I have no problem admitting to doubt. I’ve come to see having it is a byproduct of how I want to be.

Objective. Tolerant. Open-minded.

So I have no problem writing that there are times when I wonder if I take this health-and-fitness thing a bit too far. After all, I haven’t had a real restaurant meal since the summer of 1985. I exercise more in a week than most gym members do in a month.

Do you know what undoes that doubt? Memories of my mom.

Memories that explain why her early death was not so much her fate as her fault.

In her heyday, mom was a hard worker - the sort who felt two days behind if not three days ahead - so she’d usually spend two or three hours cooking, cleaning and doing laundry before going to work in the morning.

If I pointed out that she was indeed ahead and could exercise instead, I got the stink eye.

On those rare Saturdays and Sundays when she would lift weights or ride the exercise bike, her effort was closer to quarter-hearted than half-hearted and 15 minutes was tops.

Mom would often go a full day without eating solid food because of chronic stomach discomfort, but she’d still consume a surprising number of calories. Liquid calories.

Not from a kale smoothie or a protein shake, though.

Each of her six or more daily cups of coffee was nearly half creamer - and the creamer mostly trans fat and high-fructose corn syrup. In the afternoons, she’d drink Coke. Three 12-ounce cans minimum; five or six max.

When she did eat, she tended to eat good stuff in a bad way.

Low-fat cottage cheese, but with canned peaches in heavy syrup. Oatmeal, but instant - the Quaker Oats Maple & Brown Sugar variety containing 14 grams of added sugars.

Her favorite breakfast created an even greater glut of blood sugar: toasted white bread drowning in Mrs. Schlorer’s Turkey Table Syrup.

I saved her worst habit for last. She ate raw ground beef.

Yes, you read that right. While she’d be at the stove making the family burgers, she’d salt tiny rolls of raw ground beef and pop them in her mouth.

Eating ahead of time like that meant she’d have no appetite, only a cigarette for supper. Mom smoked like a diesel truck with a dirty air cleaner until her doctor told her she’d be dead before she retired unless she stopped.

She did, but the die was cast. The damage done.

Walking from the car to a concert one night, she lost all feeling in her right leg and fell face first. In a lengthy surgery procedure that had a 15 percent mortality rate, the doctors cleared the total blockage in her femoral artery and added a stent.

From that point on, walking a few hundred feet was arduous; cooking and cleaning, the same. As a result, mom slept away much of her retirement, especially the half year or so before her death.

By then she was sometimes sleeping 20 hours a day, which was why she was already in the hospital on the Monday afternoon when the infected stent caused a massive hemorrhage. Already being in the hospital, the doctor later told me, was the only reason mom survived.

By Wednesday night, the doctors scheduled surgery to amputate her right leg. By Thursday morning, that plan was scrapped.

Mom’s lungs had shut down overnight. She now needed a ventilator to breath and was in a vegetative state.

The news made my father and brother a mess, so I met with the doctors to decide what to do next. Doubt left me that day.

Mom left us the next.

I hope mom’s story affected you. If so, so might the following research.

Titled “Sugar-Sweetened Beverage Intake and Cardiovascular Disease Risk in the California Teachers Study” and found in the May issue of the Journal of the American Heart Association, this study of more than 100,000 females shows a link between high blood triglyceride levels and a relatively meager daily amount - 12 ounces - of sugar-sweetened beverages, such as soda, fruit-flavored drinks, sports drinks, and pre-sweetened coffees and teas.

Moreover, the researchers “observed a significant positive association between daily consumption of SSBs (sugar-sweetened beverages) and risk of CVD (cardiovascular disease) among adult women over a period of 20 years” while finding a higher need for devices like stents in those needing cardiovascular surgery who drank more than 12 ounces of SSBs daily.

Now that you know the end to mom’s story and this research, is it a surprise that more than 35 years before her demise, she had dangerously high triglyceride levels?

In short, though the time between cause and effect can be great, how you attend to your health and fitness really is a matter of life and death matter.

Even a doubting Thomas like me has no doubt about that.