I got an email from a friend of mine a few days ago about how much he enjoyed a hot dog he had recently eaten.
So why is this noteworthy? Well, my friend had sat in on a wellness seminar that Jason Merson and I had conducted for the Men’s leadership team at Uniontown Bible Church a few months back (okay, you might be thinking…now I really don’t get the hot dog relevance!).
Apparently, this seminar had an impact on my friend, because he began implementing some of the basics that we taught into his daily life. He “got” the importance of making health a priority while you are still healthy and can choose to make it a priority, as opposed to taking it for granted until it begins to fail and you are forced to make it a priority. Of course the difference in these two priority scenarios is huge in terms of quality of life and expense…the healthy person has a massively better life and spends much less money on staying well than the person who neglects their health, has a poor quality of life, and spends a large amount of their earnings and worth on medicines and procedures.
He clearly registered in his mind the simple daily things we can do to stay healthy: exercise, rest, water, good food, and high quality supplements and that by doing these things he is being a proper steward of the body that God has provided him in which to live his life to the full, for himself, his family, and to serve God with his gifts. I could go on and on with this…but I need to get back to the hot dog and it’s significance.
You see it is quite obvious that my friend likes hot dogs…heck, I like hot dogs! What is also obvious now to my friend is that a hot dog is not exactly what you would call “good food.” Hot dogs are like cardiac cancer bombs! So why did he eat it and why did he share that morsel of information with me? Because when you are doing a lot of the right things to take care of yourself, you can occasionally do some of the wrong stuff and it’s okay. Let’s face it, if you like hot dogs, or ice cream, or Big Macs, or whatever else it is that you KNOW is not healthy for you…you are going to eat them. To say you will never eat them is not realistic. You just eat them every once in a while, not as a routine.
The healthy person has a massively better life and spends much less money on staying well than the person who neglects their health
The other things my friend said in his email that magnify this approach is that it “tasted wonderful and I did not feel guilty.” When you do the right things for your health, and you do them often, those moments when you splurge you will enjoy it more because you don’t eat it very often and you won’t have guilt because you know it’s not hurting you, since it’s not part of your day to day life, and you are doing all the right things.
Everything in moderation…except the principles of good health, try to be as extreme as possible…it’s worth it!
