You're Perfect, Yes, It's True

I've recently come to the realization that I'm in my mid-30s.  Smack dab, right in the middle.  On May 30, 2011, I made 35 years old.  I think it was fully realized when, at my yearly check-up at the OBGYN two months ago, he said, "Get a mammogram in the next 2 years."  Wha??  Who??  I'm the age at which health concerns start edging in and calling attention to themselves.  And because I was never really a health-conscious person, my door is now falling in from all the pounding.  My body is telling me to take better care of it, and I've been slow to listen.

Some of you may know that I quit smoking back in March after having been a smoker for about 5 years.  I started to worry about my general well-being because I was having difficulty breathing.  Charlie said my snoring was TERRIBLE as a smoker, and of course I stank.  After one night of being completely convinced I was going to have a heart attack, I quit, cold turkey.  I wrote a drawn-out essay over the first few weeks of quitting, and I'll post that at some point, but to make a long story short, my reasons for quitting were simple: I wanted to live.  Having decided that, quitting smoking was as simple (never easy) as choosing to live every time I wanted to light up.

Shortly after I quit, I started exercising.  My daily walking goal was 10,000 steps, I started bicycling, I gave up soda (more or less).  When I couldn't walk, I'd do a few vigorous rounds of Wii Sports with my kids or take my bike down for a ride around Kapi'olani Park.  We visited the beach often.  But as summer began, I slowly stopped exercising.  It wasn't too bad at first because I was doing hula twice a week and riding bike more often.  Then hula ended, school began, and now I do nothing more than ride my bike to the beach maybe once a week.

And I began to feel anxious all over again about my health.  It's entirely possible that my breathing concerns lately are purely fictitious concerns of a taxed and over-worked mind.  My doctor today ran a couple of tests and a bunch of blood work, all of which show that everything is as it should be.  She stressed more than once that nothing is wrong with my lungs or heart.  The echo and stress test are precautions, says she, because I was a smoker.

It's not even that I have reason to think something's wrong other than the fact that I'm overweight and was once a smoker.  My test results always come back normal, I eat a variety of healthy foods, I don't do drugs, and I'm in reasonable athletic condition so that when I go hiking, I'm not winded.  When I ride my bike uphill, I'm not dying.  I'm just worrying myself because I'm middle-aged.  That's my theory.

And I'm gonna start exercising again tomorrow.  I swear it.