What's On My Mind - January 2024

What’s On My Mind - January 2024

What’s On My Mind
America’s Health Statistics Just Keep Getting Worse

This Month’s Health Challenge
Extremely Limit Alcohol Consumption

Quote of the Month
“If you don’t take the time to work on creating the life you want, you’re eventually going to be forced to spend a lot of time dealing with a life you don’t want.”  – Kevin Ngo

What’s On My Mind

American Health Statistics Are Scary and Trending Towards Even Scarier

As I’ve written about many times, the fastest, most successful approaches to reaching fitness goals are centered on health. Better health helps people lose excess body fat, recover from workouts faster, and improves their mood and motivation among thousands of additional benefits. I do believe that holistic, functional exercise may be the single greatest thing you can do for your life, but it is far from being enough on its own to reach most people’s fitness and health goals.

I wholeheartedly believe that:

  1. Upgrading peoples’ nutrition, sleep, and non-exercise activity habits along with developing a healthy and holistic exercise habit, is vital to general health and

  2. Living healthy is not as boring, limiting, and as terrible as people imagine it being - I actually feel that my life is easier and better in just about every way when my healthy habits are in place than when not.

Because it is so much easier to just live like those around us, when I work with people, I take an angle that shows them the health statistics of the average people around us to show why we must sometimes go against the grain. I go into this deeper in my new article: Surrounded By Fat-Promoting Norms.

What’s on my mind right now is how stunned I was as I went to find references for all the statistics I have used for years - the statistics had changed, in a bad way, and big. Each statistic had moved about 20% or more in an even scarier direction. You can read my article for more, but two stats that stood out to me are that

  1. 82% of Americans are medically overweight (up from 70%) and

  2. 60% of Adults have a chronic disease (up from 50%).

I can’t control everything that happens to me, but with my lifestyle choices, I hope to be one data point that helps push these numbers in the other direction. As the herd unfortunately grows sicker, I hope to be a part of normalizing healthy habits, so that those of us who are prioritizing our health don’t have to feel like we are always going against the herd.

This Month’s Health Challenge

Experiment with Extremely Limiting Your Alcohol Consumption

What’s a major thing contributing to the Statistics discussed above? Alcohol and it seems to be everywhere and everyone seems to drink regularly…but do they actually? 

…Did you know that according to the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, only

  • 62.8% of adults reported having had an alcoholic drink in the last year,

  • 52.9% of adults reported having had an alcoholic drink in the last month, and only

  • 23.5% of adults reported binge drinking in the last month.

I’ve been on a journey over the last 10 years trying to figure out what I want my relationship with alcohol to be like - I used to drink a lot, then I cut back on drinking about 10 years ago, then stopped drinking altogether for a few years after that, came back to it and drank a beer or two here and there again for about a year, and then decided to stop drinking forever a few years ago. What caused the sudden shift? I knew alcohol wasn’t good for you, but I didn’t realize the terrifying effects even small amounts of alcohol has on our health. You can read more about those effects in my article Think Before You Drink Alcohol. 

I always feel like I am in the overwhelming minority of people who choose to not consume alcohol, but in actuality, there are just as many of us who do not drink as those who do. Do I think you can be a great person and consume alcohol? Absolutely yes. Like most things, I don’t think your choice here impacts your value as a person in any way.  But, do I think you can consume alcohol and not carry any of the health risks associated with it?  No.  

My main goal here is to simply say that if you are someone who has a drinking habit, even if it’s a couple of drinks per week, and are considering experimenting with a sober month, it may seem like you are in a minority on your journey, but you are not.  Personally, I have found that I still have a lot of fun being sober. I have great, meaningful, and interesting conversations and even when I’m around a bunch of people drinking, I end up spending most of the night laughing and enjoying myself!   

Quote of the Month

“If you don’t take the time to work on creating the life you want, you’re eventually going to be forced to spend a lot of time dealing with a life you don’t want.”  – Kevin Ngo

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