There’s nothing like a doctor’s waiting room to get you motivated to change your lifestyle.
First, there are the magazines. Most doctors’ waiting rooms have a good assortment of medical magazines, health and fitness magazines, and sports magazines. Rarely will you see a Bon Appetit or a Southern Cooking: The Deep Fried Edition in the magazine racks.
If you’re like me, you’d much rather not be confronted about your dietary and exercise choices in this way, but since you might easily have to spend half a day in the waiting room, you start flipping through these magazines with all their full-color pages of sculpted and svelte bodies, and it’s hard not to be motivated to change your ways.
You start making out a shopping list of all the fruits and vegetables you’re going to buy on your way home. You make a list of the different gyms and fitness centers you might call. In short, you’re ready to start working out and thinning down. You’re tired of your heart racing when you’re not. After my first magazine, I’m usually ready to sign up for a 5K run or go rappelling off a Rocky Mountain or two.
The medical magazines have a way of getting to me, too. Before I even get to page six, I’ll find myself looking around for the paperwork to sign up for a full body scan. I’ll also be wondering if I have the rare tropical disease they’ve featured that month, even though I’ve never been to the tropics, don’t have any of the symptoms, and the disease has been extinct for over two centuries.
Other patients in the waiting room can also make you rethink your health regime. One look around the assortment of body and personality types in an average doctor’s waiting room and chances are, you’ll see at least one specimen of humankind that reminds you of yourself in five years if you don’t change your ways. (And that’s just the conscious one.)
Additionally, you can usually count on a DVD of a surgical procedure that, for some reason, they’re committed to running continuously throughout your wait. You’re not even sure which body part is being operated on, you just know it’s not going to be yours.
The brochure listing the doctor’s fees for such a procedure also tends to jumpstart a new diet and exercise commitment rather nicely.
I know for myself, by the time I see my doctor, I am pumped up, determined, and focused. I’m promising myself that this is going to be the year I finally kick my deep-fried habit (Twinkies, for example, taste fine without the crunch).
This is my season for cholesterol-free living, I’ll pledge to to run a mile every morning, to triple my intake of veggies, and yes, to even stop at that single potato chip, instead of consuming the entire bag…or the entire store display.
I vow to take my multi-vitamin each and every day, and to do resistance training for at least 20 minutes every single night.
But then, something happens once I’ve seen the doctor. For some reason, I’ll mentally reward myself for having made my appointment, and since my blood is already drawn, I start getting the feeling it’s party time again.
All those magazine articles I just read will become nothing more than a fleeting thought as I drive right by the gym. In fact, the only thing on my mind at that point is, “Is it a right or left turn to Krispy Kreme?”
Perhaps in the future I should start bringing my own book to read in these waiting rooms.
