This post is not really about how to lose weight. It's about the hidden costs of eating too much. It's the extra costs for food that come down the road. I was reading a story about losing weight through eating food. In the middle of that a crazy thought popped into my head: how much does being overweight cost us in health care?
If you are like me you were pretty thin when you were growing up. You were active enough to keep your weight down while growing up. It's only when I became an adult and got office jobs where I had to sit all day that I started putting on weight. And as I gained weight over the years I started going to the doctor more often.
Some of my health problems, he says, are due to my being overweight. So here I am spending money to stay healthy because I could not adjust my eating habits after I started taking office jobs. Hence, all that food I ate through those years is costing me more money. Those "cheap" fast food lunches were not so cheap after all.
The long-term costs of making poor decisions are most likely hurting all of us in some ways. We struggle with basic costs in life like making mortgage and car loan payments. But what if we buy homes and cars that need a lot of repairs? Are those cheap deals so cheap after all?
My dad always said, don't buy anything you can't fix. I used to laugh at him because if his dad was around he would reply with, don't buy anything that needs fixing.
But now I understand what they were both telling me. When you buy something you have to pay for the cost of acquiring it and the cost of maintaining it. So buying things that need little to no maintenance may save you a lot of money, unless they are so cheap you can just get rid of them when they stop working for you.
Of course, throwing cheap things away is not good for the environment and so we can't avoid those long-term costs just by throwing away cheap junk.
That is a lot to take in from one random thought but it has me thinking about the costs of everything in a whole new way.
