Being a man, I have only gone to see doctors when there was no other choice in the matter. Being a poor man, I have not had insurance for most of my life. Being blessed with a high metabolism, I have always eaten whatever I wanted and not gotten fat. Well, not very fat anyway.
So now I have a job with benefits, how weird is that? I am making a fairly good living, and still bitch and moan about it every single day. Health insurance is one of the benefits. Now I have mixed feelings about the whole health care system. I tend to think that most people don’t need to hand over tons of money to pharmaceutical companies, which is who every doctor in America works for. Just look at the walls of your doctor’s office and notice that all those cool posters, clocks, and models have some drug’s name plastered on it.
My father-in-law was a nice guy, but it could be argued that he would still be live today if he not had been a good patient that did everything his doctors told him to do. This involved a lot of surgery and drugs and suffering and death.
Ok, so once I got health insurance I decided to go in for a checkup, since I have not had a physical since I was a kid and the school wanted to make sure I had my immunizations. I don’t feel too bad most of the time, I mean, my back hurts from time to time and I have aches and pains that I tend to think of as the price of staying living. Still, I was a bit surprised when the doctor says that I have high cholesterol and bad triglycerides. I have a response, uh, what?
I read a book several years ago, I can’t remember the name, but it was about the health care system in general and making money in particular. It said that a bunch of the big pharmacy companies sponsored a study, they needed to find things that could be treated with their drugs. So they set the criteria for the study to find three things, 1) the condition needed to be dangerous in extreme cases, 2) it could be treated with the companies drugs, 3) it would be best if this was a condition that everyone has. They found three things, High Blood Pressure, High Cholesterol, and High Body Fat. Let the good times roll.
So my wife and I went for the physicals and surprise, surprise, the wife has high blood pressure and I have high cholesterol. So, is it true or a lie designed to get me to buy drugs for the rest of my life? What’s the worst that could happen? Death?
Right, time to shape up and stop eating things like Carl Jr’s Six Dollar Guacamole Hamburger( pictured above.) I had one of these for lunch yesterday and it was sooo good. I have been trying to think of better options and what I should be eating and how much exercise I should be doing. I have never had to pay attention to what I eat, so I have found this simple bit of business of cutting down of foods that are bad for impossible to do.
So I am finding this process a rather odd one. The key to success is practicing integrity in the moment of choice. Do I eat a salad or a hamburger? Do I drink water or a Dr Pepper? Well, the only thing this diet has done for me is make me feel guilty all the time as I find that I have no integrity whatsoever. You have to eat to live, but most of us are eating to die as well. It’s depressing. And to be perfectly honest, I have enough to be depressed about already.
I used to ride a bicycle a lot, like a couple of hundred miles a week. I still feel that I could just take a week off and ride my bike a few hundred miles and get back to my old riding shape. Hmm, I have a few days off next week. . .
I think I’ll just go back to manly roots and ignore the problem until I can’t get out of bed one day.
