Your Health and Your Wealth – Fitness Impacts Wallet
In the Sept 22, 2008 issue of Time magazine, there was an article which talked about how getting & staying fit could be worth tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars.
The three main points of the article where:
- Lose weight – The avg annual out-of-pocket cost for diabetics is $454. ($12,000 for more sever cases)
- Stop Smoking – $100,000 can be saved by not buying cigarettes and investing the difference.
- Get Moving – The avg annual cost of heart disease is $606.
All excellent advice.
This article instantly reminded me of the 100 push-up challenge that is featured right here on The Happy Rock. If you haven’t, you should check it out. I tried it, and really liked it. In fact my wife & I did it together.
We made it through week 5 before being side-tracked. I stopped due to an arm injury(I don’t think it was caused by push-ups), and my wife decided that if I was taking a break so should she. But before we quit I was doing 60 pushups at once and she did close to 40. And we felt and looked great.
Although I’m no fitness expert, I don’t think 30 min of push-ups a week makes for a compete workout. So while we enjoyed doing them, we always made sure to also do other activities as well. And when I say “we” I mean me.
As you’ll recall from some earlier posts, I am an avid tennis player. If time allows I try to play at least twice a week during the summer and whenever I can the rest of the year. I also ride my bike to school, work and daycare. So hopefully I’m doing what I can to stay fit and am setting a good example for my kids to also lead an active lifestyle.
My wife could definitely improve in this area, she’ll be the first to admit it…after some coaxing (ice cream works good for coaxing her) 🙂
I know she’s not alone.
Back in the days before our Government was bailing-out Wall Street, it started a program called Small Step which was designed to improve the health & well being of America by getting us to eat right and be active. The Small Step program provides a lot of simple things you can do to get in shape:
- (# 54) Play with your kids 30 minutes a day.
- (# 79) Don’t skip breakfast.
- (# 89) Park farther from destination and walk.
