Here’s To a Healthy New Year!

Musings of an Aging Mind

By Jack Bagley

Ah, health.
The thing we should value most in our lives.
With 2026 now in full swing, it’s time for me to take a little stock in good health, considering how things have gone for me recently.
Since getting out of the hospital on November 1st, I have managed to gain back some (okay, a lot) of the weight I had lost. That did not make me popular with my cardiologist on my last visit to his office last week. The nurse practitioner asked me point blank, “Are you trying to have another heart attack? Because that’s one way to make it happen.”
I was properly chastised and said I would back off the snacking. You see, I count calories at each meal, and try to keep my calorie intake at between 1500 and 2000 a day.  That’s easy to do – if you don’t snack between meals, as I have a tendency to do.
The words of my cardiologist ran through my head at that moment: “If you want to have any kind of lifestyle at all, you’re going to have to take better care of yourself.”
I promptly went home and took every single snack food item I’d bought in the last few weeks – chips, crackers, cookies, spice drops – and tossed them all in the trash can. Then, to keep myself from cheating again, I took the trash out to the outside bin so it wouldn’t be so close.
I’d like to think I wouldn’t grab snacks out of the trash, but sometimes desperate people do desperate things.
It seems to have paid off for me, too, as I’ve dropped a little over three pounds since the great snack clean-out.
But it was necessary.  I was operating under the thought of “it won’t hurt if I eat a little here and there.” Of course, that’s a fallacy – or, as I’ve heard said, “A moment on the lips, a lifetime on the hips.” Truer words were never said.
As I was cleaning out some of the snack items, I took a moment to notice their calorie count. On any typical day, when I was trying to keep the calories in the range I mentioned earlier, the snacks brought me up to 2500 and even 3000 calories a day.
You ain’t gonna lose weight with that.
To be perfectly honest with you, I should be taking better care of myself. After all, I’m still recovering from a heart attack, pneumonia, and congestive heart failure, and my doctor’s comment about lifestyle looms large in my mind. I take 13 different medications each day: some in the morning, some at dinner, some before bed. I now sleep with a CPAP machine which is fed oxygen from the gizmo that I was tethered to my first few weeks out of the hospital.
And here I am, messing up all that effort with my eating habits.
I do not ever again want to go through what I went through during the last half of 2025. I jokingly call it my “adventure.”
Hmpf. Some adventure.
Being sick is not fun, and it is also quite expensive. Even with good insurance, there are out-of-pocket charges that can leave you scrambling before payday if you aren’t ready for them. I won’t say I had the best insurance, but you will never hear me say a bad word about Medicare. My two hospitalizations during the second half of last year cost somewhere just south of half a million dollars, but the only amount I’m on the hook for is around $2,000. Medicare took care of the rest.
This year, the folks who own this newspaper (and many others) offered health insurance. I eagerly signed up, despite being 67 years old and in less-than-perfect health. They even provide dental and vision coverage, and brother, let me tell you, those I intend to use. My vision has been an issue since I was 11 years old, and I don’t want to get into any discussions about my teeth (what I have left of them, anyway).
With my luck, of course, I will have good health for the foreseeable future, since I have insurance.
But isn’t that really the name of the game? Getting healthy, and staying that way, should be the New Year’s resolution we all make for ourselves.
I am very glad that I do not smoke, very seldom drink, and have never tried designer pharmaceuticals. I’ve seen the results of their use in friends and family members and realized that the use of those is a pretty terrible way to go.
Now, if I can control my food intake, I just might make it to 70 and beyond.
I’ve lost weight before, as you may know. I dropped over 100 pounds on two different occasions, but managed to pack it all back on.
This year, I am committing myself to being healthy. To taking care of my heart, which isn’t in the best shape.
If I don’t, I should be committed.