“Early to bed and early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise.”

~ Benjamin Franklin

I had a very odd dream last night about the state of health care in our country.  It was a futuristic glimpse into the medical clinic where I go to see my doctor for sickness and also for wellness checkups.  He helps me monitor my bl0od pressure, which thankfully is fine since  I lost 60 pounds, and he helps me monitor my cholesterol, lipids, and diabetes.  I’m supposed to see him every 3 months, but sometimes, I stretch the visits and go for 4 or 5 months before I see him. 

In my dream, I went into the clinic, and I felt the heat and noticed the poor lighting.  When I asked, the receptionist told me that the air conditioning was broken, and they couldn’t afford to get it fixed.  And the lights were out in some places for the same reason:  no money.  There were people being turned away because they had no health insurance and could not pay for services.  When I got to see my doctor, he said that we would have to decide which test I wanted to have because he was limited to only one test for each quarterly visit.  So, I could choose to have my AlC checked or I could choose to have my triglycerides checked or I could choose to have my cholesterol checked.  Thank goodness I didn’t suspect any kind of infection or anything like that, or I would have had to make that my choice and not the others.  I asked my doctor if this was what government controlled health care had come to, and he responded, “What are you talking about?  There is no government control; this is the insurance companies running things for huge profits.”

It would have made an interesting dream to relay to my congressmen and women, but instead I share it with you.  I’m not trying to make a political statement one way or the other.  I’m just saying that even though things are not this bad for me because I do have health insurance that does not put those kinds of limits on my medical care, at least not now, they could get bad for me, and they are already bad for a lot of folks.  I do know people who are without health insurance and who face every day the choice of whether to try to get well on their own or whether they risk begging to be seen by a doctor that wants and needs to be paid.

I have a student who admitted to me that she has severe asthma, and when it gets bad, she uses her child’s medication to try to get better.  She said it wasn’t good enough, but it was better than nothing, which is what she can afford.  She called me this morning and told me she was very sick and wouldn’t be in school today.  I could hear her wheezing as she left the message.  She won’t be going to the doctor unless she ends up sick enough to go to the ER and see if she can be seen without medical insurance.  It’s a sad situation that faces many people.  She had insurance until her factory closed down and her job was sent away overseas.  Now she does the best she can, which isn’t nearly good enough.

But back to my dream.  When the doctor told me I’d have to choose just one test, I looked him square in the eye and said, “I choose to lose this excess weight, get rid of my diabetes medication and my cholesterol medication and my triglyceride medication.  I won’t have to make choices then.”  I seemed resolved in my dream to not have to rely on medical care when my doctor has already told me long ago that I could avoid every bit of this stuff if I would just lose weight.  Somehow I haven’t been quite as resolved in my real life as I was in my dream life, though.

The health care reform issue is complicated and very controversial.  The current bill before Congress gets bigger and bigger and more and more complex.  I frankly don’t know if I support it or not because there is so much of it, a good portion of it, I’m sure, not even pertaining to health care reform at all.  Unfortunately, that’s the way our very disturbed and disturbing Congress operates.  But whether we choose to let the government run our health care system or leave it to the insurance companies, it’s for sure that we need to reform it in some way. 

That reform may not be up to us, but there is something every single one of us can do to help: we can see to it that we are as healthy as we can be so that we don’t have to use the health care system anymore than we absolutely have to.  We can eat better, exercise more, take preventative measures to avoid passing contagious diseases, and fortify ourselves to be at our very healthiest.  What a reform that would be!  My student with the asthma could quit smoking and help herself out even more than her child’s medication could!

Every thing we do affects other things in the Universe.  The greed of big insurance companies may well affect the state of our health care system adversely.  But our unhealthy lifestyles also add to the problem.  We may not be able to do it all, but we can help reform our health care system just by vowing to get healthier.  The impact of a healthier nation would be immense.

"Unhappy is the man, though he rule the world, who doesn't
consider himself supremely blessed."

