“That’s gonna kill you someday!”
Ξ July 24th, 2008 | → | ∇ My thoughts on... |
My dad absolutely loved every kind of food that was bad for him. For example, he wanted at least one meal of biscuits and gravy every day, and if mom didn’t prepare it for him he would “fix it” himself. And he would rather have had a needle stuck into his eye than for you to trim the fat from a piece of meat. In fact, he loved fat meat so much that he would open a can of “pork and beans” and skip everything but the pork! And to top it all off he smoked for decades.
Of course everyone who knew and loved him told him that smoking and eating all that fat and grease “was gonna kill him someday”, and sure enough it did. He suffered a heart attack during surgery and passed away in 2000. He was 82.
The people (including me) who told dad that eating all those unhealthy meals would come back to haunt him eventually did so out of love and concern, but I believe we all missed an important point. One of dad’s great pleasures in life was eating the “country cookin’” that he learned to love so much as a child growing up in his large family’s Widener Valley, Virginia home, and he wasn’t about to give up that important part of his lifestyle in the quest to eek out another year or two of life here on planet earth.
Life is way too short to spend each and every day of it thinking of ways to make it a little longer and giving up the things we thoroughly enjoy in an often-vain attempt to prolong it. Famed runner Jim Fixx is credited with helping kick-start the current American fitness revolution with his best-selling 1977 book “The Complete Book Of Running”, yet as fit as he appeared to be, he ended up dying from a massive heart attack seven years later at the young age of just 52.
The fact is, short of suicide we humans have little control over the timing of our own demise. Some people die in accidents, and some even succumb to genetic defects they never even knew they possessed. Only God Himself knows when and how we’ll pass away, and He is the only one who can really alter that schedule if he so chooses.
Now I’m not suggesting that we should simply live life with abandon, ignoring all that good advice about eating healthy, not smoking, and exercising daily. It’s clear that living a healthy lifestyle increases one’s odds of living a longer, healthier life. I also firmly believe that my dad suffered through years of unnecessary health problems that were caused by his poor diet and a virtual life-long smoking habit.
That being said, dad had apparently weighed the joy he knew he would receive from partaking in those unhealthy habits against the almost certain health risks, and he made the decision to eat what he wanted and smoke his cigarettes. Who am I to say that he made the wrong choices? After all, he lived to the ripe old age of 82, and he spent most of those years enjoying the things that gave him the most pleasure.
on July 24th, 2008 at 10:52 am
I’d rather eat what I want now and not worry about a longer life.
on July 24th, 2008 at 1:47 pm
Same here.