The Ins and Outs of a Lifestyle

The Ins and Outs of a Lifestyle

April 2023

Health and wealth go hand in hand, says Sujatha Rao. 

So try and find a balance between the two In the times we live in, ‘lifestyle’ has come  to include a broad spectrum of tangible and  intangible things, which can be narrowed  down to two of the most important ones: health  and wealth. Let’s zoom in on one important  input and one important output for each of  these two aspects for keeping it simple, though  there are many more components, both in  terms of input and output, that contribute to a  balanced lifestyle.  

I. Health 

These days ‘lifestyle diseases’ is a term we en counter frequently. It includes a list of diseas es that one falls prey to, thanks to the lifestyle  one maintains. Sadly, this list includes serious  diseases such as heart ailments, COPD, diabe tes, hypertension, TB, and a variety of cancers.  

A large number of these diseases progress very  slowly and steadily. So, most of them do not  spring onto us all of a sudden. The good news  is that quite a few of them are preventable, with  the power to do so lying within our control.  

One of the primary inputs for maintaining good  health is what we eat, and the output is what we  burn, both measured in terms of calories. Keep ing these two somewhat in balance may help us  keep the bulk of lifestyle diseases at bay. 

Input 

•  Watch the calories: Nowadays, the pack aged foodstuff we buy, mandatorily men tions the calorific values. So let’s use this  information to buy ourselves some healthy  calories. 

Heartspeak 15 

•  Eat for the heart: What we eat and how  much we eat is at the heart (literally) of  a healthy lifestyle. So let’s go easy on our  hearts by eating healthy. 

•  Have fun cooking: With so many YouTube  recipe videos at our fingertips, cooking can  turn out to be a team activity and a family  pastime. This way, we know what’s cooking  in terms of calorific values too. While we  are at it, let’s also get back to our granny’s  recipes that are low on oil and high on fi 

bre, with a good dose of probiotics thrown  in for that healthy gut. 

•  Cheat a little: We can afford to have a few  treat-ourselves days strewn in between.  But we have to earn them through strict  adherence to our regimen during the rest  of the days.  

Output 

•  Do the maths: When the calories we eat  and the calories we burn are almost equal,  our weight remains somewhat constant.  So when I realise that I would need to  walk about four km to burn that single ex 

tra-large samosa, I say “No, thank you” to  such lavish helpings. Ultimately, like many  things in life, eating too is a trade-off.  

•  Don’t let the garbage pile up: “Unfortu nately, the garbage that we eat accumulates  at odd places on our body, making it very  difficult later on to shed that extra weight  off. So avoid it. 

•  Reap what you sow: If I sit on the  couch and eat those potato chips while  binge-watching TV for hours, I sure can’t  complain about ending up looking like a  couch potato, can I? 

•  Keep your buttons on:I don’t know about  16 LifePositive | APRIL 2023

hips, but buttons definitely don’t lie. So  you better take care not to burst them at  the seams. No shortcuts here—you have to  attempt to sweat those extra calories out. 

In and out 

Even with a perfect regimen on the input and  output fronts, there’s no guarantee that one  would live happily ever after. But the odds of  living better and longer would definitely im 

prove.  

II. Wealth 

Daniel Kahneman, the Nobel Prize–winning  behavioural economist said, “Money does not  buy you happiness, but lack of money certainly  buys you misery.” 

Money, or wealth, is the input we need to reach  our goals, be it education, buying material  things in life, or attaining independence of var ious kinds. It is the tool that defines our stand ard of living. By ignoring wealth, we would be  

putting our health and fitness at peril. The origins of money go all the way back to  the Mesopotamian temple and palace admin istrations in 3500 BC. Thus, money seems to  have evolved as a bookkeeping and accounting  process, progressing to coins and to what we  presently know as currency.  

It can be argued that since we are paid mon ey for our work or service, it itself is an out put. But that kind of viewpoint is somewhat  short-sighted. Ultimately, it’s a commodity to  get what we want in life. 

Let’s now try to see whether we can demysti fy the financial aspects of life using the same  simple concepts of input and output. Input 

Work hard: Unless you are a person who is  born into riches and can live off your inherited  money, you have to work almost a lifetime to  earn enough to live through your sunset years  comfortably. So the majority of people can’t es 

cape long hours of work during the prime of  

their lives. In addition to the hard work, the  knowledge to make that hard-earned money  work harder will help us make enough to last  our lifetime. 

“A miser lacks what he has and what he  hasn’t.”A case study. 

Because of the way David’s family lived, the  world viewed them as not-so-well-to-do. David  worked hard round the clock and spent most  of his time outside the house. Even his family  members thought he was a loser, as they con 

tinued to live in penury. However, when Da vid passed away due to a sudden heart attack,  his family found more than 10 property docu ments stashed away in the locker. He never got  to enjoy the fruits of his toil. For him, money  became an end in itself, and he ended up dying  with a hoard of money unspent and unenjoyed. 

Unfortunately, the sorry state of affairs contin ued even after his death. David’s only son went  berserk on seeing such riches all of a sudden.  He squandered it away, and his life too was  nipped in the bud, thanks to his unhealthy ad dictions. 

Output 

Go after your goals: Money is the tool to get  that output we want, both tangible (house, car,  furniture) and intangible (education, experi ences). The output, in this context, varies from  person to person. However, it is worthwhile  to remember that once we make more than  enough, it’s time for us to give some of it to  those who are less privileged than we are. 

Aamdhani athanni, kharcha rupayya (In come, fifty paise; expenditure, one rupee). A  case study. 

Dheeraj and his family members gave the im pression of being very rich. They maintained  a very high standard of living for decades. So  when Dheeraj committed suicide one fine day  by jumping into the reservoir of the dam in the  town, citing financial troubles as the reason, it  came as a rude shock to everyone. Immediately  thereafter, the family had to file for bankrupt cy, and that’s when it became public knowl edge that they had been spending way beyond  their means to keep up the façade of being a  wealthy family. Keeping such a false social sta tus cost Dheeraj his life. His lifestyle became a  terminal illness of sorts. 

In and out 

David and Dheeraj are outliers on the different  ends of the same normalisation curve. One was  not living the life he could easily afford, while  the other went chasing a lifestyle he could ill  afford. For both of them, their chosen lifestyle  proved to be a fatal mistake.  

Maintaining a healthy balance between the in puts and outputs of the multiple parameters  of life is the foundation of having a healthy  lifestyle as highlighted through a couple of ex amples. 

We can have a ‘well-thy’ lifestyle when we work  towards what we want out of our lives, by di recting the simple inputs towards our desired  outputs through our hard work, creativity, and  self-discipline. 

Sujatha Rao is a retired banker. She has been contributing articles to various newspapers and magazines  over the last two decades. Two of her short stories were placed third in Times of India’s national level Write  India contest (Seasons 1 and 2). Her first book titled In the Company of Stories was published recently. Her  other interests include reading, traveling, practising yoga, and mindfulness. 

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