Let food be your medicine or medicine will be your food, is a quote or variant of quote spoken by Hippocrates.
Hippocrates pretty much invented western medicine as the modern world knows it, but he identified that there are good and bad in all food and drink items, but good and bad are both relative. He also identified that exercise was an important component to maintaining a healthy lifestyle and uses the example of a walk after one’s evening meal. After all, walking is probably the most natural of all exercises though not in an era fast becoming fraught with convenience and frivolity.
The thing to take note of here is that Hippocrates identifies that the good is balanced with the bad, and as such ‘bad’ has to be in a diet to balance out the ‘good’.
A little bit of bad will do you no harm because all of that goodness is balancing it out, but on the flip side too much bad is going to show, because of the lacking goodness to balance things out.
This in an outside way this can impact your overall cost of living, where in countless publications we have done in the past point out that eating well doesn’t have to empty your purse or piggy bank. It’s currently evidentially proven that Obesity (and the associated ailments) is now the leading killer in Britain when it comes to health issues. Many people are trying to supplement a poor diet and sedentary lifestyle with a 5 a day prescription pill strategy. As we’re all aware, due to growing strains on the NHS the price of prescriptions are ever rising, and even if money isn’t the issue here, long term it will have a negative effect on your physical and financial health. Each and every drug available over the counter has a side effect or two, to which the answer is usually in taking another pill, which has a side effect or two and the beat goes on.
In a world so focused on self image and being popular, more and more people are looking for the Reality Star lifestyle and going crazy with social engagements, alongside the Fitness Star image in the form of a magic pill. Albeit, quality ingredients and food items are often reflected in their higher price compared to the prepackaged and preserved alternative. Which in the short term probably may save you a bob or two, but is it going to be enough to keep you from seriousness illness? Will it outweigh the potential loss of earnings if you end up on the long term sick? And then the pile of prescription drugs on top?
Beneath it all, living healthy comes from setting good healthy habits, both in your diet and exercise. When you feel like you ‘can’t have this’ and ‘shouldn’t have that’ then you need to readdress your expectations, and your strategy because living healthy, happy and ever stepping closer to your goals should be a happy journey, admittedly with ups and downs which there will be, but if it feels like you’re a slave to it and you’ve sold your soul to chicken breast, rice and broccoli 3 times per day and unhappy, you’re going to blow up and find yourself with bigger setbacks to comeback from.