Astronomically speaking, last Friday marked winter’s midpoint,. I’m way too old to wish any part of life to go faster, but I have always looked forward to spring, and this year is no exception. The (end of the?) pandemic provides an opportunity to write about health, which also ties in nicely to life insurance.
I have been interested in health and fitness for most of my adult life. I say most, because upon my discharge from the Marine Corps at age 22, I vowed I would never run again, as my CO made our entire unit run the PFT (physical fitness test) every Friday morning before work. Well, between my metabolism shifting from teenager to adult and my beer and pizza consumption remaining what it was when I was in, it only took about six months to put on close to 50 pounds.
So I faced a quandary. I had never been fat my entire life (up until that point), so I had to decide if fat was how I wanted to go through life, and the answer was definitely not! Even before the movie, I knew that fat, drunk, and stupid was no way to go through life. So breaking my vow, I started running.
That was the starting point, but I also took a class in college called Fitness for Life, that taught some concepts that I still use. And in 1980, I heard Wayne Dyer say that “You will either take the time for health and fitness when you are young or you will take the time for illness and infirmity when you are old.” For whatever reason, those words really resonated with me.
In addition to my running program (which has now morphed into a running/walking program due to issues with my back), I started a resistance training program when I turned 50. Those have kept me relatively disease free. Sure, I get an occasional cold, but that’s more of a nuisance. I have only missed work due to illness once, and that was when I had the flu in the early 1990s.
That’s a very long-winded way of saying that I believe I was in reasonably good shape to survive the pandemic. I say that because according to the CDC, 75% of the people who died from Covid had four or more comorbidities. It seems to me that anyone who has four or more comorbidities (e.g., diabetes, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, a-fib, etc.) would have a much higher chance of dying from anything, Covid related or not.
Amazingly, again, according to the CDC, 14% of the adult US population are cigarette smokers. And according to the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA), 14.1 million American adults had an alcohol use disorder (AUD) in 2019. That equates to approximately 5.6% of all American adults. Regardless of any other aspects of their lifestyle, almost 20% of adults are, by definition, unhealthy.
So what are we to do? Well, don’t smoke cigarettes or abuse alcohol are obvious. But also, move. Run, walk, bike, swim, it doesn’t matter. Just move. Not only will you feel better, but you just might qualify for a lower life insurance premium!
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