Dr. Peter J. Weiss

Today I’d like to talk to you about money — your money and your health.

So many peo­ple tell me, “Dr. Pete I don’t have enough money to join the gym.”  “I don’t have enough money to get the exer­cise equip­ment I need”  “It costs more to eat healthy than it does than to eat unhealthy food [which I think is prob­a­bly at least a lit­tle bit true] and I just don’t have the money, I can’t afford it that’s why I can’t get healthy.”

Now, I’ll be hon­est, I don’t you.  I don’t know every­one that’s watch­ing this mes­sage.  I can’t under­stand your finan­cial cir­cum­stances. But most of us have jobs.  There’s a pay­check com­ing in every cou­ple of weeks and there are expenses going out every cou­ple of weeks. And the ques­tion is, can we man­age our expenses well enough to carve some money out for our­selves? How much are you spend­ing on that pre­mium cable TV pack­age? Do you really need that much TV? How much are you spend­ing on movies and din­ing out and other enter­tain­ment? Could that money be bet­ter spent on your own health?

There’s prob­a­bly lots of places that, if you really sat down and looked at your spend­ing, you’d be able to cut out maybe $50 a month.  And that might be just what you need to be able to join the gym that’s high qual­ity in your area.  Or that just might be the extra amount of money that you want to spend on high qual­ity food.

If you get sick you’re going to spend a lot of money. Trust me — talk to peo­ple with dia­betes and high blood pres­sure and med­ical prob­lems who have to see the doc­tor 5 or 6 times a year. They spend a lot of money. They spend it in co-payments to the doc­tor, and they spend it on med­i­cines. How much bet­ter is it to spend that money on your­self, so that you don’t get sick?

Think of it as invest­ing in your­self, exactly like going to col­lege. You spend a lot of money going to col­lege — you get edu­cated, you have expe­ri­ences, you learn things. And you’re new on the inside. You don’t get any mate­r­ial pos­ses­sions for it, and on the out­side you’re not new but you’re changed inter­nally and it’s worth it. Peo­ple com­monly invest tens of thou­sands or hun­dreds of thou­sands of dol­lars on a col­lege degree — chang­ing them­selves for the bet­ter.

Do it in regard to your health too. Change your health and well­be­ing. It will be worth it. Spend what­ever it takes to get well and pro­tect the invest­ment that you have in your body for life. You’ll be happy that you did.