This isn’t a joke!  You are going to die…someday.

I hope that it isn’t soon, and that it isn’t painful.  But nevertheless, it will happen someday.  That’s how life works.

What strikes me as strange is the obsessiveness with which we often approach our prejudices toward certain things.  Specifically, for this blog, I’ll discuss this with relation to fitness – but it’s true of anything.

People in the fitness world have all sorts of “rules” that you’re supposed to follow.  Eat this, don’t eat that.  Exercise this much, but no more, and no less.  Do this ten times a day.  Do that once a month.  Eat these pills once after every other meal on Wednesdays.

You’re supposed to “activate your core” and build [insert bodypart here] “of steel.”  You should only drink non-flouridated water from a holy stream that trickles from the top of Everest for one month every Spring.

You need to “challenge your proprioception and balance.”  You need to do “multiplanar exercise” and get into your “heart rate zone.”

And you do!  You race around, doing all this stuff.  You eat organic, you drink the Yogic water, you practice your Asana’s, you give your Pilates instructor a cash gift every Christmas.

Then you die.

And not only do you die, but you probably die roughly around the same age as everyone else in your generation.  Maybe you live ten year longer than your fast-food-abusing classmates.  And maybe not.

Maybe you live a couple of years less than the person who ate moderately well, and exercised moderately, all those years.  And maybe not.

My point is this – there’s little credence to most of the bullshit we try to sell ourselves and each other every day.

Will fast food kill you?  Yes, in excess.  In excess anything will kill you.  Unhappiness is a killer if sustained for too long.  Too much sunlight (plus other environmental stressors…like sunscreen) will give you cancer.  Too little, also, can kill you.

You are going to die.  The most important thing is that, while you’re alive, you get the most out of it, and help others to do the same (so that they, in turn, will help you, etc.).  Do things you love to do.  Do things that make you really effing happy.  I mean – EXUBERANT.  DO THEM NOW!  And help others to do the same.

And forget about all those bullshit “rules.”  You know what’s good for you.  Do it.