For all the convenience which comes with city living – like being able to grab a ready-made bite to eat at all hours of the day, being able to pay for entertainment on a whim and just having instant all-round convenience – the city slicker’s lifestyle can very easily be to the detriment of your health. City living almost appears to be custom designed to chip away at your healthy-living habits and all the health caveats tend to be so well-hidden amongst our daily lives and activities that they tend to go unnoticed until it’s too late to actively do something in prevention.
Health killers are often very subtle and are particularly good at luring us into a false sense of security and control. They’re hidden in simple everyday choices such as choosing to take the elevator instead of walking up the steps and perhaps aided and abetted by greedy profit-pushers when you choose to supersize your fizzy drink with your double cheese burger. The false sense of being in control often presents itself as setting a later date to perhaps “go back to gym and pay for your over-indulging sins” or indeed choosing fast, ready-made foods as a matter of what you deem to be a temporary convenience. “It won’t be like this forever,” is the common sentiment, but then you wake up one day with an aggravated lifestyle-related health issue which you could have avoided by just implementing better lifestyle choices earlier on.
Removing Yourself from the Picture
Avoiding falling victim to the health and lifestyle traps of city life starts with a resolution to take active steps to taking better care of your health immediately. You have to start now and the best way to do it is to remove yourself from the inside the picture frame for a little while and look in on your life from the point of view of an outsider. It all comes down to a matter of choice – choice which you might be surprised to learn that you have way more control over. Take the tap water you drink for instance if say you live in the city of Leeds. You’d perhaps be happy to conclude that your tap water was indeed safe to drink only if you looked beyond your city border limits and cast your eye to the Tophill Low Nature Reserve, which is owned by Yorkshire Water – your most likely water company. In a study conducted by some zoology students from the University of Hull, it was found that the waste water which partially runs into the nature reserve’s water supply is home to a population of fish and otters. Who would have thought to make such a link between inner-city health and lifestyle matters and a nature reserve owned by a water company?
That’s the type of vision it takes to build up a realistic view of just what effect your city-slicker lifestyle has on your health. Take a leaf out of the books of the otters and only “swim in water that is safe and healthy.” In practice this is only a matter of making the right choices and following what you put into your body and what you subject yourself to right back to its original source.