By Tobin Barnes
I’ve been flirting with the idea of becoming a health nut. You know, weighing the pros and cons. Right now, they’re running neck and neck, almost like it’ll come down to flipping a coin.
The comedian Redd Foxx used to say, “Someday health nuts are going to feel stupid, lying in hospitals dying of nothing.”
Until recently, when I was lying in a hospital after surgery, I had thought Redd’s comment was pretty funny. Then I underwent a conversion of sorts. “Dying of nothing” started sounding pretty good.
In the throes of self-pity for what I’d just undergone, I even gave my wife free rein to remind me of healthy behavior whenever she wanted: stuff like, “You need to be exercising” or “You shouldn’t be eating that.”
I told her she could toss out these reminders as she thought necessary, and I wouldn’t complain about being nagged.
“Can I get that in writing?” she asked, knowing who she was dealing with.
I said (and this shows how far gone I was), “Yes,” virtually tossing my long-cherished arrogance about health to the wind. Thus I had traded my prior state of health obliviousness for random, inconvenient reminders of healthy habits.
But now, with the hindsight of a cooler head, I wonder whether I should resume the macho stereotype of allowing health advice to go in one ear and out the other or supinely submit to taking care of myself.
The choice is not as obvious as it would seem to the average female mind.
It takes time and trouble to be healthy, especially once in the midst of middle age. Men do not easily dispense of time doing nothing or accept the trouble it takes to practice good habits, even if it means avoidance of heart attack, cancer, surgery or whatever other mayhem an unhealthy life might conjure up. We’ve got reputations to maintain.
Nevertheless, imbued with the spirit of the new, though somewhat reluctant, convert, I decided to total up the damages thus far. I went to realage.com to take the test that’s been trumpeted everywhere in the media.
That in itself isn’t a simple thing. The test takes time--once again, time that males treasure so dearly as time that could be used doing nothing of value. So I went through it as quickly as I could.
One of the results of the test is a comparison of your real age to your health age. In this, I was gratified to be told that though my real age is 54.6, my health age is many years younger. My total disregard for health issues had evidently worked.
When I gleefully reported the results to my wife, her reaction was “Ha!” To say the least, she was skeptical. It was as though she wasn’t happy that I might live longer than expected.
“What’d you put down for your blood pressure?” she pounced.
I told her what I thought had been a reasonable estimate.
“Ha!” she said.
She then asked other indelicate questions about my responses, again finding that I’d perhaps been a tad optimistic about past results and present behaviors. She persuaded me to go back and put down real answers. After all, the site is entitled the Real Age Test, not the Wishful Thinking Test. So I did...mostly, or at least I revised the more egregious answers.
And again the results weren’t all that bad. My real age, 54.6, was obviously still the same and my health age was a pretty-good 51.1. Hey, I was cheating the logic of a healthful life by more than three years. (I think not being a smoker is the thing that helped my case most. I’ll be the first to agree that I have other areas that need work.)
The results also detail an extensive list of improvements the test-taker can make based upon the answers given. By following the advice, and, at least in my case there was a ton of it, a person can lower his health age significantly.
However, I’m thinking if I did all it advised, it’d be close to a full-time job, but I can see where every bit that I do is bound to help.
Right now, I’m leaning in the “every bit” direction.
Dying of nothing is a thoroughly attractive idea, though dying later than normal is the more realistic one.
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