Don't Put Off Getting Healthy.
A reflection on not delaying getting fit and eating better.
Over the last few months, I’ve spent a lot of time extolling the virtues of getting in shape and eating well to everyone around me, and that’s probably quite predictable because I’ve gotten really healthy over the last year or so — both dramatically improving my physical fitness as well as my diet (which personally I find even harder). I will write a lot about both of those topics in the future (so make sure you subscribe for that), but today I want to talk about why you should get healthy today.
I don’t necessarily think having a kid was the motivating factor that made me start getting serious about exercise last year (and I had already been working on my diet before that), but it was certainly a motivating factor. Having a kid is a good reminder of a few things — your time on this earth is limited, you have responsibilities to others, and the like. What I recognize (because this was my experience) is that it’s easy to say to yourself “I should be healthier, and I will deal with getting healthier sometime in the future”, and I think this is very dangerous. Not only can the time get away from you, but moving plans to get healthy up has a ton of benefits.
For one, it’s easier to get healthy if you’re younger. As you get older, exercise — which is such a huge part of getting in shape — just gets harder.
As you get older, you have more time commitments (doing a lot of exercise is a bigger time commitment than people appreciate!), your career spins up, and then there are relationships, kids; things just get busy.
But, I think what’s even bigger is that, well, your body gets older! It’s kind of crazy the things you can do and come away uninjured from when you are a kid, or even a teenager, but as you get older things get much harder! I don’t remember the first time I woke up to super sore muscles after going to the gym, or my first real exercise-related injury, but those things really ramp up with age. All of this means that your ability to consistently do a large volume of exercise just drops precipitously as you age. This all makes basic sense: if you can run a half-marathon without being too sore, it’s going to be a lot easier to burn calories!
I’ve also long believed that it’s easier to stay in shape than to get in shape, because working out hard when you are really out of shape is exhausting and sometimes not a whole lot of fun. I swim a lot now, but I wouldn’t really want to have gone to the pool in a bathing suit with the shape I was in a few years ago, and I think swimming may have killed me! Working out when you are in shape is still tiring of course, but it’s less something that I’d dread compared to when I was a lot less healthy. Basically, there’s a sort of virtuous spiral you can get into if you get into shape, and the longer it takes for you to get there the harder it is to cash in on those benefits.
I think it’s also worth thinking about getting healthy in terms of compound benefits. Like with the growth of many things, when you grow your health there are various rewards you reap, and that means that the sooner you get in shape the more cumulative benefit you will see. For example, when I think of the last year as opposed to the years before, I actually got more enjoyment out of it, because I could spend time exercising and not feel exhausted (at least to the same extent) and because I also had more self-confidence — not to mention that things like doctor’s appointments or physical activities with friends were much more likely to be good experiences.
You can imagine this getting extended to activities — if you’re in shape, you’re a lot more likely to want to go play pick-up sports, or go hiking with friends, or try something new, and so there’s an effect where you can live a much richer life and you will probably have more novel interesting experiences (which make time run more slowly for a nice extra benefit). Just in the last year I’ve done a ton of climbing, cycling, running, hiking, and more — more activities and time spent active with friends than in the previous 5 years combined.
From a more strict health point-of-view (recognizing that I am not a doctor), you can also imagine how for every bit of your body it would be better to be healthier for as much time as possible. A higher resting heart rate is going to mean more wear on your heart for as long as you have it; the same could be said for high blood pressure and its impact on your entire circulatory system. By getting healthy sooner, you bend that curve downward, and even if you take two fit people — the person who has been fit for longer is probably in better health. Of course, this isn’t meant to discourage you from getting fit if you haven’t been in the past, just that at this moment getting fit is a good idea.
There are also a lot of practical effects downstream of this: the healthier you are, the longer you will live (on average), and so the more novel health interventions you will benefit from. Basically, you can’t kick your health down the road forever, and moreover you can probably expect that the longer you stay healthy, the easier it will be to keep staying healthy. Imagine for example someone who struggled with weight control for a lot of their life, if they get into a negative health spiral that could have life-changing consequences, but if they struggled hard to keep their health solid then they would be benefitting right now from GLP-1 agonists, which could very well be a life-changer for them.
It’s pretty clear we are in a golden age of biotechnology (I think Noah Smith’s post above is good on this topic), with things like MRNA vaccines, advanced immune checkpoint inhibitors, CAR-T, Alphafold, machine learning tools (I’m “AI” skeptical, but I have no doubt the tools we are building are going to make doing research and valuable science at least somewhat easier), and all kinds of stuff which I’ve probably never heard of. The better your health, the more of the incredible innovations that people are creating will be available both in an absolute (it exists) and local sense (you can get it, and at an affordable cost, wherever you are).
I do think there are also more practical benefits to shifting the “get fit” moment in your life as soon to the present as possible.
For one, if you’re young, you’d probably benefit disproportionately from being in better shape than an old person: you’re probably out and about more, up later, and doing more. All of this stuff gets easier and is going to be less of a drain on your energy if you’re in great shape. As a young person in a city, I think exercise is also very often a great way to meet people; lots of sports are done in teams or socially, and in the last few years run clubs have been a huge thing. On the diet side, eating healthier often means eating differently (as well as probably less), which personally meant opening up and breaking my bad picky eating habit. You can imagine how something like that has its own cumulative benefits over the years — who knew Greek yogurt is... fine!
I think there’s also one more thing to all of this: if you are still relatively young, getting in shape lets you see what you can do. I was never all that fit in high school, but now I can comfortably run half marathons (and I think maybe a marathon this year?); it’s kind of nice to do that stuff so that you can get a whole lot of context as to what the great athletic achievements we see during events like the Olympics actually amount to. You can also see just how much you’re capable of, and I think that’s a very powerful thing.