Sounds pretty familiar, doesn’t it?  I finally understand this phrase.  Like many, I have heard this hundreds of times throughout my life.  Ya, ya, it’s important to read and learn.  But think about how this impacts your life:

When you know better, you do better.  If we only knew, we would do better.  The only way to change our behaviours are to change our beliefs. 

If you want to be healthier, all you have to do is understand more about what it takes to be healthy.  If you know, and you don’t follow through what you KNOW will make you healthier, then it’s clear you have unconscious motives to be unhealthy.  When one truly wants to be healthy, one does whatever it takes, pays whatever price, and travels whatever distance to get there if they believe that it will help them get to a healthier state.  One wouldn’t stop researching and trying new things. 

If your doctor says “take these meds and live with it”, you wouldn’t just sit back and call yourself a victim or a sufferer.  Has this ever happened to you, when your doctor has said “just live with it?”

To someone who values their health, the thought of getting healthier consumes them.  I can tell who those people are after 30 seconds of meeting them.  It’s an attitude.  Health is an attitude in how you eat, move and think.

The same way you get to your vacations, finish school, or reach any of your goals you have (ie, saving for a down payment on a home or braces for your kids) is by understanding that you will have to endure both pleasure and pain to get to that goal.  If your goal is to get a bicycle, you hold that thought with all your heart and emotion, you have a purpose, you endure the pain of sacrificing other things, prioritizing your time and money, and voila, you get it.  If it’s truly a meaningful goal to you, you would embrace both support and challenge, pleasure and pain in the pursuit of the bicycle.  If you can’t endure the pain and challenge of the pursuit for it, you simply didn’t want it bad enough. 

Here is my personal profile of a healthy person based on my experience in working with people on their road to recovery.  Someone’s recovery time will be dictated by how close this person comes to these qualities:

·      Exercises regularly

·      Eats healthy

·      Takes supplements regularly

·      Takes responsibility for their own emotions rather than labeling themselves with “sufferer of, or victim to”

·      Takes responsibility for their own health

·      Thinks that health is attainable if they work enough at it

·      Aren’t quick to take medications

·      Doesn’t smoke

·      Don’t need to consume alcohol on a daily basis

·      Love themselves enough to value themselves as well as others

·      Honour their own values and priorities

·      Has a clear purpose in their lives they need to get well and stay well for

·      Has a desire to learn about how their body works and how to be healthy

·      Open to alternatives other than drugs or surgery (medicine’s tools)

·      Regards the doctor as a partner in their health rather than one who has power over it.

These are simply “Dr. Nima’s characteristics of a healthy person’s lifestyle traits”. 

I know, I’m not saying anything new or anything that you haven’t heard before.  It’s another incovenient truth:  Those traits on the list are simply ways in how you eat, move, and think, and those traits are requirements to be healthy. Stop doing them in that certain way, and you are on the road to illness.  It means that being healthy is truly a conscious choice that you can decide right now.

What is most important in your life?  (Children, work, golf, music, business success?)

How will being healthy support your highest priority?  What would happen to your most important thing if you lost your health?  Take the time to think about it.  If you can come up with the “why’s”, then the “how’s” take care of themselves.

I’ve seen entrepreneurs have speedy recoveries because each day they miss work, they lose big money, while worker’s compensation cases, and people who get paid for their time off, seem to have a slower recovery time, and far more difficulty with getting better.  The reason?  There is no urgency, or unconscious motivation to get better faster. 

Decide that you will be healthy.  Give yourself 50-100 reasons why it benefits different areas of your life.  Then do your research and ask around.  Google it.  Try it from a multi-disciplinary approach.  Find out more about WHY you aren’t well.  The answer is always within you, and you’re important enough to find out.  Who is more worth it than you?

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