Don't be one of those who fall and can't get up

I'm sure you've all seen the commercial where an elderly woman has fallen, and is unable to get back to her feet. Fortunately she has .... a Medic ALert radio, I think (it's been some time since I've seen the commercial). "I've fallen and I can't get up," she calls, and someone on the other end of the line sends help right away.

Well, fallig is something that afflict elderly people, and more often than not, they can't get up. My mother, for example.

I've posted here about my mother before. At age 40 or so she was diagnosed with high blood pressure. She got pills, took them for a couple of days perhaps, then stopped taking them because she didn't like the way they made her feel. So she tried healing herself naturally - the power of positive thinking, and so on. (I think she also bought a lot of books on healing oneself naturally, but truth to tell I don't think she really implemented any of the solutions in those books - cutting out certain foods, etc. I think she had the books on her shelves and just hoped they'd work by osmosis)

Long story short, about 10 years ago she got congestive heart failure, and had to go to the hospital to get all this liquid pumped out of her system. (She hated going to the doctor so much that she'd never told my dad the issues she was having - for example open sores on her buttocks where the water was trying to get out, and since they had separate rooms, he never knew, until finally one day she couldn't get out of bed.)

Long story short, she's lived for 10 years with congestive heart failure, so instead of taking one, high blood pressure pill, she now takes 6 pills a day, and the side-effects dull her mind and give her about a couple of hours of sharp thinking a day. After that all she can do is read or watch TV, original thought is just too hard.

She has few pleasures, one of those is food, and so she is now about 150 pounds over weight. And if she falls...(she now walks with a cane) she can't get up, and it takes the combined effort of my father and myself to get her up.

Which is a long way around the subject, which is one reason to stay fit - weight in proportion to height, and weight training on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, is so that when you're in your 70s, you'll have less chance of not being able to get up once you fall.

Of course with women there's also the problem of osteoroporosis or brittle bone disease, but consuming calcium will help with that, as will selective weight training.

So, today is Friday, it's a weight training day.

It's also the 14th of Jan, so if you started your "new life" on Jan 1, you can step on your scale either today or tomorrow. Chances are you will weight exactly what you did on Jan 1, but by now, if you've been cutting back your food portions even ever so slightly, and exercising every other day, your body should now be in that caloric imbalance state where the weight will start to come off. Slowly. Remember, 2 pounds a week weight loss is the healthiest target to aim for.

And above all, it is health we want. If you do not have health, you do not have anything.