There is no more prescient business topic than personal health, as CargoMax-leased owner-operator Dean Carnahan would have it. Without your life, your business can’t even be an afterthought. Trouble is, as Carnahan well knows, taking control of diet isn’t always a simple thing to do out on the road. Truck stop options are too often limited to high-calorie, high-sugar junk or fast food these days. He’s hopeful getting more drivers taking a proactive role in healthy eating can spur a movement to change the status quo in that regard.
“As you see more truck-stop chains go to the smaller parking lots, quick food, get-in-get-out-type attitude,” Carnahan says, “everybody starts getting plumper because of all the stupid stuff we’re eating.” Bad diet leads to more weight leads to sleep apnea and cardiovascular disease and all sorts of other health issues, Carnahan notes.
As he tells the story of his own health change beginning a couple years ago in the podcast above and below, he started shopping at Trader Joe’s following the advice of his wife, who’s something of a natural-diet guru to hear him describe her, replaced soda with Gerolsteiner sparkling mineral water and fast food with trail mixes, protein powders and the like and lost 40 pounds, got his blood pressure in line and is feeling great. “I’m not trying to lose weight,” he adds. “I’m just trying to live longer. The best way to live longer is to eat stuff that feeds your body.”
As you’ll hear in the part of our conversation that follows – we talked over coffee near my home base in Nashville (apologies for the background noise) – Carnahan, who lives in Winchester, Tenn., believes more drivers need to treat bad health outcomes as something other than nonpreventable accidents.
On his way to Illinois to meet his codriver when we sat down to chat, he’d just been by the Trader Joe’s grocery store for a car’s backseat-full of provisions for the long road ahead. Dean urges drivers young and middle age to shift their eating habits now, before it’s too late. A good rule of thumb: “Don’t eat anything with a patent on it,” he says, something his wife has said frequently.
And with doctors, too, strive to work collaboratively on personal health. Bring a healthy amount of skepticism to those who are too quick to prescribe medication without considering lifestyle effects on health. When Carnahan speculated with one that he was developing a blood-sugar issue in recent years, the first reflex was to slap him with a prescription, for instance, though there are dietary ways to deal with that — as with blood pressure — as well.
