The Affordable Care Act is a lie
Authors Note: I am deeply grateful to Rachel Alexander and Steve Laib of The Intellectual Conservative for their willingness to carry this series of excerpts from my new e-book Your Personal Affordable Care Act: How To Avoid Obamacare. As conservatives we need to speak bluntly about the fact that not only is nothing free but freedom -- from government and industry intrusion into our lives -- comes at a price in responsibility and accountability. My e-book provides the roadmap for doing just that. This is Excerpt 3. See here for Excerpt 1 and Excerpt 2.From The Second and Third Chapters
For most people (the exceptions being folks with inherited disorders or significant disease) being healthy is not as hard as we make it out to be. We make it hard because were often trying to dodge a fundamental fact: its easier to search for the magic bullet never find it and stop trying. Its much harder to say to ourselves starting tomorrow I am going to begin fixing myself and no matter how many small steps it takes or how many times I need to start over I wont stop until I succeed." Thats the attitude of an everyday athlete and as someone recently tweeted to me: the pain of discipline is far less than the pain of regret.
The first and most important step on your path to better health is to get rid of the people and things that tick you off and bring you down. If they really added value to your life you wouldnt be in the predicament youre in now would you? You have to hack away the non-essential so that you can find your core strengths and pursue the good health that is your birth right. Itll be hard to sever ties with old acquaintances (if someone is holding you back or bringing you down they arent really a friend so stop calling them one) habits and things (if you find yourself spending too much time online or in front of a TV it might prove useful to get rid of some of your devices). Cant watch what you dont have. In May 2014 my family dropped our cable TV service; for the first time since 1990 I live in a house without cable or satellite TV. It is blissfully quiet. If there is something really worth watching we stream it. Otherwise as I can now attest youre not missing much.
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These strategies work are doable by the majority of people and more importantly they are sustainable for the long-term. The entire framework begins with fitness and if you dont or wont accept that premise then as far as I am concerned youre already finished. This is where the rubber meets the road. You are either willing to change or you arent. If you arent then your suffering will come in two forms. First and less severe will be the physical suffering that results from a long inexorable decline into ill health which even if it doesnt lead to a premature death will surely and slowly destroy your daily quality of life. The more painful suffering will be of the emotional and psychological variety because youll look back on your wavering and timidity and know that you blew it when you had the chance to fix things. The pain of regret is ALWAYS greater than the pain of discipline. I make no apologies for my fitness-first credo. There are dozens of claims some gadget or gizmo is going to make your fitness journey easier (the whole fitness app mania is absurd) or that you can solve your problems with this or that food or drug. If you go those routes you are subverting your strategy because you are giving primary responsibility to someone else for what ails you and for what is more often than not self-inflicted. Your sense of purpose of finding your fitness path and walking it no matter what is how you build the heart necessary to succeed. Your success will differ from mine and thats fine. It has to suit who you are and where you want to go but it also should meet normative standards that we know are valuable. Your strategy should also meet the test of experience.~~~~~
Pursue fitness first
Establish the highest possible level of cardiorespiratory fitness you can achieve because it is your foundation. This is critical to avoid underachieving. Even if you are unfit now every incremental improvement helps lower your risk of disease or premature death and moves you further away from the pharmacy and the doctors office. This is the case no matter whether you are a man or a woman or even if you already have a disease such as diabetes. Remember however that fitness is not static. It requires ongoing work to get an ongoing benefit. Start slow and small and add a few minutes of time and intensity each week. Use the options at ExRx.net to find a program that will suit you based on what you decide to do. If you are determined to lose weight you will probably need to average an hour or more of aerobic exercise each day. As you become lighter and more fit you might be able to cut time by working harder for shorter periods. This will ease the pressure on your schedule but it will increase the effort you must expend. Make sure you are ready for that trade off. As your fitness improves branch out and do more difficult things. I am a very big fan of high intensity interval training which is extremely time efficient but brutally hard. I use Tabata intervals when I train on my treadmill or indoor bike and they can be adapted to other aerobic activities. Theyre short and tough like me. When you are not exercising teach yourself to walk fast. The federal governments ridiculous advice to just walk" has turned us into a nation of larded strollers which means that no one is ever going to either become more fit or lose weight. Walk as fast as you can whenever and wherever you are aiming to move as close to 4 mph as possible. There is a strong relationship between normal walking speed and mortality especially in older adults. This is so because walking speed affects and tells a lot about a persons state of health in addition to general fitness: balance movement control vision posture and the health of multiple organ systems. Dont get to later life as a slow poke. If you do your stay there is likely to be short and unpleasant. I dont walk slowly anywhere not in the grocery store not even inside my house. Unlike in a car where speed kills when it comes to walking speed saves and improves lives.~~~~~
