What is the secret to a healthy, long life? What really matters?
I might have an answer for you.
The answer comes from 82 years of my grandfathers lifestyle.
My grandfather Julius broke first 3 major rules of healthy long life. And he broke them big time.
He was a heavy smoker.
Honestly, I have never met anybody in my life who smoked more. He was sm0king nonstop like a locomotive that never stops.
To tell you the true, I have never seen him without a cigarette. He smoked outside in the garden, he smoked inside when he came to visit us. My parents didn’t mind, since they were heavy smokers too.
I think he even lit a cigarette in public transportation few times, because he couldn’t wait to have a smoke.
I tried to count the amount of cigarettes he smoked and I came to this:
He smoked a cigarette for about 10 minutes starting right away when he woke up. That’s about 6 cigarettes per hour. If I count 8 hours for sleep for him, that makes him 16 waking hours.
Lets say, 3 hours throughout the day he couldn’t smoke for some reason, which is pretty conservative estimate. That makes 13 hours of smoking 6 cigarettes per hour – 13 X 6 = 78 cigarettes per day. That’s almost 4 packs per day.
He was a heavy drinker.
This was kind of a cultural thing of my grandfathers generation.
You were actually considered a little off if you didn’t drink regularly at some traditional old stinky beer pub after work.
Of course, they didn’t serve only beer, they had other goodies like the cheapest and the strongest kinds of vodkas, rums and gins. The stronger the better. Most of the time, beer was just a back up for the hard stuff.
Wine was very uncommon for a guys like my grandfather. It was considered weak. It would take forever to get some buzz from it, since guy like Julius had huge resistance to alcohol, built over time of drinking.
And my grandfather loved hanging out at old beer pub at railroad tracks and drinking heavily everyday.
And of course, he also drunk when he was home and my grandma wasn’t around, or secretly pulling his bottle from under the bed.
Interestingly, in spite of all that heavy drinking, I always saw my grandfather straight on his feet and never tipsy. That was probably that resistance or trained body for alcohol consumption if you wish, that I mentioned before.
He worked outside on the sun all day and he never used sunscreen.
My grandfather Julius spend all day outside on the strong sun, working on the nearby communist farm.
He never used sunscreen, because, quite frankly, they were not available.
His skin got burned every year several times, since he also never wore a t-shirt.
So what do you thing?
Plain terrible. You would think and me too, that person living lifestyle like this would dye at 43, if he is lucky.
Yet my grandfather Julius lived all the way to 82, dying after he tripped somewhere on the street and fell on his head.
If he didn’t have this injury, I am pretty sure, he would be still sitting with me somewhere in his garden, enjoying his cigarette and drink, dark from the sun burned unprotected skin in his nineties, telling me the war stories we used to love to listen.
Don’t get me wrong.
I don’t want you to start smoking, drinking and not using the sunscreen to live long healthy life.
All this things are very, very bad for you.
What I am trying to say is, that there may be some more important stuff to do in our lives, that make our bodies healthier and longer lasting.
And I strongly believe, that there are more important things for our health to do than not smoking, drinking and not using sunscreen.
There are 3 grandfathers Julius lifestyle secrets I observed, that in spite of heavy abusing of smoking, drinking and sunburning helped my grandfather live long and healthy life.
I am going to write about them in my next 3 posts.
You probably already know about them.
Let me just tell you and remind you, that they are critical and very, very important for healthy body and long life.
My grandfather probably didn’t consciously think and know about them, but luckily for him, they came as consequences of his lifestyle, that was so typical for his generation and the place he lived.
Here they are: