User blog:Taldin/Taking Care Of Yourself

One of the things about spending so much time in a hospital surrounded by sick people is it pushes home yet again how vitally important it is to take care of yourself. No matter how much you may think you're healthy, a pound of prevention is worth a world of suddenly-required cure.

So much of who we are is a balance of things - what we eat, how happy we are, how much we do to stay healthy and fit... there's a minimum maintenance requirement that many people ignore.

The human body has its limits. We adapt to change, but some adaption only slows down the damage rather than prevents it. Little subconscious things, little choices we make because it's easy, push that envelope of coping until something breaks.

When we say that we will start that exercise routine, or that diet, or quit smoking or drinking, 'tomorow', or 'next week', you're getting one day closer to that breaking point. The place where you say, "man, I should have done more of X before this happened."

As I sit by my housemate's bedside, she keeps saying that she didn't do enough. I say that she still did better than doing nothing at all.