Do you give it your all every day when it comes to your health?
skeeze / Pixabay – Do you give it your all every day when it comes to your health?

I had the opportunity to watch the movie, Miracle, while working out on the treadmill this weekend. I had not seen this movie before, even though it’s been out since 2004. It is about the 1980 Olympics hockey team that won the gold medal. The United States team consisted of non-professional hockey players.

The central drama surrounded the United States versus the Soviet Union. The US team lost to the Soviets 10-3 a short while before the Olympics started. The Soviets had won the Olympic gold medal in hockey for the previous twenty years. Many on the Soviet team had played together on the side for as many as fifteen years. They were the greatest hockey team in the world!

Many emotions went through my mind as I watched the coach, Herb Brooks (played by Kurt Russell), mold his team into a cohesive unit. At one point in the movie, the coach mentions a telegram he received from a lady in Texas to his wife.

In that dialogue, he said, “The important thing? The important thing is that those twenty boys know in twenty years, they didn’t leave anything on the table. They played their hearts out. That’s the important thing.”

What is the important thing in our lives? I Googled ‘important things in our lives’. The top responses were God, Love, Parents, Knowledge, Health, Happiness, Friends, Family, Freedom, Purpose, Peace, and a few more. I Googled the ‘most important thing in our lives’ and found that health and God beat out all the others consistently.

I believe our spiritual beliefs belong at the top of the list. My number two important thing is health. If I take the statement made above and apply it to health, it might look something like this. The important thing is that in the last twenty years of our lives, we know that we did everything we could to be in the peak of health.

We are amateurs regarding our health. Amateurs practice till they get it right. Professionals practice till they can’t get it wrong. Most of us don’t know what is required for peak health at the end of our lives. We practice at doing things but seldom do we master it to the point that we do it the same way daily.

The top five things are eating correctly (balanced nutrition), eating the right amount (caloric restriction), managing our stress daily, aware of the toxins in our life and avoiding them, and exercise balance. Doing those five things will give you significant leverage to avert age-related disease and be able to enjoy life.

It is not difficult. But, it is not something we strive to do daily. It reminds me of the 1972 Fram Oil Filter commercial slogan, You can Pay me Now or Pay me Later. An auto mechanic explained to a customer that a small investment (in a new filter and oil today) would cost far less than an engine rebuild later.

We operate the same way. We need daily maintenance to manage our internal systems a peak efficiency. When we stop attending to our daily requirements, we can expect a much more extensive bill down the road. If you think hospital costs are high today, wait twenty years!

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