Cars are on sale again: zero down payment, zero interest, zero shame. Boss W says now is the time to buy, and he may be right, if shiny metal is your weakness and three years of amortization do not make your pulse race faster than a treadmill ever will.

It is a buyer’s market, not just for cars but for condos, watches, and paintings, though not for gold. Hard assets suddenly look soft when an economy slips from lethargy into something resembling a medically induced coma because of a corrupt government flailing for survival.

But here is the rub, to borrow Conrad D’s line: while you can shop for a new car, trade up a watch, or flip a condo, you do not get to do that with your body. There is no showroom, no trade-in value, and no zero-interest installment plan.

Yes, that body with the beer belly you are pretending not to notice is the only unit you will ever own, and neglect carries compounding interest.

I know this because 37 years ago, I graduated from college weighing 98 pounds. Reed thin, all bones and bravado, convinced that youth came with a lifetime warranty. I slept badly, ate worse — tapsilog and Minute Burgers — and thought exercise meant walking briskly when I was late for sportswriting coverage.

Like most people at 20, I mistook survival for health, helped along by starvation pay during six years of climbing the journalistic ladder. The kids have it easier now: with good pay and no editors bawling them out over the clickety clack of typewriters in newsroom hells thick with cigarette smoke and expletives.

But back to clogged arteries, insulin spikes, and the twin evils of subcutaneous and visceral fat. Bodily decline, when it comes, is rarely dramatic, unless you are unlucky enough to be thrown straight into a fight with the Big C.

Atrophy, malaise, and brain fog sneak up in excuses: too busy, too tired, too old, too late. One skipped workout becomes a year. One indulgent meal becomes a habit. The mirror forgives; the arteries do not.

So let me offer the most unsexy but essential advice I can give: before you lace up your shoes, buy protein powder, count macros, or download the latest fitness app, make a beeline to the doctor.

Not Google, not YouTube, not ChatGPT, and certainly not the loudest guy in the gym who looks like a Greek statue but does not know his LDL from his left delt.

A real doctor. In my case, a superb new cardiologist who did not care how much I could bench or how fast I could run, but cared deeply about whether my heart could handle it.

This is where many people go wrong. They treat fitness like penance for past sins: crash diets, extreme cardio, punishing routines copied from people half their age and twice their recovery capacity. Two weeks in, something hurts. A month later, something breaks. The couch wins again.

The road back to health is boring, incremental, but profoundly effective. You walk before you run, sometimes literally. You lift weights not to punish your body but to remind it what it was designed to do. 

Carbs are not the enemy; mindless carbs are. Protein is not magic; consistency is. Cardio is not a moral virtue; it is a tool. Macros matter, but not as much as adherence. A perfect plan you abandon is useless. A simple plan you follow is transformative.

At 57, I feel tighter, leaner, and, I imagine, healthier than I did decades ago, not because I discovered magnesium glycinate for deeper sleep and more vivid dreams, but because I finally accepted my limits and am trying to work intelligently within them.

There are no bonanzas here, no zero-down payments, and no refinancing. Miss enough payments on this one, and the repo man does not knock. He arrives as a stroke, a bypass, or a diagnosis you never saw coming.

Now, about that New Year’s resolution.