When I spent all day in an emergency room last December — trying to figure out why I was hurting so badly — I had a lot of time to think about my health.
Even though the problem at the time — the damaged gallbladder which had to be removed — had nothing to do with my weight, the situation was still scary enough that it had me thinking about my mortality.
“If I haven’t done anything about my weight by a year from now,” I thought, “it’s eventually going to kill me.”
There was nothing magical about the one-year time frame, but something about it makes sense even now. I know I weigh too much. The excess weight causes problems. But the bigger issue is what all that sugar consumption is doing to my health — physical and mental — on the inside.