Christmas

You know what they say… “You don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone“. I was thinking about this the other day when I was lamenting those who got close to pulling the trigger on a life changing program this year, but didn’t quite get there. It struck me that one’s decision to start exercising or not, is quite similar to Pascal’s Wager if you have ever heard of it. He was a 17th century French philosopher and mathematician who had some interesting ideas around decision making and the risk/reward ratios of believing or not believing in God. It posits that the risk of not believing, which at the time was believed to be eternal damnation (and I guess is still believed by some), was just too big a downside to not believe. Now, the question of ‘choosing’ or pretending to believe aside, this was a pretty good argument and one that I see as very similar to the quandary most people have around exercising. Have you ever heard someone defending their reason for not exercising or being healthy with lines like ‘well my grandpa smoked all his life, he didn’t get cancer and lived to 92‘ or ‘my overweight aunt never exercised or ate well and she lived to the ripe old age of 99‘? So let’s look at it plainly. What do you risk by exercising your whole life and eating healthy foods, even if by some small chance it was in your cards that you too could have lived to the ripe old age of ninety something […]