Time to give up?
There comes a time when one just has to give up.
You just gotta surrender to that “evil twin” of yours who keeps your “good twin” from doing what you both know is the right thing for your health. That time came for me today . . . again.
Here’s an excerpt from an article on KENS San Antonio:
If you need some inspiration to lose weight, read on. A newly-published study shows overweight middle-aged women are significantly less likely to live to a ripe old age.
Fat is the enemy of long life. That’s the conclusion of a new study published in the British Medical Journal. It tracked 17,000 women over 30 years, and it’s a warning for the more than 72 million Americans classified as obese.
Being fat in middle age makes you 80% less likely to make it to old age in good health. “And that’s what they showed,” explained Sue Cunningham, Ph.D., a registered dietitian with the U.T. Health Science Center. “The women who maintained their weight, who managed their weight the best, had a healthier life when they were older.”
Cunningham says the reality is that for most of us, what we weight at about age 18 is probably our optimum weight for our lives, but it gets harder and harder to maintain that.
Here are the hard facts. For every two pounds of weight gained since age 18, a woman’s odds of being healthy after age 70 go down by 5%.
“It’s not so much the length of your years, as the quality of your years,” Cunningham said.
And the truth is many young people are setting themselves up to struggle from an early age. “We certainly are starting out a lot heavier,” Cunningham observed. “Most of us, a lot of us, too many of us are starting out too heavy, too young.”
Certainly our genetic makeup determines much of how our old age plays out. But this study clearly showed that weight is one of the most important environmental factors we can control that will allow us, as women, to become little old ladies.
———————
I haven’t written much lately. I suspect I am rebelling against my knowledge that I absolutely must do something about my weight. Fortunately, I am quite tall for a woman at 5′11″, and that helps me to spread out and thus hide the worst of my bulges. From others, that is. There is no hiding those bulges from me.
I had lunch today with an old friend. As you might suspect, we talked a lot about our common friends and health woes caused by their advancing years. Gawd, I don’t want to be the topic of one of those conversations for someone else. I don’t want my friends sitting around some day talking about how hard it is for them to see me with so many weight-related health problems. “If only she had just lost some of that weight she was always worried about.”
I promise you tonight, friends, that I will change my dirty ways. I know what I should do. I should quit eating junk, quit sitting at the computer instead of riding my bike, quit procrastinating. I am starting right now. Please send me your good vibes.
