up. I realized I was doing the same thing as Dr. Lodge described, allowing the drip, drip, drip to become a way of life instead of actively boosting my immune system with my previous levels of exercise and nutrition. I realized the trap I had fallen into and changed back to my previous, focused health practices that very day. My inflammation receded in about a week, and my energy levels climbed back to where they used to be. I had been under the illusion that I could coast and cheat without consequences, that I was entitled to the “rewards” I was overindulging in, and that somehow my poor diet and sedentary ways were not going to do me any harm. I was thinking this lifestyle was a temporary hiatus; meanwhile my older, poor health habits were creeping back in and gaining a stronghold.
The message here is simple yet subtle. Later-life health isn’t always easy work. Unlike when I was younger, my body won’t recover from cheating as easily. Temptations are all around us as well as inside us, driven by emotional roots, long-held beliefs, and old habits we sometimes aren’t even aware of. Yet the process I went through in those months made me stronger and more aware that my new life of health is more important than the old motivations that used to drive me. If I indulge those old motivations too much, the risk of falling ill or becoming less mobile increases. It’s as simple as that.
If I reinforce my new, healthy habits the potential for living a longer, healthier, and higher quality life increases. And isn’t that what we all want most of all?
