Dr Michael Mosely explains in his book about reducing sugar in your diet that eight weeks is a long enough period of time to change your lifestyle for ever. Personally, my will power is insufficient to achieve eight weeks, so I have never been able to test the theory. That is until 2020, when all of a sudden lockdown was announced and it seemed as though life changed forever. I find it very strange as I stand at the opening of a new year, looking back over this unusual period and recognising how much my life has changed, almost beyond recognition. It isn’t simply the way I work or even the way each day is lived, I find that my whole set of values feel very different now. There is a whole list of experiences that I would have taken for granted at the beginning of 2020, that cause me now to feel afraid and vulnerable.
One of my biggest concerns as I set out on 2021 is the uncertainty and I find myself asking questions like, how long is this likely to continue? Will we ever get back to living the way we did a year ago? Will we have to social distance for the rest of our lives? Will we be able to take any holidays this year? and all these questions bring a huge level of stress and I guess that many of you reading this will share my concerns and maybe have a whole list of your own questions to add to that list. Maybe my biggest challenge of all is around the issue of what life will look like at the end of all of all this, will life go back to how it was before, or will we emerge as different people.
When Dr Michael Mosely writes in his book, the incentive is aimed at reducing the high occurrence of diabetes around the world, this is perceived as something positive and I wonder if the world can be a better place at the end of all of this. I hope to not return to travelling thousands of miles every year in my work and I wonder if this is now a chance for us to decide how we want things to work in the future. I think that we have a choice, let’s make the most of the opportunities this experience gives us.