Opinion – Fernando Rocha: Fitness, yes, but not always

I arrive here with great pride, “treading this floor slowly.”

I am from São Paulo from Minas Gerais and a journalist since the last century. I really like bottled beer, food and bar talk with pork rinds on Saturday afternoons. It is necessary to explain that this is not a long neck – and that draft beer is not beer.

For almost a decade I presented a daily program, live and on national television, about health and quality of life. I learned to speak skillfully about proteins and carbohydrates, triglycerides and cholesterol. I became familiar with sinister syllables like TGO and TGP as well as disturbing ones like ADD AND ADHD. At the same time, I had the privilege of living daily with the best doctors in Brazil from the most varied specialties.

If healthy living were a language I can say that I had a lot of contact with this fantastic alphabet, and I practiced in my everyday routine the premises I learned on this journey. But even so, I never abandoned my duel with the scales. The struggle of more than half of the Brazilian population against grams and milligrams has always been my struggle.

I ran to São Silvestre five times and in all of them I came first in my category (that’s because in my category there was only me). I also faced an international ultra marathon from Switzerland to France at the feet of Montblanc and I arrived almost in one piece after ten hours of race. Even so, in the inflated account of calories, I always live on the overdraft.

I keep balancing the dishes between the necessary movement of 10 or 15 thousand steps a day and the filet a parmigiana that always calls me. I’ve understood for a long time that after 35, 40 and 50, weight training is gymnastics for the whole body, including the brain.

The gym isn’t exactly my favorite place to hang out, but I face the machines the same way I face a Monday after a long holiday. I’m sure millions of earthlings suffer from this same dilemma.

After so much effort, I always end up negotiating with myself a few reward calories that range from a simple quindim to a sophisticated bologna sandwich.

The list is immense. Inside me, the third world war has already begun. It has no logic but it has feeling. The fight is against ourselves, from the inside.

In this science of transitory truths that is medicine, there are more questions than answers. How many diets are there in the world? How many are yet to come? All of them accessible at your fingertips on the internet.

How many tips, tricks, phrases and products to scare away laziness and get out of a sedentary lifestyle?

Even navigating this universe of available information, obesity is expected to reach 30% of our adult population by 2030.

What can you do today to get out of statistics tomorrow? How to be stronger than our best excuses is the million dollar conundrum/question when it comes to self care, quality of life and longevity. And if the question costs so much, imagine the price of the answer?

The key only turns on the inside and big changes start with small steps. Deciphering labels, planning the fridge or learning how to drink coffee without sugar or sweetener, for example, can be a starting point.

There are thousands of others and in all of them you have to enjoy the process. It is more important than the result itself. The important thing is to get started.

Life is every day and that goes for any age – and for any weight.