Sometimes I wonder why so many people get obese, why people go blind from diabetes, why some end up in scooters with oxygen tanks. Then I realize: I could very well end up like that, because doing otherwise fucking sucks.
Take eating right. That means no carbs. That means no pasta, no white rice (staples of cuisines I’ve eaten since I was a kid), no eating out, nothing but water, always having to spend tons of time to cook everything yourself and spending tons of money on ingredients since anything fast is full of salt, fat, and carbs. Or else eat stuff I hate, which is a lot.
All form of exercise are drudges completely devoid of any pleasure.
Man, if I get diabetes, my life is OVER, one way or the other. But to avoid it, I’d actually have to drain my life of a lot of makes it worth living to begin with!
Add that to the “live fast, die young” thing, and I’m suddenly not surprised people’s health get so bad. Then again, getting to the “death” part is SO painful (and frankly, gross) that it brings me back to the “why” all over again.
I can’t help you on the exercise thing. If you truly hate ALL exercise, including simply taking a walk outside on a nice day, that’s an issue.
But food? Eating right? I eat right. I’m diabetic, and my blood sugar is in great control. I eat pasta, white rice, eat out at least once a week, often more. Yeah, I spend time cooking, but that’s because it’s my hobby. I could eat just as healthy with a minimum amount of cooking.
I drink beer. I eat cookies. Really, I eat just about anything I want. We order pizza probably 2-3 times a month.
I also, however, eat them in moderation. I have maybe one sweet a day - a cookie, or some ice cream, or candy. I also make sure I eat vegetables. Lovely, delicious vegetables: Brussels sprouts cooked with bacon, big salads with fresh tomatoes and cukes and bell peppers and ranch dressing, a nice side of green beans in butter.
I think your view of just how hard it is to eat healthy and how difficult diabetes is to control is incorrect. Do you have to make some life changes and pay attention? Yeah. Do you never get to eat anything pleasurable ever again? Hell no.
the environment we evolved in and the one we are in now is not the same. Plus we didn’t really evolve to worry about abstract threats decades down the road. overriding those genetic programs if a lifelong struggle for most.
however there are ways to help. one is to alternate healthy days. one day eat healthy and exercise, the next not. or set a goal, say X% of your calories are going to come from healthy foods.
I eat not too wellthough. only about 30% if my calories are healthy. it’s better than zero though.
I don’t HATE exercise; like I said, I just take no pleasure in it. Walk outside on a nice day? With all the cars roaring by spewing CO2 in my face and taking in the sights of the ghetto-y areas? What’s the point?
As for food, like I said in the gangrenous thread, your food habits were probably healthier to begin with, so you didn’t have to make as big an adjustment. I eat a LOT of pasta, mainly because it’s cheap and fast to cook (and happens to be a staple of frozen stuff, for obvious reasons, though I eat prepared pasta mainly for lunches on weekends and twice a week for work). Losing that (since everyone says that carbs are evil, especially for diabetics) would mean losing a LOT of time and money. I used to eat more veggies, but since I live alone, they always rotted in the refrigerator before I finished — more waste of money and food, not to mention my salads were always waterlogged so I had to use more dressing (which also went bad in the fridge). So I stopped; I was wasting food and money, so again, what’s the point?
This is where my POV comes from, basically.
Absolutely. Whenever people talk about diabetes in threads here, all I ever read about are deprivation and doing without. Like I said, “carbs are evil.” Yet they’re a major part of my diet. I suppose in my case, diabetes is inevitable…
I know that. It’s just that what I’ve read people having to DO to manage it makes me wonder what my life would be like if I had to do the same. (That and I hate needles, but that’s another matter entirely.)
I just had a turkey sandwich and lemonade for lunch. Now I’m gonna go for a bike ride on the Minuteman Trail; sun shining, birds chirping, all that jazz.
Neither of these are necessarily true. You can be trim and still eat carbs, salt and fat and go to restaurants. You need to have a bit of portion control. If you feel like you can’t limit your portions, then restriction may be necessary.