~Seneca

Do you ever sit around daydreaming about the things you wished you had?  I do.  All the
time.  I want money to pay off all my debts.  I want money to remodel my house.  I want
to have some kind of simple bariatric surgery to help me get rid of all this extra weight
I have. And then I want to be able to afford plastic surgery afterward to get rid of all
the excess skin I'll have. I want time and money to travel with my husband.  But do I
think I'll be any better off if I am able to get all of these things?  Not really.  I am
so blessed just as I am right now.  I have the most wonderful husband in the world.  I
have good friends and a wonderful family.  I have pretty good health.I have a very
comfortable home.  I have a job that I love and thrive in.  I have coworkers that are
the best to work with.  I have so much peace in my life.  Peace and happiness and joy
is worth so much more than millions of dollars.

I teach community college students.  Some of my students are unemployed after years of
having a good job.  Some of my students are experiencing personal tragedies of other
sorts: the death of family members, cars breaking down and no money to get them fixed,
a lot of sickness going around, and personal family struggles.  Yet they come to my
classes and are prepared for tests and essays.  And if you ask them if they are blessed,
they will say with 100% assuredness, "Yes!  Of course!"

My husband delivered a sermon a couple of weeks ago on the book of Job.  Job was a man
who was visited with every trouble imaginable.  He lost his health, his family, his
riches.  He lost everything he had.  Yet when asked to "curse God and die."  He would
not.  In the rather fairytale like ending of Job's story, all is restored to him plus
some.  He is wealthier than before he lost everything.  He has a new family that is
larger and more impressive than the old one that perished.  He has his health restored.
By all comparisons, Job is better off at the end. I don't think the moral of his story
is that if we just hang in there and refuse to curse God and die, that we will be
richly rewarded.  I think the moral of Job's story is that we are blessed no matter what
our external situation is.  And we can choose to be blessed or we can curse our existence
and be miserable.  It's our choice.

I had a student call me last week in tears.  She had been sick with the flu a couple of
weeks before.  She had a sinus infection following that.  Her hours were being cut at
work, and then all of a sudden, when she wasn't quite well yet, she had been asked to
work overtime.  So, of course, she was doing the best she could.  She was behind on her
work for my class.  She was low on funds because she had to visit the doctor a couple of
times and get medicine that she couldn't afford.  She was ready to work a twelve hour
shift, glad for the extra money, when her throat closed up, and she could barely swallow
or breathe.  She was forced back to the doctor's office and was told she had step throat.
Her employer would not let her work. She called me and told me all of this, and she even
launched into her past troubles of when she was a child in the foster care system, with
no parents to love her. She ended by saying that her house was messy, and she didn't
have the energy to clean it up. She said she just wished she had a mother who would tell
her that everything was going to be okay.  I felt great compassion for her, but I
couldn't tell her that everything was going to be okay.  I could give her a time extension
on her work for my class.  But that was all I could do.  I hope she feels the love of God
and the blessed state that she is in despite her tragedies.  

There have been times in my life when I did not feel blessed either.  I felt fairly cursed,
in fact.  But I realized it was just a mental state to feel cursed. And I realized I had
the power to change my mental state. One thing that helped tremendously was to take
prayer walks.  I would walk and give thanks for all the things in the world that were
right with my life. I broke it down to being thankful that my legs would take me on the
walk and for the shoes on my feet and the food in my stomach and the ability to digest
that food.  I walked and walked and gave thanks, and the more thankful I was, the better
I felt. It was worth more than all the therapy in the world. It was worth far more than
if I had won the lottery and had all the money I needed to take care of material things.
I would come back home with a healed heart.  I highly recommend prayer walks to anyone
feeling cursed.

