People like Aaron Davis make me feel bad about myself
Maybe it's because they impress me so much. They admit their mistakes, their flaws, their weaknesses — and they strive to make themselves better and healthier people. Maybe it's because they make me realize my own mistakes — the things I'm not doing. Either way, it's just so damn daunting.
As most of us can attest, it's easy to talk about change. But it's a tall order to actually do it. Davis, last year's Broker of the Year, falls into the latter group.
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After seeing himself on the cover of Benefits Selling last spring, Davis, the president of NextLogical Benefit Strategies in Westminster, Md., said he "felt sick" over how he looked. He was nearly 250 pounds.
Over the next few months his decision to stop "playing with my health" became clearer. So as Davis approached his 50th birthday, he made a variety of lifestyle changes: He started going to the gym nearly every day, walked three miles on the days he didn't, and completely changed his diet, cutting the bad stuff out almost entirely.
He's since lost 35 pounds, with plans to drop another 20.
The thing that really impresses me about him is that he admits to being hypocritical. He was a guy, he says, who was talking about wellness programs and solutions to clients but, personally, not living well at all.
"It was the height of hypocrisy for me to be out there selling wellness solutions when I was overweight myself," Davis told me recently. "We all need to be ambassadors of healthy living — leading the way in making these critical lifestyle changes. I want to be an example to our clients and their employees that it's never too late to change."
Honestly, I often feel hypocritical myself. I struggle to exercise, to eat healthy, to adhere to all my prescribed medications, and I'm a ball of stress and anxiety — and I constantly write and talk to all of you about consumer driven health care.
I don't want to be that person.
Of all the things we can screw up or postpone or not pay attention to, our health shouldn't be it. It's the most important thing we've got. Clearly we can't control everything about it — but everything we can control, we must.
Davis teaches us that we can all do better than we are. I know I can.
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