Exercise is all about your attitude. Some exercises are more boring than others. Some forms of exercise are fun in their own right (e.g basketball, soccer, etc). If you find a certain kind of exercise boring, try another. Try dance. Go frisbee golf. Take group classes. Go rock climbing. Exercise doesn’t have to be 20 minutes on a treadmill. I’ve found that supervised/coached programs (group classes, crossfit, boot camps, etc) are great for motivation. Try to think of exercise as a way to meet your goals rather than as a thing to enjoy itself.
And the good thing about exercise is that you don’t have to be so stingy in your diet. You can be a little freer in what you eat if you’re burning hundreds of calories in exercise. Plus, exercise will up your metabolism, so you burn more throughout the day.
Soda is evil. Juice is evil. Coffee and tea are disgusting, and I don’t drink alcohol. What’s left besides water (I mean, for me; others can drink the coffee and tea, I freely admit)?
I’m an excellent shape, and I don’t wonder at all. I know that people have very skewed perspectives about what is involved in eating right and exercising. The problem is, people get themselves all psyched up about it, and then set an impossible goal.
Not at all. Eating right doesn’t mean never enjoying the food you eat, it means eating with a level of control and moderation. I love to eat, I enjoy sweets, I enjoy carbs, I enjoy fatty foods, but I don’t just eat fried chicken and cake.
A lot of people want to spend their days sleeping in, playing videogames, drinking, watching TV, whatever, but responsible adults realize that they have to have to have jobs, have to run errands, have to do chores, etc. Some people have a crappy job that they hate and makes them miserable, some people have jobs that they love, or at least find jobs that they don’t hate.
Eating right is exactly the same. Some people think they need to eat lean chicken breast, brown rice, and broccoli 3 meals a day and starve themselves. No wonder they hate eating right. Do some research and find foods that are healthy that you also enjoy eating, or at least don’t hate. Chances are there’s some good proteins you enjoy, some vegetables that you’d love. And even then, it’s still okay to treat yourself now and then.
This is very much along the same lines. If you think what you need to do is go to the gym and run on the treadmill for 2 hours every day, of course it’s drudgery. Personally, I don’t LOVE going to the gym, but I generally like it, I always feel better afterward and it gives me time to think about things, a bit of socializing, and works out my stress.
But, going to the gym isn’t only way to exercise. And you don’t need to be in excellent shape, just decent enough to maintain whatever your health goals are. If you like walking, go walk around your neighborhood. If you like swimming or biking or basketball or whatever, do those things. Most people have at least one physical activity that they enjoy, so why not just find a way to turn that into exercise?
I find exercise and good eating has the opposite effect. It reduces my stress, increases my health, gives me energy I wouldn’t otherwise have. Even though I put a lot more time an effort into it than most people, just by those effects alone, I get a lot more out of it than I put into it. And chances are if I worked out more moderately, I might have even a slightly higher ratio.
We’re not supposed to spend most of our days as senditary as we do, so it’s no wonder it leads to so much stress, depression, obesity, and other health problems. The only hard part about it is getting it started when you haven’t done it, making it through the first few weeks, really starting to feel the extra energy and better mood, it quickly becomes self-enforcing.
Very good point. I guess it’s that when I work, I actually get something tangible out of it. Being healthy just means I DON’T get diabetes, so it’s harder to be motivated when the goal is the absence of something rather than the getting of something (since I’ve never thought exercise ever made me feel any better in any way).
And I’ve never denied that I could eat better; it’d just suck up a significant amount of time and money. It’s something I’d be resigned to doing, rather than wanting to. (But then, as you said, it’s not a matter of what I want, is it?)
As for the exercise, if I ever found a physical activity I actually enjoy, I’ll be sure to take your advice!
I’m a recently diagnosed diabetic, and last night I had BBQ wings and corn on the cob. It’s way better than I’d feared. Of course, at the point of my diagnosis I was pretty uneducated about diabetic diet, and also felt my life was over.
Uh-huh. How hard are you looking for a physical activity to enjoy?
And there are work-arounds to that anyway, like keeping it brief. My best work-out is grueling and unpleasant, sure, but it’s also only 25-30 minutes 3 or 4 times a week. A half-hour that improves and prolongs my life vs a half-hour watching a rerun or browsing SDMB is a pretty easy choice.
As far as diet, I worry less about what I eat (since I’ve got no medical conditions) and more about how much. Portions here in the US are huge, and I rarely finish everything when I eat out.
Though I didn’t think of the “increase misery to save time” thing. That might be something to consider. If I’m going to be miserable doing whatever, I might as well go all the way. How did you come up with it? I don’t think I could think of something that bad by myself.
You have an unbelievably mopey attitude about life. It’s not just that you’re wrong about eating right and exercising, it’s the bizarrely bleak point of view you’ve taken. Frankly you seem insincere. You even tried to ruin taking a walk on a sunny day.
So I would say most people would wonder at anyone having such a deranged perspective on life. Only if you start with the assumption that the world is the way you say it is would there be any rationale to “choosing to die”, but we all know it’s nothing like you’ve described.
Health isn’t just not getting diabetes. It’s a lot of things. Just on that side of illness, it means I get sick rarely and, when I do, it’s generally not as bad and I recover faster. But there’s also just being able to do things. It’s nice being able to do things that require physical effort and being able to do them when I might otherwise not be able to, or do them easily when I might otherwise find them difficult.
For instance, I know quite a few people who will tire themselves just walking up a flight of stairs or walking from a more distant parking space into the office. Both of those are trivial to me. When I’ve had to walk several miles for some reason, it’s not a big deal. When I need to lift or carry things, I can do those myself. I also find that I generally need less sleep too.
Along similar lines, it hugely impacts my general mood. I’m definitely in higher spirits when I’m well rested, have eaten well, and worked out in the last day or two. When I go more than a couple of days without working out, which rare, I’ll definitely have greater issues with depression, esteem, motivation. Hell, I think better and more clearly when I’m exercising.
So, ultimately, exercise affects just about every aspect of my life from making me more productive at work, to making even my leisure activities more enjoyable. Hell, I even play videogames better because of improved focus and greater stamina and all of that.
But here’s the thing, it’s not an all or nothing thing. It’s not eat a lot of bland or horrible tasting health food and maybe squeeze in a little bit of delicious but terribly unhealthy junk. You need to do that if you want to be an elite athlete, but not in general. For instance, I don’t like broccoli or brussel sprouts, so I don’t eat them, but I do quite enjoy a number of other vegetables, carrots, many types of beans, spinach, etc. Sure, given a choice between a plate of carrots and a piece of cake, I’d rather eat the cake, but I do like carrots. I can still enjoy a juicy steak, some chicken, or whatever. That is, it’s a matter of comparing your choices and weighing between those two factors. So it’s not, a bucket of greasy fried chicken vs. tofu in chicken flavored broth, it’s picking backed chicken, or skinless chicken, breast over thigh, or a different kinds of breading. There’s a ton of options between those two extremes, and chances are there’s something other than the best tasting and worst for you that you can both enjoy and choose to improve your eating. And you can still ocassionally have that unhealthy stuff.
An expression I like to use is that you don’t need to water dead grass. Your body will crave the unhealthy stuff because you’re used to it and you’re generally unhealthy. What I found when I started getting a little more serious about exercise in my early 20s than I’d been in my teens, was that as I got healthier, I actually had fewer cravings for the stuff that was bad for me. I would drink a fair amount of soda and I cut it out realizing just how many calories it was. I generally don’t have cravings for it now and it’s usually even too sweet. So, by having better health, I need more protein and the stuff in healthier food, so my body’s cravings had changed based upon my needs. So I just find I crave junk less now.
So you don’t enjoy walking, hiking, biking, swimming, dancing, basketball, or any sort of other sport? There’s literally nothing you enjoy more than just sitting in front of the TV or computer? Even if that’s all you like, there’s probably a way you can turn some of those activities into some sort of exercise. For instance with videogames, maybe you like FPSs, you could look into doing paint ball or laser tag, or if you like RPGs, you could look into reenactments or LARPing, or look at some of the Wii Fitness or XBox Connect exercise types of things.
And like above, exercise also follows the same principle of watering dead grass. Say you do look into laser tag, you can’t do it every day for exercise, but wanting to do well at it will give you that rewarding motivation to get a bit more stamina or be more agile. Those are the sorts of tangible results from exercise that can motivate you above “you’ll be healthier”.
I don’t know what your passions are, but almost anything can be made more active in some way and, usually, that greater interaction only serves to make it more fun.
