This is the season in which many Americans try to live out their New Year's resolutions, those popular, and often unsustainable pledges to improve oneself, ditch a bad habit, all that. While almost half of all Americans make a New Year's resolution, not so many actually live up to them. According to some statistical studies, 75% of people stick to their resolution past the first week. After two weeks, that drops to 71%. After one month, 64%. After six months, 46%. (That last stat I think is a little misleading, as I would imagine that most attrition between the one- and six-month benchmarks happens within Month Two, as after that period of time, whatever behaviors one has done to fulfill their resolution have become habit. But I digress.)
Other studies offer even bleaker results, suggesting that 49% of people who make resolutions have middling success with them. A quarter of us never succeed but try anyway, year after year. And a depressing 8% of people always successfully achieve their resolutions. I strongly suspect these people are either lying, or their resolution is something along the lines of "to say I always achieve my resolution whenever I am asked about it."
Popular resolution topics include better money management, improving relationships, self-improvement (i.e., education), and most commonly, either losing weight or gaining fitness. Since we are still in Week One of 2012 and everybody is still hanging on to their resolutions, I thought I'd talk about resolving to lose weight and/or get healthy. Since as resolutions go, this is one of the ones most prone to fantasy wish fulfillment. The problem is that people fail to appreciate the sheer amount of work it takes to get fit when they are overweight or obese. The numbers on obesity and their related costs are telling, and you don't have to live under the threat of a heart attack to want to be fit and trim. The trouble is figuring out how to do it. In modern America, that isn't always easy. We live in a society where we have easier access to really bad-for-us junk food than we do to decent produce. And since most of us are overweight already, there is a mammoth industry dedicated to pushing the latest get-healthier gimmick on us, which means that if you're already behind the eight ball healthwise, figuring out how to get better entails sifting through a whole lot of mixed messages.
To prove this point, writer and professional guinea pig A.J. Jacobs recently began promoting his book, "Drop Dead Healthy," in which he notes how he spent a year trying to live out every piece of healthy living advice he could find. And while he shed pounds and learned some really helpful stuff (like how reducing noise in one's life reduces stress and high blood pressure, because loud noises constantly trigger our fight-or-flight response), he also came across a lot of nonsense. And when he tried living it all out, the effort to be healthy was pretty much killing him.
Jacobs talks about his experiences in the video below. But the points I took away from it that hit me the most was his living with applying a shot glass' worth of sunscreen all day, every day. I can hardly stand the stuff when I vacation on Cape Cod, and I've got a fair Irish complexion that demands sunscreen. How he lived a year putting it on when he didn't need to is beyond me. That some dermatologist stood by this recommendation is just incredible to me.
The kicker, though, is when Jacobs acts on a Danish health effort to get people to wear helmets all the time for additional safety. He shows a picture of himself watering a plant while wearing a bike helmet, and you realize that some efforts to live healthier lives only ends up suggesting that we live lives we'd rather not live at all.
And herein lies the grim truth of what Jacobs uncovered. As a people, we really need to get healthier. As an industry, life and health insurers will only profit (and handsomely so) if people get healthier. So much so, in fact, that it still amazes me that more life and health insurers do not invest heavily in healthy living initiatives; the long-term returns on those investments are sure to be worth it. But for now, people are unhealthy and they often point to the blizzard of contradicting or just plain weird health advice out there as the reason they need to justify their unhealthy lives. The confusion over whether eggs are good for you or not has prompted plenty of people to throw cholesterol concerns over their shoulder and tuck in. This attitude is inexcusable. We impose upon ourselves a huge cost that is a direct result of our affluence. If only we could sort out what makes for a simple, healthy lifestyle, and what makes for fashionable nonsense, then maybe we'd all be living longer, thinner, and – most importantly – happier lives.
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