...a point of knowing that I am getting older and ready to settle down and enjoy life as an adult with responsibilities.

I ended the previous post, before I took a pic of my dinner and blog that. One of the things that pops up often in many people's lives as they get older and become adults is their health. Health is a concept, an overall view of a person's body functions meant to be measure to ensure a good quality of life. Now I feel that being healthy is important because I do want to live as long as possible. Growing old does not mean my health has to decline. I think that if I step up and become more active and do more in taking care of myself that I can be healthy for as long as I want to be.

In order to know what needs to be done to reach that healthy status, one must get tested and have some kind of benchmark to work with. September 1, 2005, I went to my doctor for the first time in a long time. I got my benchmark for my weight and my blood pressure. My doctor ordered lipid panel and glucose test and asked me to come in the following week. When I came back next week, we decided that I needed to do a few things to make things better fo rme so we started medication for my blood pressure and my doctor approved the exercise and diet plan I went on.

The funny thing is that I had no clue that my blood pressure was dangerously high. I had a few clues that my weight was causing my body to come apart, like my knees and lower back hurts often. As for being diabetic, I had a couple of clues, I was thirsty a lot and I was constantly hungry. Or maye I wasn't hungry all the time, I just ate because I wanted to eat to cover up my emotions. That is the hard part here, trying to decide if the eating part was a clue that I was diabetic or that it was getting out of control.

Somewhere I read that our bodies are like our cars. I agreed with that perception and I realized that what I did when I went to see my doctor was that he was giving me information about what I need to do to get healthy, just like when you take your car to a garage and have them run the diagnosis test on the car to determined what needs to be done. In future posts I will go in depth about what I am doing with my health in terms of maintenance, activities and repairs. There are what I came up with from the information I got from my doctor. As always, I talked with my doctor about my plans to make sure the plans are sensible and not hazard to my health. My doctor and I have this kind of relationship that we ask each other for permission to change things. When I went on my blood pressure medication, we had to make modification and my doctor asked me "are you okay with increasing your blood pressure medication?" Doing that made me comfortable with him knowing that I can talk to him about what I do and he could give me feedback and make modifications as needed.

Let me stress this again: Your doctor is the most important team player you can have in your life when you are working on getting healthy and staying healthy.