The Road to Wellness: Swallowng the Bitter Pills

Lately I've been becoming more and more concerned about my health. Recently, my younger brother James has been hospitalised due to severe vomiting (so severe that he has burst a number of capilaries in his eyes thereby replacing all the white areas with a rather shocking red), he has some kind of gum infection around his wisdom teeth so they will have to be removed and he managed to get a very nasty case of rubella. My mother has been diagnosed with serious water retention and is unable to sleep because her arms keep losing circulation and alternating between mind blowing pain and no feeling at all (which she says is worse.) All of this, plus observation of various ailments in other people I know, has given me a new respect for my body and an uncomfortable awareness of the damage I've been doing to it for the past 8 years or so. Most of my thoughts have been revolving around macabre fantasies about me being hit by a car. I keep thinking about myself lying there about to die and what I would give in that moment to spend just one more day with the people I love. I feel so stupid that I have done so many things that have cost me not just days but weeks and possibly even years. I've allowed myself to become grossly overweight, I smoked for 8 years, I didn't exercise and I ate a big pile of garbage (nutritionally speaking). If I was to speak to my 'self-of-two-years-ago' I know that I would have heard all those silly excuses I hear from other people who refuse to take care of themselves:

I may get hit by a bus tomorrow, why should I plan for an old age I may never get?
(A bus may kill you. Hauling around 30kgs of excess flab: that WILL kill you. You prevent bus-related death by looking both ways before you cross the street why not do the same for disease-related death? )

Old age sucks, why should I care about losing the last couple of years? They will be awful anyway.
(Firstly, if you take care of your health old age needn't be physiologically destructive. Secondly, you will still be the same person when you are old with the same attachment to life you have now, with interests, passions and people who you care about. If you have lived well you will probably have more people who you love. Children, grandkids (great-grandkids?) - wouldn't you love to see them grow up, get married, start families of their own? I only need to see the joy in my grandfather whenever he spends time with his great-grandkids to know that while old age might be tough on the body it can more than make up for it in other ways.

I'm young now - I'll sort myself out later.
(This is the biggest load of trash I have ever heard. If a young person abuses their body it affects their quality of life. Period. I know a number of young people who complain of lower back pain, who are out of breath at the top of a flight of stairs, who don't sleep well and are on the fast track to heart failure. My stepfather died at 44 of heart disease. He had an infant son. He was so young.)

I guess why I took me so long to sort myself out was that I was so afraid of taking responsibility for my actions. By changing the way you live your life you are, in essence, admitting that the way you used to do things was a mistake. That's a bitter pill. I used to pretend that nothing was wrong and run the same horse-and-pony show I see so many overweight, unhealthy people do (I'm fine. No really, I'm happy this way. Really I'm sure. I'm fine. I'm fine. I'm fine.) I was given a dvd of family videos from gatherings this Christmas and I watched myself and thought: who did I think I was kidding? I'm huge. I'm uncomfortable. I can't believe that I thought that nobody would notice that I ballooned by about 10kgs a year. I was not okay. I'm still not. But I will be.