I'm not a cook and I take little pleasure in spending time in the kitchen chopping vegetables, simmering sauces, or whatever else you're supposed to do to prepare "baked pesto tilapia and roasted vegetable quinoa" for dinner. I can't reasonably see myself eating tofu vegetable stir-fry for lunch or whole-grain avocado toast for breakfast. I haven't prepared elaborate meals for myself in like 30 years and don't see myself turning into some Whole Foods Betty Crocker overnight.
And as for exercise, it's recommended that one gets at least 150 minutes of vigorous exercise a week (which is a really odd metric because that amounts to 21.4 minutes per day, and who monitors their workout time to tenths of a minute?), or 10,000 steps a day. Look, I'm 70 years old, and if I can get my socks on in the morning, that's vigorous exercise to me. But I get it - less time in front of the computer playing video games, more time out on the street doing something, anything.
So I'll opt for the 10,000 steps per day instead. As it is, I try to walk about 2.5 miles every other day, and can easily step that up to every day now that spring is here. But 2.5 miles is only about 6,600 steps, at least according to my phone, and I need a lot more than that to meet the 10,000-step quota. Yesterday, I managed to get in 10,288 steps by pushing my walk to 3.5 miles, but I was exhausted and needed a nap afterwards. I had things I needed to do today and the weather was less than optimal so I didn't get the walk in today, and I have an appointment mid-day tomorrow, but still the 3.5-mile daily walk is a reasonable aspirational goal.
As for the food, like I said, I'm not an avocado toast kind of guy. And next week is Big Ears where eating is a challenge, and "healthy, heartwise" eating is a near impossibility. It's carbo-loading at the hotel breakfast buffet in the morning, and then grabbing whatever you can on the fly during the day - a slice or two of pizza, some barbecue, a burrito, whatever. Getting in the 10,000 steps isn't a problem - a lot of the time is spent walking up and down Gay Street from one venue to another - but healthy eating? Forgetaboutit.
I'm going to have to work my way toward better eating, but the change isn't going to happen overnight. I went food shopping today and deliberately didn't buy a lot of the pasta and prepared foods I'd been subsisting on. I still bought cereal, but I selected only those that had the lowest sugar contents (never liked the super-sweet, kiddie stuff anyway). The websites forbid whole milk but fuck you, I'm not eating my cereal with skim or some 2% dairy product, so deal with it. I bought a ton of fruit, some vegetables, salads, lentils, nuts, and berries. Brown rice and whole-wheat bread. It's a start.
After I get back from Big Ears, I can try going deeper into the recommended diet. It's going to be a series of baby steps, not a whole-hearted leap into the rice-cake menu, but it's a start and it's better than what I've been doing, and if that's not good enough for my glucose and my A1C, then fuck them.
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