Investing in health & fitness

(Possibly more than I can afford!)

Although I’ve only just announced it, Project Try Everything has actually been underway for about three months now (and I already feel like I’m falling behind, predictably). What have I been up to so far? Three main things:

1. Ramping up my investment in health and fitness.

2. Building a monster spreadsheet to track symptoms and factors that might affect them.

3. Somewhat oddly (for me anyway), a lot more breathing exercises, both fast and slow.

I’ll splain these each in more detail in three short posts. Today, the health and fitness investment.  What’s that about?  Why bother? This isn’t necessarily obvious.

Let’s not make a bad situation worse

The only thing worse than being stuck in a shitty unxplained illness, like an animal in a trap, is making that bad situation even worse by being unhealthy in ways that I can explain and could have prevented!

And so I will do anything I can possibly can — whatever my illness will allow — to get healthier in spite of whatever’s wrong with me.  It’s compensation.

But that process could also constitute treatment. A bit of a long shot, but maybe: it is possible that something I do for myself for in the name of health and fitness will actually help to solve the problem. And the more I do, the better the odds of that easy win.

So it’s a matter of casting a wide net, of Optimizing All The Things. (A principle I have explored in detail on PainScience.com.)

Like a part-time job

Really taking care of yourself properly could easily be a full-time job.  But I already have one of those.  As high as the stakes are, I cannot afford to push my efforts that far.

But my plan is to do more than ever before — a proper part-time job — and sustain that for at least a year or two.

And that’s a big investment. It’s an expensive and complicated thing to do: lots of organization, habit-building, time, energy, and figuring out how to fit a bunch of new things into a life that is already cluttered with more priorities and goals than I know what to do with.

Consider how much time you can sink just into eating well.  The dishes alone!

I have never really skimped on taking care of myself

Thirty years of self-employment has given me lots of opportunity to practice “life balance.”  I work really hard, but for well over a decade I’ve considered taking exercise and sanity breaks to be part of working hard. For most of the last decade, I think I have probably spent about twenty percent of my time and energy on health and fitness.

But this is going to be a whole new level — more like, say, forty percent? — and it’s taking some time to figure that out.

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Tune in next time to hear about the monster spreadsheet. Gripping stuff.