Yes, There Are Things We All Lie To Our Doctors About, But Here’s Why We Shouldn’t

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It’s easy to develop bad habits without really noticing it. If you take life day-by-day, then you might think of many of your behaviors on a day-by-day basis, too. Very few people zoom out and look at the big picture of their behaviors. If you try to live in the moment, then thinking of your life as the sum of many parts isn’t very fun. You just want to take today as it comes. Unfortunately, your body keeps score, even if you don’t. It doesn’t see 100 separate days of poor eating choices or bad sleep as isolated issues. Your body recognizes and responds to patterns, and suddenly the behaviors you didn’t see as a problem have caused a big concern. Only when we see our doctors are we forced to reflect on some of our habits. And only when we realize telling the truth would make us sound bad do we realize…oops…maybe we’ve been slipping up.

As many as four out of five Americans withhold information from their doctors that is critical to their overall wellbeing, says Community Healthcare System. But avoiding a lecture in the moment doesn’t help one avoid the real physical problems that can occur when certain behaviors aren’t adjusted. If you don’t want to tell your doctor the truth, that is your prerogative, but here are major things most people lie to their doctors about, and why that’s a problem.

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How much you exercise

If you’re like many Americans, your goals of going to the gym daily quickly dwindle down to once or twice a week. Then it becomes just power walks around the neighborhood. Maybe one workout class a month with friends. But you report your goal to the doctor, and not the reality. While exercising is time-consuming and not always fun, Mayo Clinic reports that adults should aim for at least 30 minutes of moderate exercise daily. That can also be broken down to 150 minutes of moderate aerobic exercise a week or 75 minutes of vigorous aerobic exercise per week, with strength training mixed in a couple times a week. Even if you hate the gym, there are other ways to love exercise, which MADAMENOIRE covers here.

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How much you drink

Pop culture and our favorite shows normalize drinking excessively. How many funny postcards and memes and aprons exist, glorifying wine-guzzling women? So much of our social lives revolve around alcohol. And while overdoing it a couple times a week doesn’t seem so bad, the Center for Disease Control and Prevention says prolonged excessive drinking can lead to chronic issues like liver disease, colon cancer, and memory issues, to name a few. The recommended alcohol intake for women reported by the CDC might shock you: it’s just one drink or less per day. So if you take down two glasses of wine with dinner each night, you’re already consuming twice the recommended amount of alcohol. And if that becomes four drinks a night Fridays and Saturdays, then your intake just skyrocketed past a healthy point.

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Your diet

When your doctor asks if you eat fruits and veggies, you might think of that sad bowl of a couple of apples that have been sitting on your counter for a month and say, “Yup!” Or maybe you think the lettuce on your sandwiches count. How about the pickles on your burgers or the jalapenos on your nachos? Those are veggies! Sure, but vegetables shouldn’t be toppings: they should make up the bulk of your food. In fact, USDA MyPlate says half of your plate should be fruits or veggies. Consuming enough vegetables can reduce the chances of heart disease, diabetes, colon cancer, and obesity.

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How much you sleep

Everybody wants to do more, accomplish more, see more people, and go more places. Everybody wishes there were more hours in the day. The truth is, we’d never be satisfied. We’d just fill those extra hours, too. For now, you may try to cheat the system by simply sleeping less. You never want to say no to any opportunity. So maybe you go to bed at 1am and get up at 6am. But your body needs to get adequate sleep so that all of its systems and organs can fully recover. The Sleep Foundation says most adults need between seven and nine hours a night of sleep. So you can tell your doctor you get that, but your body knows the truth. The National Center for Biotechnology Information reports that long-term sleep deprivation increases one’s chances of stroke, heart attack, and diabetes, to name a few.

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Sexual safety

The CDC reports that less than half of sexually active adults use condoms – way less than half. These are figures your doctor is likely aware of, so if you tell her that you use condoms with every new partner and do not quit condoms until you’ve reviewed recent and clean STD test results…she knows you’re probably lying. It may seem like no big deal to just quit condoms after sleeping with someone a couple of times, without both of you getting tested. But if this person is ready to be lax with you, they’re probably lax with everyone, meaning they likely rarely use condoms and you risk a fertility- or life-threatening STD by not using condoms with them.

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Checkup frequency

Maybe you go a few years between checkups. In order to avoid the lecture from the last doctor on how long it’s been since she saw you, you may just get a new doctor. You can lie to this one and say you had a checkup last year, but with somebody else. And you can do this over and over again, only getting checkups ever few years. Maybe every decade. But it is very important to get regular checkups so that you can catch issues before they become big, irreversible, and possibly life-threatening. Most of the time, if you wait to see a doctor until symptoms are severe, treatment will also have to be severe. Or, perhaps the issue has become untreatable. Here are a list of physical exams women should receive regularly.

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Mental health issues

One in five Americans experience mental health issues, according to the National Alliance on Mental Illness. There is no shame in admitting if you don’t feel one hundred percent well mentally or emotionally. Life is a battlefield. Perhaps the only thing that’s truly crazy is to not feel a little crazy sometimes. Or stress, depressed, anxious – you name it. In this article, MadameNoire covers some of the things holding the Black community back from seeking therapy and how to change that. Many mental health experts would say that people should treat their mental health like their physical health, doing regular check-ins with a professional, even when they feel okay.

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Things We All Lie To Our Doctors About