Stealth health and wellness

Recently, I wrote some new content for my business website and discussed “stealth taxation”.  I described it as taxes you don’t see until it’s too late.  Stealth taxation is not the result of tax law but rather from being innocently unaware and uninformed.

I didn’t coin this term.  It apparently has its origin “across the pond” thanks to our British taxpayer friends.  Apparently back in the late 1990’s, the term appeared when a national association of pension funds demanded a reverse to a tax on UK pensions fund dividends.  One advocate of a proposed tax law change publicly commented how pension funds were being “taxed by stealth”.

Well enough about the world I live in most of the day, but let’s borrow the stealth term and apply it to our middle-aged men health and wellness journeys.

When thinking about my journey, diet and exercise components come to mind.  I don’t know about you but, for me, these words connotate effort and work.  So, let me use the words nutrition and fitness; I like these words better.

In any event, in my pursuit of health and wellness, I have a full-time curriculum of nutrition and fitness things I do.  I read up about the newest and best ways to eat and exercise, and remain always open to new ways to skin my health and wellness cat.  This all takes time and painstaking effort and somewhere along my journey, I may achieve some health and wellness gains. 

Sometimes these gains are modest and seem to dwarf the effort I’ve expended.  Yet at other times, the gains I’ve made may suddenly disappear or diminish during times when I experience lethargy in my pursuits. 

Whether I dance with joy about the gains I’ve achieved or lament about the erosion that has come my way, I tend to do so in my public square, letting my whole world know about great or poor little me.

Regardless, I have a proven track record of always marching forward, even if my cadence is two steps forward and one step back, because my journey has no end destination until my day of eventual reckoning, when I meet my grim reaper.

Again, I don’t tend to keep all this to myself but, rather, burden others with what I’m doing.  This broadcasting I do about my middle-aged man health and wellness pursuits, reminds me of my elementary school “Show and Tell” classroom time.

Maybe what I really need to do is be more covert, quietly silent with perhaps a slight whisper at most.  And to pursue that which I seek without regard to any progress statistics or visual appearance goals in mind.  To do so just like the mindless eating, sleeping, driving, walking and chewing gum that I do throughout my day.

Maybe this fresher and newer approach will result in me achieving that which I seek without seeing it until it’s too great.

Maybe then what I have achieved can best be described as stealth health and wellness.

Pax Domini sit semper vobiscum