My Mother’s Health Plan

Posted on June 25, 2012

Here is the first in a series of excerpts from an HNE white paper titled: My Mother’s Health Plan: Everything I Need to Know About Good Health I Learned From My Mother, by Peter F. Straley, HNE President and CEO. We’ll run additional excerpts in future issues of Living Well for HNE members.

Introduction
Health care is extremely complex, and therefore you may believe that the solutions to decreasing health care costs are also complex.

However, My Mother’s Health Plan offers a simple solution to bending the cost curve in a positive direction. It is not unlike the concepts offered in Robert Fulghum’s book All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten.

When you take a moment to think about it, you can summarize the important components of good health into three categories:

1. Physical activity/exercise
2. Good nutrition
3. Prevention

These are all things your mother told you to do.

Go Out and Play
When your mother told you to go out and play, she was encouraging you to get some physical activity and exercise. Physical activity is anything that gets your body moving. Examples include: walking, jogging, running, cycling, swimming, skating, tennis, basketball, soccer, aerobic classes, etc. Strengthening activities include weight training (free weights or equipment), resistance band training, and various calisthenics where you use your body weight
for resistance.

Exercise has been reported to help people:

• Achieve and maintain a healthy weight
• Reduce high blood pressure
• Reduce risk for type 2 diabetes, heart attack, stroke, and several forms of cancer
• Reduce arthritis pain and associated disability
• Reduce risk for osteoporosis and falls
• Reduce symptoms of depression and anxiety

It sounds like a wonder drug! In fact, if you took a brisk 10-minute walk 3 times a day, 5 days a week, you would meet the requirement for moderate-intensity aerobic activity.

So why don’t more people do it?
Unfortunately, it takes commitment and the development of new habits. For anyone who has tried to develop a new habit, you know how difficult it is to maintain.

And that’s not to mention the allure of the “magic pill” – you’ve seen those infomercials that promise results with little to no effort (read that as no responsibility or accountability). I wonder what would have happened when my mother told me to go outside and play if I had responded that I was going to take a diet pill instead?

Categories: Summer 2012