Fitness Spotlight recently posted a great article, (it's true to life, go read) located at http://www.fitnessspotlight.com/2009/06/11/5-urgent-vocabulary-today/ about five well worn and well traveled excuses used to deflect responsibility for your own health. If you look at some of the bad behavior perpetuated every hour of every day, continuously without fail, it shouldn’t come as a huge surprise when an individual feels like yesterday’s discarded crap when everyone else around them are on the top of their game. 

Cigarettes are being taxed to new record highs, and people still haven’t read the memo. Just to use round numbers for the mathematically challenged, a pack a day smoker shells out a hard earned five dollars to deliberately ruin their lungs. (Just because you have two doesn’t mean the second one is a spare.) At thirty five dollars a week (7 x 5, keep up with the action) multiplied by fifty two weeks, we’re looking at $1820 being pissed away, per year. A two pack a day smoker, $3640. Tell me that wouldn’t purchase a sweet HD big screen TV and still have change left over for gas to drive it home. And you would have enough energy and lung capacity to suck your ass off the couch and search for the remote. 

Bad eating and alcohol consumption habits, extreme sedentary lifestyles, at what point did you earn the right to complain about the cost of health care? You’re the reason it costs so damn much. Of course you contribute to it. You can’t swing a dead cat without striking a doughnut shop (or three), and at least two or more brand name coffee shops hawking hot ice cream in cups as large as a three year old toddler. And let’s be honest, coffee is a regular eight ounce cup, black. Everything else is an excuse for today’s version of a large banana split - sugar, whipped cream, more sugar, a syrupy topping and sprinkles, and no banana. Let’s not omit three of four competing burger joints, more twenty four hour convenience stores, and the ongoing battle of which is tastier, Coke or Pepsi, with the other sodas clamoring “Look, at us, we’re caffeine free”, when they never had it from the start. 

Why do you think these places appear quicker than pimples on teenagers? You keep spending money at these places, chasing the same downward spiral, until one day your co-workers are passing a jar around the workplace while you’re listening to a doctor tell you about the expensive prescriptions and meds you have to purchase due to your lifestyle induced heart attack / high cholesterol / block artery / failing liver / bad kidneys / diabetes / cancer / or just plain grossly overweight.

On second thought, maybe you’re right. It probably is due to your advancing age, bad genes, some alien mutating virus from another world, a sinister CIA plot, or some hateful co-worker is out to get you.

It’s never your fault.