Carl Setzer

One thing that strikes me, on this fitness journey, is how a sedentary my life had become. My fitbit's basic plan is to accomplish 10k steps per day. Well, today, I just got that. At 11:40 at night. That entailed pacing around me house for a few minutes. And I did an hour of taekwondo and cycled for about an hour. I may not be as sedentary as some. Yet, reaching these basic steps require significant life changes. That speaks to an internal illusion of mine. Fitness. I see myself as the epitome of health. But I'm 20+ pounds overweight and nowhere near the peak fitness levels of my youth. Plus, that fitness was based on lots of exercise, and nothing else. My diet was atrocious. And is only slowly getting better. These are not the easiest changes to make. Decades of bad habits, brought home to roost as my metabolism calms. At one point, I wanted to recapture the fitness of my youth.  Now, though, I want something very different. I want greater health, one of better diet, of rich...

A few years ago, my weight crept past 220 lbs. With clothes tight, belts tighter to the point of needing replacement, I felt fear. In my mid-40s, all the diseases associated with obesity stared me coldly in the eye. Even more frightening, I noticed a few people, slightly older than me, with major mobility issues. All that lead to a call to get healthy. Now I didn't race for the nearest cross-fit course. I just added back some things I love: cycling and walking, also attacking some dietary "low hanging fruit" (limit soda, cut back on sweets, smaller portions) and ten pounds dropped quickly. But each additional drop presents challenges. So I adopted several smartphone tools, the main one now being MyFitnessPal. And I keep looking for better tools. About 6 months back, I noticed my wife's Fitbit laying unused and asked to try it out. I hated the thing! It displayed, in great detail, my sedentary life. So, I parked the thing. Then, around New Year's, my fallow accou...

Today, walking by my house, I see a young woman (twenty-something) standing on her back patio, cigarette in hand. I've noticed more and more young folks smoking, and it disturbs me. Watching my mother die of cancer plays a piece, and that deep inner desire for no one to ever self-inflict that horror. But there's another piece at play. Entirely anecdoteal observations on my part show a great up-tick in smokers. Now, my generation saw great deceases in the rate of smokers. The next seems to be growing. What's at play here? Our knowledge of health-risks has only increased, no it's not any kind of decrease in awareness of them. Actually, my wife presented me with an idea that makes sense: they're rebelling against us. We grew up with socially acceptable smoking parents. Perhaps part of our turning away from cigarettes was our own rebellion. Anyway, there is a communications piece at play: the social message against smoking has waned. To our detriment, as a society...

Just watched a spot for a prescription eye-lash grower. Watching it makes me think of the treatments for gas, hair-loss, and all sorts of trivial ailments. Seems rather superfluous and silly. Clearly, even such a noble endeavor as medicine looses its ethical compass in the face of profit. How do we get treatments developed for serious diseases that don’t have large markets? The invisible hand won’t bring them about. A disease, no matter how dreadful its affects and the suffering it causes, that only has a minute number of “customers” won’t attract the medical industrial complex. Is there any way to build these treatments, products? To alleviate these diseases and mitigate suffering? This ethical concern is one, unspoken, draw for me towards a nationalized (perhaps globalized?) system. I hope that we could find a non-socialized system.