I still play the lottery.  My husband just bought us another 2 dollar powerball ticket
last night.  We haven't won yet, but we could.  It's the possibility that we might that
keeps us spending those two dollars at a time.  Will I be blessed if I win the lottery?
Oh, yes!  Am I blessed if I never win it?  Oh, yes.  Because I couldn't imagine anything
as sad as having all the money, all the prestige, all the power in the world and not
feeling blessed.  As the Roman philosopher Seneca said, "Unhappy is the man who rules the
whole world if he doesn't consider himself supremely blessed."  

I hope everyone else fared much better than I did on their healthy eating programs when Halloween started rolling around.  I had lost 74 pounds and managed very well to keep temptation at bay and to keep my home a “controlled environment.”  A place that is void of all sugary treats and/or other misc. food items that would throw me off track. All went well until….Halloween.

Who would have thought that a big bowl of “fun size” candy bars would have had so much power over me? I swear they talked. Calling my name constantly. And I answered nearly every time. It would have been bad enough if I had endured only a day of it, but I set the bowl out 3 days in advance. Even had to fill it up again on the night of Halloween.  Shameful, but true.

Halloween has left me 5 pounds heavier. I could have continued to binge, but decided to get up, wipe the chocolate from around my mouth, enroll myself back into Weight Watcher’s, before the next couple of holidays roll around. I might have lost a battle, but I haven’t lost the war.

The battle rages on….

"Neither situations nor people can be altered by the interference
of an outsider. If they are to be altered, that alteration must come from
within."Phyllis Bottome (1884-1963, American writer)

I don't even know how much of my life I've wasted trying to change 
other people, to mold them into the perfect model of who I thought 
they ought to be.  It's been a lot of squandered time for sure.  The 
truth is that I can't change anyone else but myself.  I have all the 
power in the world to make changes in myself and in my own situations, 
but not one ounce of power to change someone else.  I wish I had been
taught that when I was a young child.  I could have saved myself a lot
of heartaches and headaches for sure.

And once I finally did learn this amazing truth, I found it
to be so liberating.  I could just stop working so hard trying to 
accomplish the impossible task of forcing someone else's change.  Wow!
What liberation!  What a weight off my shoulders!  I can't do it!  So,
I can just stop trying so hard and give myself a break.

There are a lot of people out there trying to force someone else to 
do something that the person being forced doesn't want to do.  Well,
listen up, folks!  Stop it.  Stop spinning your wheels.  Stop raising
your blood pressure to dangerous heights.  Stop worrying yourself to
death over your failure to do something that is impossible to do!  Set
yourself free by letting go. 
 
That doesn't mean you have to like whatever it is that you've
been working so hard to change for someone else.  And neither does it
mean that you are required to put up with the obnoxious behavior or the
dangerous lifestyle or whatever it is.  What it does mean is that you
can use your energy to evaluate your reaction to the situation because
that's something that you truly have control over.  You can devote your
time and energy to something productive:  what are you going to do in
response to the situation?  Do you want to just accept it and live 
with it?  That's certainly a possibility.  Do you want to distance 
yourself from the situation?  That's another viable option.  Maybe you 
just want to live and let live; in other words, let the person who is
not doing what you want him or her to do reap the consequences of his
or her actions.  In fact, maybe if someone is left to face his or her
own consequences instead of having a false sense of how things are 
because you're constantly rescuing them, he or she just might decide
to make a change.  And that's the only way change is ever going to 
happen anyway.  The author of change is the self.  A person has to be
altered from within.  Any unbearable situation has to be altered from
within. That's the only way there is for change to happen.

Once you've been set free of someone else's responsibility,
you can find time for doing positive things for yourself.  And just 
letting go will set you free.

My father used to say, "Don't waste your time trying to teach 
a pig to sing.  It only frustrates you and irritates the pig!"  How 
true.  Nothing is more frustrating than trying to accomplish the 
impossible.  And nothing is more liberating than relinquishing the 
pig back to its destiny in the pig sty.  Of course, a pig can't change 
itself.  It is what it is.  But humans can change who they are when 
they decide it's what they want.  They can become the highest form 
of whomever they have ever wanted to be.  But the alteration has to 
come from within.

