I had a bit of a reality check today.
In my job I am routinely surrounded by people with a good level of personal fitness. This has never been more so than in my current position where the average age, including staff, is about 22.
Today I took my boys to the park. it was a beautiful day.
There were a lot of dads there which is fantastic. You can never have enough men spending quality time with their children.
What I noticed was something else. All told there were about 30 dads there. Including myself, only three were not visibly carrying excess weight. Of the remainder, about 75% would be classified as obese, one or two morbidly so.
It was the handful of men left over that caused me to think. They shared the same characteristics: Mid to late thirties, (body just starting to slow down), slight paunch. Probably suffering more from a lack of exercise than anything else. It is these men that are in a dangerous time.
From what I’ve seen this is the tipping point. It is the changes they make now that will determine which group they end up in in the future. If they don’t pay attention, in five to ten years time they will wake up to find themselves obese, probably with back and joint pain, at risk of diabetes, with an uphill battle to get back to fitness.
If they form good habits now, make the changes that their slowing body demands, they can have a long and healthy life with minimal effort.
This is where I come to the title of this post. I have always believed that changes that are important enough to make a resolution about are too important to put off until a milestone. This is seldom more true than in issues of health and relationships. New Years is a bad time for health as well, as most of us have just come out of a period of overindulgence. This compounds the trap in designating a start time: if we say we’ll start at some designated point in the future, often we will be even more relaxed until then. The bad habit becomes worse because because we have a plan to “fix it in the New Year”. We stop watching what we’re eating because we have a future plan. This can mean that the five extra kilos we’ve been carrying through the year can become 10, or even 15 over the holiday period. What could have been fixed by not eating dessert quite so often and taking a good walk every day, now requires concerted effort, significant diet changes, probably medical advice and lots of hard work.
Part of being a dad is modelling all aspects of life to our kids. Physical play, enjoying the outdoors, even just being able to keep up with your kids while they’re having fun at the park will make a huge positive input to all aspects of their development. The healthier WE are, the longer we can do this for as well. It pains me to see dads who are too unwell to do more than watch their teenage children play, especially when it could have been prevented if only they’d caught it early. Spending more time with our kids is good for us too. It helps us keep a sense of perspective about things.
The trick is to pay attention to what is happening in our own bodies, and to not put things off until later, because thing have a habit of creeping up on us. Our children need this of us.
byronsteele 