Give yourself the gift of good health this Christmas

About three and a half years ago, a soon-to-retire high school teacher came to see me. “I don’t want to be too forward,” she said, “but will you tell me your age?”

After I did, she said that when she mentioned to a class she was the oldest teacher in the building, they argued that I was older.

It took a while, but I remembered why they believed that. I’ll tell a good-natured lie sometimes in class as a type of gullibility test.

So when someone that year asked my age, I said, “Sixty-seven,” straight-faced, and added that I thought all that healthy eating and intense exercise made me look much younger.

A few nodded, a few expressed surprise, but no one questioned my claim.

While that class clearly failed the gullibility test, it’s not surprising. It really tests trust, something I’d like to think develops inside room 108 every year after a few weeks of class.

Something I’d also like to think develops after you read a few weeks of reading this column.

But when I write this column, there are no good-natured gullibility checks. Your health is too important for that.

So trust me when I tell you that the most important gift that you can give this Christmas does not go to a family member, a friend, or even a worthy organization like the Red Cross. You give it to yourself.

It’s the gift of good health.

While good health is indeed a blessing, never forget it is a blessing that you can bestow upon yourself. And that it really doesn’t take that much.

Just time. Motivation. Awareness.

While many people correctly believe that good health comes from a combination of attentive eating, ample exercise, good genetics, and luck, they fail to recognize the supreme power of the first two.

Healthy eating and ample exercise mitigate — sometimes even negate — bad genetics. They create, as often as not, what’s erroneously called good luck.

That “lucky” friend with the fast metabolism, the one who eats double what you do yet doesn’t gain a pound, isn’t really blessed at all.

She just takes the time to prepare meals that make it hard for her body to store excess energy as body fat. She just motivates herself to work out vigorously and regularly. She just recognizes when her body needs a break or a different exercise routine.

That’s not luck. That’s something she created through cause and effect.

Proof that you can indeed create good health can be found in dozens upon dozens of scientific studies. Consider one that appeared in the July issue of JAMA this year.

In it, researchers assessed nearly 200,000 Europeans 60 years of age or older, none of which had any signs of dementia at the start of the study. They found that those at a high genetic risk to develop Alzheimer’s disease but who followed a healthy diet, exercised regularly, did not smoke, and only consumed moderate amounts of alcohol were less likely to develop the disease than those without any genetic risk but who led an unhealthy lifestyle.

Let that sink in for a while. In this study, doing what’s good for the body trumped bad genetics to avoid a dreaded affliction that turns your golden years into a gray haze.

Additionally, a study published in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology this year evaluated feedback from more than 400,000 40 to 69 year olds in the United Kingdom and found that severely shortchanging sleep (defined as sleeping less than six hours a night on average) increases the risk of heart attack by 20 percent. That figure was derived after researchers eliminated what researchers call confounding factors.

In other words, they found the increase occurs regardless of one’s degree of wealth, education, physical activity, or body fat; state of mental health; and decision to smoke or not. It’s an increase created by insufficient sleep.

Other health benefits, oddly enough, can be attained while you fail at others. In the Diabetes Prevention Study, some subjects did not achieve what the researchers deemed “clinically significant” weight loss — generally regarded to be five to 10 percent — through a combination of diet and exercise.

Yet as long as those subjects did the prescribed amount of exercise as they “failed” to lose weight, they reduced their likelihood of developing diabetes by 44 percent.

Results like this are what lead an expert panel created by the National Institutes of Health to conclude that weight loss need not be five to 10 percent to help health. Their review of all prior research determined that even those who lost as little as three percent of their original body weight reduced triglyceride levels and improved blood sugar profiles enough to have a positive impact on their health.

In short, giving gifts this Christmas season to family and friends and worthy organizations is great, but too often at Christmastime, we give so much of ourselves that we adversely affect our health.

Don’t do that. And don’t ever feel guilty about giving the gift of health to yourself.

Why deny yourself what you’d love to give your loved ones?