“A beautiful woman must expect to be more accountable for her steps, than one less attractive.”
~Samuel Richardson

The college where I work is promoting healthier living by challenging employees to compete for the next two months in tracking the number of steps we take each day.  We have charts to fill out daily, and we’re to submit our charts with our totals in December.  The person who has accumulated the most steps in the time period of the challenge will win a prize!  I have wanted to get myself motivated to exercise, and I love a challenge, so I have chosen to participate.  The challenge began Wednesday.

I have no idea how many steps other people take, but I suspected that I didn’t take nearly as many as most folks and not enough to prevent weight gain, much less to lose weight.  I have heard that the magic number is 10,000 steps per day.  That would be the equivalent of about 10 miles per day.  Not all at one time!  But the total of all steps taken in every situation during the day.  10,000 steps seems like a lot to me.  But I had no idea how I compared to that until I put on a pedometer and actually counted my steps.

I fell way short of 10,000!  Wednesday, I stepped a grand total of 3, 758 steps.  I’m going to round that up to 4, 000!  Okay, so I’m 6, 000 steps short of 10,000, but what does that mean?  I checked around online, and it seems that most experts rank the number of steps as follows:

Under 5,000 – sedentary, very inactive (that’s me right now!)

5,000 – 7,500 – low active

7500 – 10,000 – somewhat active

10,000+ – active

12, 500+ – extremely active

Okay, so I’m sedentary or very inactive, which is what I suspected!  I actually did some things to increase my steps on Wednesday to get as many in as I did just doing my normal activities.  I went to a bathroom further down the hall from my office, I parked as far away from the building entrance as I could in the parking lot, and I took a walk over to another building on campus that I usually don’t go to.  Without all those extra steps, I might have only taken about 2,000 steps in a day.  But either way, I’m still in the low active category.

10,000 steps seem very far away.  I’m probably not going to make it to 10,000 overnight or even in one week.  I’m not in any kind of shape to start stepping 6,000 to 7,000 more steps in a day than I do now.  But I can increase my daily steps gradually so that I can get myself to my goal of 10,000 steps in a day.  So, that’s what I’m going to do.

One suggestion that I kept seeing over and over again as I explored online about counting steps is to just monitor what you actually walk in a day, and then make your first goal to increase whatever that is by 2,000 steps.  One source said if you do that, you probably will stop gaining weight.  I think 2,000 steps a day seems reasonable to add to what I normally do.  That’s two miles over the course of the day.  But in order to do that, I’m going to have to do more than just park further away from the entrance or use a bathroom a few steps further down the hall. 

Here are some things I think I can do to make my 2, 000 extra steps goal:

• Take a walk up and down my driveway a few times before I get in my car to leave for work in the mornings.
• Park in a more distant parking lot from my building every work day.
• Make a circuit walk around the hallways here in my building three times a day while I’m at work (maybe every time I go to the bathroom if I go more than three times during the day).
• Take a walk up and down my driveway a few times when I get home before I go inside.
• Do more housework! 
• Instead of conserving energy, which I’m an expert at, take more steps to do everything I do at home or anywhere else.  In other words, take the long way around instead of figuring out the shortest route.

That’s all I’m going to do this next week, and I’ll let you know if I was able to get my movements up from 3,000 steps a day to 5,000 a day.  If I can do that, then I’m half way to my goal of 10,000 steps!

I know I won’t win this competition at work.  But adding more steps to my day every day will make me a winner anyway!  The competition is just a means to get myself going.  But maybe they’ll have another challenge in the future, and I just may be more competitive by then!

Here is something that looks fun that I found online.  It’s called Web Walking USA, and you keep up with your steps and chart your progress in a cross country walk.  I believe they said that you should count each 1000 steps as a mile.  I think I’m going to do that, too, so I can see how far I’m going while I’m stepping it up. 

http://walking.about.com/cs/measure/a/webwalkingusa.htm