Have you heard this one?

Come on man enjoy your life. Eat what you want. Drink what you want. Smoke what you want. Life is meant to be lived!

Have you had that come back to you when you tell someone you’re on a mission? When you tell someone that you’re trying to eat right. That you stopped drinking. That you’re exercising more. It’s always from some out of shape flabby bastard. You never hear that from somebody actually in shape; Somebody actually healthy. It’s always from some lazy ass. It’s their internal justification for being a sloth.

And they’re not wrong. We’re all going to die. Absolutely. But this is my answer to them. When are you going to die? You ever see a fat 80 year old? The answer is no. They don’t live that long. You ever watch anybody died of colon cancer? It’s heartbreaking. You ever lose a relative to a heart attack at 60 or 65 years old? Do you think their family thought that they lived a nice long life? Or do you think that their family wanted 10 or 20 more years.?

I have a couple of relatives that are severely overweight. Very obese. And I was thinking today that they’re not going to live much longer. And then I started thinking about the last 15 or 20 years of their life. And I keep thinking of myself “what a waste.”

The last 15 years of their life has been spent on the couch watching TV or sitting in restaurants as their only form of entertainment. They wheeze and they limp and they can’t play with their grandkids. Everybody comes over to their house and they just sit there while everyone else mingles and plays with the kids.

So yeah we’re all going to die. But it’s not about that. It’s about what do you want your quality of life to be in the last 25 years of your life. Do you think plowing through quarts of ice cream and 12 packs of beer is worth losing 10 to 15 years of your life? Not just that. Is it worth 10 to 15 years of a sedentary, wheezing, doctor visit-filled, waddling, painful, exhausting, burden to your family lifestyle before you die?

We all gotta die. How do you wanna go out? I’ll choose “quietly in my sleep at 86” over “shitting into a plastic bag and wheezing my last breath at 66.”

I gotta go. We’re hiking to a waterfall and not drinking today.

Peace