Live Long And Prosper

To start of this discussion today, I want to focus on the relative importance of diet and exercise. When I use the word ‘diet’ I am not thinking in terms of the latest fad to used to exploit the gullibility of people and sell yet another book. We will have no South Beach diets, Atkins Diet, Diet of the Stars or whatever here. Instead I mean the word in the simplest sense of what you eat. Actually, to extend the definition just a little, I also mean how you eat. The latter I will address in subsequent blogs but for now let me just remark that aspects of the how can be just as important, indeed even more important, than simply the what. Sometimes a false dichotomy is created by people writing about this subject between diet and exercise. This is a little misleading as it is clearly not an either or choice. One can quite easily maintain a healthy and life giving exercise program hand in hand with a similar attitude to exercise. The point I woulld like to make though is relates to the...

Attitude Perhaps we will open the discussion with a few words about attitude and longevity. There are several aspects to this but perhaps the most fundamental is to understand and deeply appreciate that you are not a victim. You are not aging too fast, not overweight, not having a problem with smoking, not drinking too much, not anything at all because of the actions of somebody else. All these things happened because of lifestyle choices you made. Own it. Be responsible for it. My own problems were not inflicted on me but were and are down to choices I have made. Believing otherwise, playing the role of victim, is profoundly disempowering and leaves you in a place where you feel that you do not have the choices available to you to make the changes you need to make. Even if there were some truth in the notion of victimhood, it still is a profoundly wrong-headed place from which to start. It gives all the power in your life, in your belief system and in your personal philosoph...

Introduction This blog is concerned with the process of living a long and healthy life. I am not a doctor, so please take medical advice on any aspects of these ideas that concern you, but I do have much personal experience in addressing the threats to a long and healthy life which has given me a degree of insight into such matters that I believe may be of value to many of my readers. A little personal history may be useful at this point. Although I was always active as a young man a climbing accident in my mid twenties lead to several back operations and a degree of incapacity at times which could only be described as severe. Eventually, in my mid forties, I had to leave my job in the fire brigade and strike out into other areas. During my early fifties I suffered a seizure which nearly took my life and left me in great pain for much of the following year. Two years later, after I considered that I had made a full recovery, I suffered a heart attack and had to have a gra...