Kerre Woodham: Living a healthy life is a day-by-day decision

Now, if you were told that you would be dead in 10 years but you had the potential to save yourself if you chose to do so, would you?

Rationally, intellectually, of course you would. Especially if it was as simple as taking a pill. You'll be dead in 10 years, take this pill, you'll save your life. You'd do it to see the kids grow up and spend time with the people you love, you'd take the opportunity of a second chance, a second life,  and make the very most of it.

But there is no magic pill. If we want to live long, healthy lives, it's a day by day decision. There is no magic pill, so many of us are choosing willfully to eat, drink, and drug ourselves to early graves. And along the way, we're costing the country a fortune.  

It's all very well for people with time and knowledge of different foods and different food ingredients and enough money to fill a grocery trolley to bang on about food preparation and making soups out of leftover vegetables.

For people doing it tough, there are no leftovers. It's a completely different reality. I have more time than most. And is our family fridge filled with neat, colourful glass jars packed to the brim with salady goodness for the week ahead? It is not. But just because something's hard doesn't mean it can't or shouldn't be done.

I follow Dave Letele on Instagram and the stories of transformation that come out of his gym’s are amazing. These are people that are prisoners of their own flesh, who are unable to participate in the lives of their families. Unable to move. And yet step by step, starting off quite often in bed or on the couch, they can turn their lives around. Whatever Dave and people like Dave are doing is working.

Maybe the 60 experts should have gone down to Dave's gym and asked him what his people do, what he does, what does he say? What, what are the motivators for change? How do you get people to take that first. It's not even a step. That first raising of the arms in the air from their beds that gets them from there actually into a gym and saving their own lives.

The answer surely must come from the people on the ground, not from those who theorize and posit and postulate who have no idea what it's like to be in the 5XL t-shirts of those who are battling every single day.

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