When Benjamin Franklin said, “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure,” he was referring to fire safety. These wise words can be applied to a variety of concepts, especially health.  All too often a health scare motivates me to change my lifestyle. It would be smarter to  practice healthy habits before I develop a problem rather than after I have one. In doing this, perhaps I will avoid the problem altogether.

I couldn’t avoid getting hepatitis C, but once I did, it motivated me to develop better health habits. I had tried treatment, but in the old days, treatment was hard and the success rate was low. I needed to stay healthy until better treatments were available. Eventually I was cured, but I believe that regular exercise, a healthy diet, no alcohol, solid sleep habits, and stress reduction kept my liver in good form in the interim.

Once free of hep C, I could have gone back to my old ways, but quite frankly I learned the following:

  • A healthy lifestyle feels good
  • There are a lot of other lifestyle-related diseases left to be acquired, so why go back to my old ways?
  • If I ever got non-alcoholic fatty liver disease, I better be able to look my doctor and blog readers in their eyes and truthfully say that I had not returned to a life of alcohol, saturated fat and sitting on my derrière.

There are no tricks to being healthy. Hep has some suggestions. The hard part is doing it. I rely on friends and an app to keeping me accountable. I fall off the fitness wagon occasionally. It’s very tempting to stay holed up through the relentless (but welcome) rainy weather. Right now my Jazzercise class has a 30-day challenge which gets me out of the house since I don’t feel like doing my daily walk. Athletes don’t stop training in bad weather, and although I am no athlete, good health is worth training for.