Sometime in the past, you probably read that the Pilgrims and Indians who gathered in 1621 for what is now considered the first celebration of Thanksgiving gobbled no turkey during that three-day feast. But unless you’re really up on Turkey Day trivia, it should surprise you to know that, along with considerable amounts of venison, they probably ate some lobster, seal, and swan.

Here’s something else that should surprise you, though it’s not about New World pilgrims 400 years ago. It’s about United States patients in the last 25 plus who have been prescribed medications for chronic conditions like diabetes and hypertension, and it was first brought to light in a 1998 Business Health article.

Up to half of these patients don’t take their meds or take them so irregularly that they’re rendered ineffective.

“This nonadherence to prescribed treatment,” Dr. Fred Kleinsinger writes in a 2018 article published by the Permanente Journal “is thought to cause at least 100,000 preventable deaths and $100 billion in preventable medical costs per year.”

Another surprise is that this hasn’t changed. Which is one of the reasons why the title of Lisa Marshall’s article for WebMD this October begins “Your Greatest Health Threat Is You.”

There are no surprises in the article’s intro, though, just the same old same old. To wit: “New Year’s Resolutions are routinely abandoned. At least 80 percent of diets fail.”

But then Marshall quotes Kleinsinger, a family practice doctor in California: “If nonadherence [to taking prescription medication] were listed as a cause of death, it would be around the sixth most common cause in the United States, killing about 125,000 people annually. Millions of people are dying, and billions of health care dollars are being wasted.”

And why? “Because people don’t take their damn medications.”

That should really make you wonder. Not only about what these people could be thinking, but also if Marshall’s title applies — albeit in less serious and more subtle ways — to you.

For even if you’re as committed to (though some might say as obsessed about) health and fitness as that guy who claims (with tongue firmly in cheek) to be The Fitness Master, there are always going to be things you want to do or even need to do that are less than best for your health. For what Thomas Sowell once so famously wrote about economics and politics in this case is also true.

“There are no solutions. There are only trade-offs.”

As we approach that Thursday when we’re most likely to count our blessings, I’ll propose that being able to make health trade-offs is one of them. If you want to interpret this as permission to eat whatever and however much you want five days from now, you can, but there are better ways to apply the saying.

Like to the frequency, intensity, and total time (called FIT from this point on) you spend exercising in a given week.

To best manipulate FIT, you need to consider what is your maximum recoverable volume. It’s a term Dr. Mike Israetel coined to express “that your body’s ability to recover from training is finite at any one given point and it changes over time,” the ramifications of which he discusses at length with Thomas DeLauer on a Thomas DeLauer Metabolic Optimization Podcast.

Israetel, a professor who’s taught exercise science courses at Lehman College, Temple University, and the University of Central Missouri, is better known as the host of the Renaissance Periodization podcast. He has been a competitive bodybuilder, a professional Brazilian Jiu Jitsu grappler, and coauthored six exercise-performance books.

He tells DeLauer “all good training” doesn’t push past your maximum recoverable volume. For if your amount of exercise exceeds your body’s ability to recover from it, “you’re engineering an environment where you don’t get gains, you get losses.”

While that’s not nearly as bad as people failing to take prescribed medication, it’s still a health threat.

For you, however, it’s probably not a major concern. Nor is its converse, failing to exercise hard enough to stimulate muscle growth, as likely a problem for you as the one Thomas DeLauer faces every week when plotting out his weekly workout schedule.

Take a look at any picture DeLauer posts, and you’d never guess a guy this jacked could possibly have any workout problems. But what these photos don’t reveal is that weight training is DeLauer’s second favorite form of exercise.

What he actually enjoys more is running, and long distances at that.

So here’s the trade-off Israel suggests to DeLauer. To have set times when he dramatically cuts back on one, as much as 70 percent to get better at the other.

Because science shows that for a few weeks you can maintain your base level of fitness by doing about 30 percent of the exercise you typically do.

So if a reduction in exercise is a trade-off you need to make during the holidays, it’s really no big deal. But keep it to a week or two — and keep reminding yourself that being able to do so is just another one of exercise’s innumerable blessings.