The ‘Whys’ Of Lifestyle Diseases

Diseases don’t just happen. Something has to go wrong. Most of the time “that something” has to do with how you treat your body, that is, what you do with it and what you put into it.
What I mean to point out is that fate has a minor role to play; it’s the “life style” we have which defines how we will be in the years to come. So it’s a matter of choice, right? What you choose is what you get.
But the irony is that, we aptly install antivirus in our computer so that we could prevent it from being infected, we install pop up blockers in our browser so that unwanted things should not show up, but we fail to apply the same prevention and care to ourselves.
Yes, it is in fact possible to have “disease free lifestyle”. It is as simple as making a choice, that ‘yes I will stay healthy for the rest my life’. But “Lifestyle” as a link to prevention to disease prevention is so strong that it demands questions.
For a good lifestyle four areas we need to concentrate on:
1. Eating Right,
2. Proper Exercise,
3. Adequate Rest, and
4. The ‘Mind Cookie’ (+ve attitude).
What are Lifestyle diseases? Firstly, the most important fact we need to know what we are up against. Right! Well, to start with ‘a lifestyle disease’ is a result of day to day nutritional deficiency, increased stress, and lack of exercise, pollution, alcohol and inappropriate eating habits.
Let us discuss facts about five such diseases in India in the years to come:
1. Diabetes: ‘By 2030 Asia is explained to have 190 million Diabetics cases, more than half of them in India and China’.1
2. Heart Disease: World Health Organization estimates that ‘By 2010 60% of the cardiac patients in the world will be Indian’.2
3. Arthritis: ‘By 2020, Scientists expect 40 million people will suffer from osteo arthritis’.3
4. Obesity: Scientists say that the percentage of overweight/obese people in India is on track to rise from 9% in 1995 to 24% in 2025.4
5. Respiratory Disorders: More than 500,000 premature deaths in India are caused by atmosphere pollution each year.5
1. Newsweek Magazine. 2. Time Magazine. 3. Time Magazine. 4. Time Magazine. 5. UN Report.Further, diseases like cardiovascular disease, type 2 diabetes and even certain cancers, account for nearly 60% of 56.5 million deaths a year deemed preventable. And it’s all about lifestyle.
So why do we eat, what we eat? In other words, fats in the form of Burgers, Pizzas, wada pavs, and all sorts of greasy foods in the world. Research says, ‘fat brings more mental satisfaction to your body than a mere veggie’. But believe me, “feed a cookie to your mind and not your body” and you will be more than satisfied with the results (I will come to this part latter on).
Further, we have people like Amitabh Bachchan, SRK, Michal Jordan coming on TV and telling us to have cold drinks, pizzas and burgers, who never in their lives would even touch a burger or even enter a place where these things are made. Leave alone these people; we even listen to ‘the joker’ who tells us that a burger will have protein, carbohydrates, fats and vitamins.
I seriously doubt that these things remotely have something to do with health and nutrition. Yet we listen to these people and eventually end up having a fat belly, less active lifestyle, and march our way to various lifestyle diseases, while the psychopath joker is still thin and is still pulling more people to a known doom.
Why don’t we quit smoking? It’s not that a smoker doesn’t care that more people die from tobacco use than from automobile accidents, drug abuse, AIDS, and alcohol combined. It’s that he’s probably addicted. Mind receptors stay eager to receive years after you quit. One puff can get you back to a pack a day before you know it.
It certainly will increase your health-care budget. A Dutch study figured that health-care costs for smokers can be 40 % higher than nonsmokers. A friend of mine is a chain smoker, while in a conversation; I asked him “How much money do you exactly spend in a month on smoking?”. He took some time in calculating, he is a 28 year old young man, a smoker for 5 years. He said “about 2000 INR”. I replied “do you know that is more than my health club fees and supplementation combined”.
So technically he was spending more towards damaging his health than I was spending towards the betterment of mine. And the sad part is that after that conversation he started to smoke even heavily than he was doing before to relieve himself of the tension that arose from this realization.
Why don’t we exercise? Everything is available on a touch of a button, from a pizza to a home theater system. That makes us the only species that doesn't even move to have food. We hardly consider taking a walk, after having our meal. We take our vehicle even if the distance to be covered is half a km.
A person I consulted gave all sorts of reasons not to work, enough for me to create a database, trust me that’s not my intention. But just to name a few,
“Why should I unnecessarily make my body suffer?”
“Why should I pay somebody to make me sweat?”
And my personal favorite,
“I will miss Baba’s yoga Shivir on TV”
……… and the list goes on.
I said “The point is not to watch it over TV but to actually do it as instructed”. He said “that view differs from person to person”.
Why do we ignore stress? Probably because we’re not too sure what it is. I think people understand that stress has a negative impact on our lives. Heart disease is one such negative impact. Some people when they are stressed run to a refrigerator or they smoke as my friend in the earlier conversation did.
Stress slows down your metabolism; it depletes body immunity, increases free radical activity in your body and much more. So to conclude it’s all in your mind but you need to recognize it and treat it accordingly (look out for my upcoming entries on stress management).
But my point is not to concentrate on removing stress but to do things which will actually not give rise to it in the first place.

I encourage you to ask any queries that you have regarding your lifestyle and I will gladly try and answer each and every one of them.Look out for my next entry “Beat That Stress”.