Make sure you target diet quality before quantity
When you aim to eat better start with this simple goal: eat for quality. When you eat for quality you will almost always eat fewer Calories which is a bonus that can help to produce weight loss. My quality parameters are set this way: 25 to 30 grams of fiber daily 80 to 100 grams of protein daily (approximately 1.1 to 1.4 grams of protein per kg of my bodyweight) (6) About 30 percent of Calories from a variety of mostly naturally occurring not added fats Thats it. Its all I use to understand whether I am eating well. Why? Because meeting these goals requires that I: 1) eat abundant plant foods which are the only sources of fiber (such as fruits vegetables nuts/seeds/legumes/lentils and whole grains); 2) get protein from a diverse range of sources (lean meat fish dairy soy beans/legumes/lentils nuts and whole grains); and 3) eat a wide range of fats from seafood (mostly salmon and tuna) eggs olive oil nuts and nut butters and whole milk dairy. Over the last two decades I believe weve been sold a bill of goods about fats by pharma-coddled entities like the American Heart Association dimwitted health professionals and self-anointed nutrition experts who wouldnt know a useful scientific nutritional principle if it fell on their heads. This includes the leadership of the national health bureaucracy which cannot communicate effectively even about the single issue of whether or not salt intake matters and if so how (7). I enjoy small amounts of alcohol in the forms of beer wine or Scotch. But I almost never have more than one drink in an evening and I dont drink during the work week because as I have gotten older I have noticed that alcohol disrupts my sleep pattern. And since I like sleeping (8 to 9 hours nightly) and I am really good at it drinking less helps me feel better and it means my Scotch collection will last longer. So an occasional a glass of the alcohol of your choice is probably fine. But if you dont drink this is not a reason to start and no you cannot get your entire alcohol intake on Saturday night. And if you do drink always keep in mind that alcohol is not a benign substance and in fact its benefits if there are any have likely been oversold…mostly by people who sell booze. Heres what I dont eat: crap. In fact here is the worlds simplest diet advice: eat less eat less crap.~~~~~
Your problem is not Pepsi Coke McDonalds or Burger King. Youre not addicted to their food. If you were and we took the food away youd have withdrawal like alcoholics and drugs addicts have which could actually kill you. Real addicts engage in adverse behaviors to support their habits; they steal lie cheat and even kill to get their fix. Have you ever heard of anyone being mugged so someone addicted" to food can get their ice cream? Did you sneak off behind your high school to wolf down M&Ms? To push the idea of food addiction is to advance a concoction that tries to absolve people of responsibility for a problem that weve created by promoting conspiracy fantasies. We eat more of everything than our ancestors did and we do it voluntarily. And if we were smart we would take advantage of the fact that we are blessed to live in a culture where food is getting less and less expensive thanks to an incredible agricultural sector and food industry. America is the only place on earth where people are lame enough to scold a productive industry for actually producing in abundance and reducing the unit costs of buying its goods. And dont forget that cheap abundant food and the ubiquitous entertainment that keeps us tied to our chairs is OUR doing. The baby boomers who grew up with three TV channels and an occasional trip to Burger King decided that was a life of deprivation. As they went on to become the wealthiest generation in American history they also went about the business of fixing that deprivation: burgers on every corner and 300 entertainment and media options in your pocket. The boomers and the Gen Xers who came after them leveraged their knowledge and money to build a commercial culture that is nearly stifling because we cant stand to say no. And I dont blame them for a bit of it. If I cant use it wisely thats my fault not theirs.~~~~~
Turn off your TV and other electronics
It is well past time for American families to turn off their devices including the TV. The web is nice but its better to be connected to the people who love you. When you first do this it will seem weird almost like you are missing out on something. That feeling will pass replaced by conversation recreation and blessed silence. See if you can make TV watching a family event: that is the TV is on ONLY when a majority of the family cares to watch and there is unanimous agreement on what to watch. In most families that alone will keep the TV off. As I noted earlier we recently dropped our cable TV subscription so consensus is much easier to reach now. On a typical evening at our house we stream a movie or sports show that we all want to watch or we each are absorbed in our own reading materials (everyones tablet is loaded with good books and magazines) and conversing about the same. Our TVs are almost never on especially not for broadcast news or reality TV shows; why dont you just give yourself a craniotomy and pour poison on to your brain?~~~~~