Body

Dear Conscience,

It is Wednesday, which brings me to the theme of Body, and how to care for this body I inhabit.

What’s up?

I’ve neglected my body. It’s allowed me to do so, but I’ve probably shortened my healthspan as a result. I haven’t exercised, I can safely say, in decades. Apart from a few meagre short lived attempts. I’m not eating healthy, I don’t cook, too many days I get by on bakary products. I don’t like either exercising or cooking, and given that I fail to carve out time even for much simpler things, like showering, just hard to find and upkeep the motivation for such large lifestyle changes.

What have I done to date?

The only ‘body’ habit I’ve consciously implemented this year was to sleep at night. I had a newborn and it wrecked my sleep patterns, but I deteriorated them further by then being on my phone at night when I couldn’t fall asleep. It was one of my basic rules that I needed to implement to even function, otherwise I couldn’t even hope for any progress. Removing the phone from my bed worked quite well, and I’m not chronically sleep deprived anymore. Now, I need to start moving from ‘basic functioning’ to healthy thriving.

What do I plan to do?

This will require lots of things, main elements, apart from sleep, being: nutrition, exercise, and hygiene. It’s just all so large, that I can’t imagine ever having time to incorporate all that into my life. It’ll probably never be perfect, and I have to start small. But I do have to go beyond small to improve my health. Also, I need to tune into my body and my health better, start going to regular check-ups, including some of the more scary ones that become necessary at my age, to monitor for (and hope not to find) the worst.

What will I do today?

I am completely outside of my routine right now, traveling, so a good excuse not to start any of the dreaded healthy habits. But what I can do, is look up health insurance plans that include a general check-up and some additional tests and specialist appointments, and request an offer, so that I can start it up as soon as 2024 starts. So that’s what I’ll do.

Sincerely,

B.