Can you imagine a situation where developing epilepsy because you got beaten to a pulp in a boxing match would be a good thing? How about if it leads to your discharge from the Army days before you’re scheduled to ship out for Vietnam with your platoon.

All but one of whom die there.

Can you imagine a situation where working as a janitor for more than a decade after earning both a bachelor’s and a master’s degree (the latter from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa, probably the nation’s most prestigious writing programs) would make sense? How about if it provides you the time to read about 10,000 books and think about the ways in which you want to write yours.

One of which becomes The Pugilist at Rest (Little, Brown, 1993) and leads to critical acclaim and fame as you approach the age of 50.

These are but two of the pieces you need to assemble the jigsaw puzzle named Thom Jones, a puzzle that he himself, in a manner of speaking, never completed. And some of those missing pieces? More exercising and better eating during his self-imposed stint as a menial laborer.

That’s when he developed the disease that would require him to take medication beyond what he was already taking for depression. The disease that would ultimately do him in at the age of 71 in 2016.

Type two diabetes.

There are two reasons to recall Jones’ all-too-early demise, the lesser one being The Pugilist at Rest is well worth reading.

A Los Angeles Times review concurs and cites the book’s strength as Jones’ “gutbucket descriptions where irony tangles with Hemingwayan macho.” So if you like For Whom the Bell Tolls or bleakly beautiful stories about boxing, father-son relationships, or the Vietnam War, see if you can corral a copy at a used book store.

Second and more importantly, any early demise from complications brought on by type 2 diabetes can be avoided. After years and years of the medicos believing the disease couldn’t be cured, research called that view into question.

Then a game-changing study published in the January 2017 edition of BMJ found “constant evidence” that type two diabetes can go into “total remission” with the right amount of weight loss.

In July of 2021, the same journal also published a review that corroborated this claim. Considering the studies performed over the last 12 years, lead author Roy Taylor writes, makes it clear “the processes that cause type 2 diabetes can be returned to normal functioning” for about 50 percent of type 2 diabetics provided they lose the needed amount of weight (about 32 pounds for those who are really heavy) within a decade of diagnosis.

Currently, diabetics live six fewer years than the national average.

But according to a study published in the July 2022 issue of BMJ Sports Medicine, those who reverse type two diabetes through weight loss may still have their lives cut short if the weight loss comes only through exercise or diet - and not the combination of both.

Researchers at the University of Sydney in Australia analyzed data accrued on nearly 350,000 people in the United Kingdom for an average of 11 years and found what exercise diehards see as the gospel truth: that eating better won’t cause you to live longer if you’re not also exercising. But what was also discovered in this study - and possibly surprised a fitness fanatics - is that exercise alone doesn’t lead to a significantly longer lifespan unless it’s teamed with a really good diet.

Based on the amount of exercise they performed and the quality of the foods they ate, the people in the aforementioned study were divided into groups. Compared to those who exercised the least and ate the worst, those who exercised the most and ate the best were found to have a 17 percent lower risk of death from all causes.

Moreover, their risk of dying from a cancer caused from excess fat was 27 percent lower.

But those who ate a diet rated “best,“ yet didn’t do what’s considered a moderate amount of exercise - about two and a half hours of aerobic exercise and an hour of weightlifting per week - saw no improvement in the mortality rate for all causes, including heart disease.

Now back to Thom Jones and his other medical problem: depression.

Ongoing research suggests exercising and eating right could have helped him here, too.

In what’s become known as the SMILES trial, for example, Deakin University researchers found the depressives in a dietary support group were four times as likely to go into remission than those receiving social support instead. A review published on April 13 by JAMA Psychiatry of 15 prior studies totaling more than 190,000 people found that those who did the recommended amount of moderate exercise had a 25 percent lower risk of depression than those who did none at all.