These past few months I’ve been talking to a lot of medical professionals. Each time they ask me, do you exercise? I have to answer with an embarrassed no.

As it turns out, there’s nothing terribly wrong with me. My primary care physician decided to be thorough, just in case, since I hadn’t had a checkup in AGES. I have fantastically low blood pressure, and my BMI looks just fine, as always. I did learn that I have a benign growth on my gallbladder, which I wasn’t even sure was a vital organ until I looked it up. I also needed a prescription for a terribly annoying but non-life-threatening problem, which is now no longer a problem. The rest is just lack of exercise, sleep deprivation, and — in my opinion — stress.

Surprisingly, I’ve been learning to resolve my problems with stress through my graduate coursework on organizational leadership, which itself adds a lot of stress. By default I guess the two cancel each other out, but I’ve also been given a lot of new tools to use to analyze the world around me, which has been very exciting.

I’ll go into further detail about that later. Meanwhile, here are a few ways I’m adding exercise into my life:

• Take the Stairs Tuesdays at work: there’s a big sign at the bottom of the escalator telling me I’m a loser if I don’t take the stairs. You think I’m going to ignore it?
• Pushing the jogging stroller around Disneyland: everytime I do this I start jogging. Seriously.
• Buying the big kids new bicycles at Toys R Us: self explanatory.
• Tuning to our local indie radio station and hearing polka music…

Categories: health
Comments Off