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Like any neurologist, I see patients with all kinds of weight-related issues: lumbar pain, type 2 diabetic neuropathy, stroke and cerebrovascular disease, and many more. So, in addition to being a neuro doc, I hand out a lot of general medicine advice: lose weight, eat better, exercise more, and take your statins and other pills.
The funny thing in all this is that I am myself about 60 pounds overweight. And, from what I see on hospital rounds, I’m not the only doctor who falls in the overweight category. My tall frame helps me hide it, but the scale and body mass index charts don’t lie.
While I preach a healthy lifestyle, I don’t live one. Granted, I don’t smoke, and I take my simvastatin and niacin, but otherwise I make far from the best eating choices.
I think there could be a whole support group for physicians with poor eating and exercise habits. An ironic part of this job is that while we lecture patients on exercise, our schedules don’t allow many of us the time to do it ourselves. My average workday is about 14 hours, and when you try to get about 5-6 hours of sleep at night, help your kids with homework, and do other stuff at home and with your spouse, you pretty much find your exercise time limited to the hospital staircase on rounds.
I don’t know how medicine became this way. Certainly, I didn’t pick it for the lifestyle, but it’s sad that a field centered around the health of others often limits that of its practitioners.
Like any neurologist, I see patients with all kinds of weight-related issues: lumbar pain, type 2 diabetic neuropathy, stroke and cerebrovascular disease, and many more. So, in addition to being a neuro doc, I hand out a lot of general medicine advice: lose weight, eat better, exercise more, and take your statins and other pills.
The funny thing in all this is that I am myself about 60 pounds overweight. And, from what I see on hospital rounds, I’m not the only doctor who falls in the overweight category. My tall frame helps me hide it, but the scale and body mass index charts don’t lie.
While I preach a healthy lifestyle, I don’t live one. Granted, I don’t smoke, and I take my simvastatin and niacin, but otherwise I make far from the best eating choices.
I think there could be a whole support group for physicians with poor eating and exercise habits. An ironic part of this job is that while we lecture patients on exercise, our schedules don’t allow many of us the time to do it ourselves. My average workday is about 14 hours, and when you try to get about 5-6 hours of sleep at night, help your kids with homework, and do other stuff at home and with your spouse, you pretty much find your exercise time limited to the hospital staircase on rounds.
I don’t know how medicine became this way. Certainly, I didn’t pick it for the lifestyle, but it’s sad that a field centered around the health of others often limits that of its practitioners.
Like any neurologist, I see patients with all kinds of weight-related issues: lumbar pain, type 2 diabetic neuropathy, stroke and cerebrovascular disease, and many more. So, in addition to being a neuro doc, I hand out a lot of general medicine advice: lose weight, eat better, exercise more, and take your statins and other pills.
The funny thing in all this is that I am myself about 60 pounds overweight. And, from what I see on hospital rounds, I’m not the only doctor who falls in the overweight category. My tall frame helps me hide it, but the scale and body mass index charts don’t lie.
While I preach a healthy lifestyle, I don’t live one. Granted, I don’t smoke, and I take my simvastatin and niacin, but otherwise I make far from the best eating choices.
I think there could be a whole support group for physicians with poor eating and exercise habits. An ironic part of this job is that while we lecture patients on exercise, our schedules don’t allow many of us the time to do it ourselves. My average workday is about 14 hours, and when you try to get about 5-6 hours of sleep at night, help your kids with homework, and do other stuff at home and with your spouse, you pretty much find your exercise time limited to the hospital staircase on rounds.
I don’t know how medicine became this way. Certainly, I didn’t pick it for the lifestyle, but it’s sad that a field centered around the health of others often limits that of its practitioners.