Category: Health

How Do You Stay Healthy?

Once you understand what it means to be healthy, you can change your lifestyle accordingly. But how do you maintain it?

One of the sad facts about aging is that it gets more difficult to recover from setbacks. Losing weight is harder. Recuperation from injury takes longer. Muscle mass is slower to build, and faster to be lost. It is more difficult to perform at a high level if you don’t eat or drink properly.

But even beyond aging, maintaining a certain level of health or fitness is a different skill set than achieving it in the first place.

Can you share the things you do to stay healthy?

How do you stick to a healthy diet, when there are so many unhealthy options all around us?

What exercises do you find best for maintenance? And how do you continue an exercise plan, when it is all too easy to take a day off, sleep in, or skip the gym?

Perhaps the most challenging of all, how do you stay mentally fit? What do you do to stay motivated, hopeful, and curious, rather than lethargic, distraught, and rigid-minded? You might be able to lift weights or do reps to keep your body in shape, but there is no equivalent way to keep your mind sharp. So what do you do?

In short, how do you stay healthy?

Related questions: What does it mean to be healthy? Are you aging well? How are your body and mind intertwined? How do you exercise?

Strength Training Or Cardio?

When you exercise, are you more likely to work on strength training, or increase your heart rate?

Share why if you wish.

Strength Training Or Cardio?
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Exercise Or Eat Healthy?

Just about every fitness or weight loss regimen includes two things: exercise and eating healthy foods. Certainly, both are good things. But is one more important than the other?

For instance, are you more likely to lose weight by exercising constantly but eating terrible food, or changing your diet but being mostly sedentary?

Finally, do you prefer one over the other? You may enjoy eating fresh, green food. Or you may like the endorphin rush from working out.

Share why if you wish.

Exercise Or Eat Healthy?
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How Does The Pandemic Continue To Disrupt Your Life?

The Coronavirus pandemic has arguably been the most disruptive event in recent history. How has it impacted your life now?

The early days of the pandemic were by far the most disruptive, as we all struggled to adjust to the spread of the disease. This included lockdown, the adoption of facemasks, disinfecting groceries, a shortage of toilet paper, and on and on.

However, most of the immediate impacts have been alleviated. There are vaccines, and that, combined with a growing familiarity with living in a society with COVID, have seen many aspects of life return to normal. Large gatherings, including sporting events, concerts, and so on are happening again. Many people no longer wear masks. Socialization has increased.

Listen to a podcast where Michael and Lee discuss a related question: ‘Freedom or security?’ We also discuss a bonus question: ‘Is technology neutral?’

And yet, COVID is still with us. While the overall case numbers, hospitalizations, and deaths due to COVID are lower than in past years, they are still significant. Individuals and/or families still catch the virus, and plans are frequently postponed or cancelled even now, nearly three years into the pandemic.

Now that we, as a society, have adapted our lives to accommodate COVID, what do you find to be the most disruptive to your life? Are they things you do, other people around you do (or don’t do), or some combination of the two? Three years in to this situation, what has had the biggest impact on your life?

Related questions: What advice would you give your pre-lockdown self? How do you want this to change you? How has your work life changed? COVID-19?

Should We Try To Predict The Future?

Despite many thousands of years of practice, human beings are mostly unable to predict the future. After failure upon failure, the question arises: should we even try?

From big events to trivial ones, we humans are really inept when it comes to divining what comes next. There are some very basic things — the sun will rise tomorrow — and that’s about it. Jobs are unstable. Health issues can arise at any time. Marriages fail regularly. And of course, the farther out in the future you go, the less certain things get.

Admittedly, as our understanding of the universe grows, some predictions come easier. For example, scientists can predict with great accuracy solar and lunar eclipses.

And yet, even science has its limitations. Predicting exactly when a particular breakthrough will or will not happen is an exercise in futility. Science is, inherently, an exploration of the unknown, which means that progress is inherently unknowable.

None of this stops us from trying to predict what comes next. From taking your umbrella with you when you go out for the day, to selecting the numbers for the lottery jackpot, we can’t help but guess what will happen next.

A lot of time, effort, and money is spent regularly on prognostication. Insurance companies have armies of actuaries. Pundits get paid to sound confident in their predictions of the next election, even if they were completely wrong about the last one. Meteorologists use the latest in cutting edge technology in forecasting the weather.

Could all this time, effort, and money be put to better use? Would our lives be better without the constantly mediocre attempts to predict the future? Or is it the case that our efforts in that direction is what drives us to learn? To make new discoveries that can make our lives better in other ways?

Related questions: What is time? How much does your past determine your future? How do you plan for the future? What is your five year prediction? Ten?