PUT YOUR hands up if you spend eight to 10 hours a day sitting while on the job. Put your hands up again if you consider walking around your housing estate or park or that the last time you vigorously exercised was six months or more ago.
Hands up also if you are more than 10kg overweight or if you are now suffering from ill health because of unhealthy lifestyle choices.
If your hands are up for any or all of the above, congratulations: you are now in contention for the next top health scare. Pick one of these – diabetes, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), coronary artery disease (CAD) or musculoskeletal disorders. These four are just the tip of the iceberg. They are the hot and dangerous four. The list goes on.
Change is becoming the new buzzword in politics. Not only is it creating waves in the US but also for us here. Change can also apply to us individually.
Lifestyle habits are becoming more detrimental to health. People in the city don’t walk anywhere any more. As quality of life increases – and this is mostly through automation and convenience – people tend to move less.
Within the confines of my office desk, I can order food, book an airline ticket, pay any bill, do banking, go shopping, watch TV or the latest movie and even view my home’s CCTV. Anything out of the norm from that would be, for the average person, already too much effort and work.
We are becoming a lazy society. And if we don’t know yet, obesity and minor complications are slowly creeping in, and then, it’s game over.
Being healthy is not just about watching your diet or being careful with food. This is simply not enough these days. Even food quality has becoming poorer.
Most farm-bred poultry and cattle go through some form of hormonal growth treatment, all in the name of profit. Even fish is not safe to eat. The sea as we know is literally a hotbed for dumping of toxic wastes.
Additives and preservatives – do these two sound familiar? Everything that we ingest today has some form of additive or preservative added on. Then, there are the pesticides in our vegetables and crops.
Flipping through the news only confirms this. In the past two years, how many companies around the world have been exposed for flouting regulations on excessive additives and preservatives?
Even everyday supplements like vitamins are not devoid of artificial flavouring, chemicals and colouring. Ascorbic acid, the active ingredient in vitamin C, is known to be clear in colour. But the vitamin C tablets sold commercially are usually bright yellow or orange in colour.
Simply put, what goes in must go somewhere. Either it gets utilised through the body’s natural metabolism or it comes out as waste.
We’ve all heard of free radicals. Free radicals enter our body either from the food we eat or the environment. These get accumulated in the body and before you know it, it forms the Big C!
Making good choices with food would be the first step. Next would be to create a higher body metabolic expenditure through exercise. Exercise forces the body to utilise excess stored energy (fat). A higher metabolic rate will force the excretion of more toxins from our body by way of sweating.
So, in short, life is about choices. You have a choice. You can choose to smoke and damage your lungs as well as pollute the environment. You can also choose to drink excessively, damaging your liver, or eat excessively and risk being obese and developing related complications.
We are only human and we have flaws. We can argue we are too busy, don’t have time, can’t afford it, too hard, too much effort, too painful ... Or we change, and cut off all the excuses.
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