Will today's decisions be tomorrow's regrets?
Der_Typ_von_Nebenan / Pixabay – Will today’s decisions be tomorrow’s regrets?

There is a television commercial sponsored by Milky Way. A tattoo artist is distracted by a Milky Way candy bar while tattooing a man’s arm. The tattoo should say, No Regrets. But, it says, No Regerts.

We get distracted by many things daily. It’s hard to avoid. I find that even having something written down doesn’t ensure that it will happen. Not having it written down almost guarantee that it will not happen.

Our health is very low on our priority list. Most people don’t pay attention to it. They might think about it occasionally, but no real action is taken to ensure that their health will be ideal when they need it the most in their retirement years.

We think about our families, our finances, our vacations, our cars, our cell phones, our spiritual lives, our friends, our jobs and many more things more often than we think about improving and maintaining a healthy lifestyle.

Jeff Olson wrote The Slight Edge. In it, he states that incremental changes made daily can have huge effects in the future. Those effects can be good or bad. If someone smokes a couple of packs of cigarettes every day, he or she can expect a shortened life. If another person exercises every day without fail, he or she can expect a healthier and longer life compared to the daily smoker.

We have habits. We do the same things every day. However, a small change occurs that becomes a part of our daily habits. It might be good or bad. It doesn’t matter. It happens. We allow it. We perpetuate it.

For example, in school, we had to read. After school, over 95% of former students don’t read a book a year. I was one of them. If it wasn’t related to the courses I was taking, I didn’t read. Nowadays, I read daily and finish a book a week on the average. But, not reading was once a habit in my life.

Health is similar. Our parents taught us to eat a certain way when we lived with them. When we became independent, we adopted another set of habits for eating. For me, meals were fixed and eaten in the home. Rarely, did my parents ever take all nine of us kids out to dinner.

I learned to cook from my mother and enjoy cooking today. But, for years, I deferred to eating out because of the convenience. I still strive to eat at home daily, but it is difficult. However, I do make healthier choices when eating out in recent years.

Eating healthy is one part of a much larger equation of a healthy lifestyle. Daily stress reduction, balanced nutrition, exercise, intermittent fasting, caloric restriction, toxin removal, etc. contribute to a healthy lifestyle. We need to address these and other issues daily to be healthy in our retirement lives.

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