His own cardiovascular-disease health crisis

Front and center in the fitness, health and wellness goals of Pierini Fitness is upper-percentile cardiovascular-respiratory fitness and his middle-aged man fitness training is based on it.  So, he read with great interest a recent article appearing in the Wall Street Journal about a resurrecting cardiovascular health crisis, driven by skyrocketing obesity and diabetes. 

Reading the fine print of this lengthy article, Pierini Fitness learned that a six-decade significant decline in the cardiovascular disease death rate is leveling off and, for middle-aged Americans, it’s rising!  Among the age 45 to age 64-year crowd, cardiovascular disease death rates increased almost two percent from 2011 to 2017. 

He also learned that the overall cardiovascular-disease death rate is a “quiet” contributor to a recent, and disturbing, decline in American life expectancy because it’s no   longer the counterbalancing offset it once was to the emerging causes of middle-aged death from drug overdoses and suicides.  Furthermore, it’s likely that cardiovascular disease deaths will continue being the leading cause of deaths for middle-aged men. 

“Yikes!” utters Pierini Fitness, undoubtedly the proudest and always card-carrying middle-aged man of America.

So, is all his cardiovascular conditioning training all in vain?

Maybe not, because the training he is doing keeps obesity and Type 2 diabetes monsters away; they are the key culprits of a new wave of cardiovascular disease deaths.  Obesity and diabetes have link to high blood pressure and other health maladies increasing the risk of heart attacks, strokes and other cardiovascular-disease failures.  One cardiologist called modern-day obesity the “new smoking” in terms of contributing to cardiovascular disease.

Answering his own question, no, his cardiovascular conditioning training is not all in vain, but it must also include the other side of the equation – eating sensibly and only what is required to adequately fuel and nourish his middle-aged man body.  To eat more is an invitation to obesity, the condition of being grossly fat or overweight.

Being grossly fat or overweight happens when we eat more than required over and over.  It’s happens too often in opulent America where we live.  No longer a condition afflicting only the wealthy, excess eating and drinking is being practiced by Americans of modest and, even, inadequate means. 

Better to keep it off than to add and try to take it off.  This is a lesson Pierini Fitness has learned more than once.

Now at an ideal bodyweight, he watches it like a hawk and is always on guard duty like the Queen’s Guard responsible for guarding Buckingham Palace, or The Pontifical Swiss Guard responsible for the safety of the Pope.  

Pierini Fitness will continue his hawk-like guard duty for the rest of his life to reduce his risk that the end of his life will not be the result of his own cardiovascular-disease health crisis.

Pax Domini sit semper vobiscum