Eat that salad, sleep 8 hours, thank your body!
Tags: Body, Habits, Fitness, Health, Routine

Last week, I had to take my mom to the hospital, because she had a fish bone stuck in her throat for 3 days. Why 3 days you ask me? It was because my poor mom had thought a tiny fish bone does not qualify as a big enough problem to go to the hospital, and also she had expected that leaving the body to take care of itself might also do the trick. I must admit, we all do this from time to time.

Anyhow, both had failed, and on the third day, when mild pain ensued, mom was ready to go to the hospital. The doctor took the bone out in less than 2 seconds, and I admired him so much for it and mentally put him on a very high pedestal next to my super heroes. He told us that it was our lucky day, if mom had waited any longer, it would have caused a wound which would have taken much longer to heal. He then went on to jokingly remark, “The fish would have cost 10 bucks, but surgery would have cost 10K”

Poor mom was extremely grateful to the doctor and thanked God, while I, who had been suggesting the hospital visit from day 1 stood aside with a standard poker face.

Source: Internet

On coming back and sharing this account to a few of my friends, I realised that a lot of us tends to take our health for granted and visits to the hospital as a sort of last resort and luxury even. There are two very valid sides to this. On one hand, there are people who diligently visit hospitals, but are made to do a lot of necessary as well as unnecessary tests and spend a huge amount of money for all of those. And on the other hand, people who try to circumvent this very problem by not going to a hospital at all. And some others who even try to self — medicate themselves which is the most concerning of all. I remember googling my symptoms to find out Google declared me dead 5 minutes back. Never WebMD your symptoms.

Source : Internet

Given these two sides, the best thing we can do from our side, is to take care of our health. And when it comes to health, ignorance is never bliss. Health is wealth and like personal finances, it is something each one of us are responsible to do for ourselves and cannot expect it to be done for us by someone else. But I personally have found building healthy habits and being consistent with them to be very challenging. Something as simple as drinking enough glasses of water gets forgotten and I had to deal with a bout of dehydration related issues a couple months back as well. Finding time for exercising, meditation and so on as a consistent habit has also been difficult. But one of the most recurrent things I see in videos of what people would have told to their younger selves was to take better care of their health.

Along with the right nutrition and exercise, regular routine check ups help in early diagnosis of cancer, lifestyle illnesses such as diabetes and so on. And getting yourself tested is also not as hard as it used to be before. Venture Capitalist funded firms such as Netmeds.com and 1mg.com lets you subscribe for test packages that suit your preferences. Reading test results is scary and daunting sometimes, but hey, we need a starting point from where we can try and take better care of ourselves.

Test Packages at 1mg.com

As a kid, and even now, I used to picture my body and the organs inside as characters. So every time I had a disease which I was recovering from, I took the liberty to imagine my WBC’s all dressed up in armor and fighting away the foreign germs in an attempt to protect me. It is really magical even, to think of the coordinated synergy with which our organs work hard every day — with no monthly paycheck also. It is only right to treat these hard workers to tall glasses of water, exercise and mindfulness. Indeed it is a difficult and lifelong journey to get into healthy habits and they also require constant reconfiguration as we grow older and have other lifestyle changes. But it is something all of us can strive for, one day at a time.

Here are a few simple healthy habits to keep in your repertoire of healthy habits toolkit. At least one of these can be tried every day. Drinking enough water is the simplest one and if not anything and we still manage to do that alone in a day, I think it still counts as progress. I hope this picture comes handy, and once you get the hang of it, feel free to play around by adding new habits, and keep the game going. I personally find the slight dopamine rush from completing at least 1 of these a day to be rewarding.

Source: Me!

Finally, talk, discuss and have open conversations regarding health, fitness and lifestyle with your friends and family. Appreciate that friend of yours who is trying to cut down on sugar intake. Join them even. And also keep in mind that getting healthy should not be yet another thing to stress about. Take it one day at a time, and understand that great things do take time.

Credits and thanks to Hanna and Bryan for reading and editing drafts of this, and Smriti for choosing the memes!!