It must be plain to all thinking people that there are many hard choices and actions required of anyone who is serious about realizing the highest levels of health. These are never the easiest choices, there are always more appealing options, and they are never the things that we actually prefer to do. But here’s one thing that makes them a smart choice: there is no alternative.
Can't Buy Me Love.... Or Health
The actions we’re talking about are things like waiting to eat the right foods, even when the wrong ones are within our reach. Or, showing up for those hard, uncomfortable, and appearance-compromising workouts, when there are many other things vying for your time – every one of them more appealing than that. Or, even when you are simply choosing not to do tempting but health-compromising things like drinking excessively or hitting the tanning bed.
As you are faced with those choices, and many more like them every day, it may help to know that no matter how rich anyone is, they are faced with the very same choices. And, their money will not help them. Even “Bill Gates money” can’t buy you a substitute for exercise or eating well. They must be done by you, every time, and there is no alternative. That ought to make you think twice before you fall for the pitch for one of those fix-it pills. Buying anything in pill form is just another act of someone trying to “buy their way” out of having to make the hard and healthy choice.
In fact, it’s one of the tests for AH; one of the ways you know you’re on the right track: the things that produce Accidental Health are among the acts of health that can’t be purchased or hired out at any price. Conversely, if you are trying to “by your way to health”, you’re participating in your own degeneration.
So, Accidental Health is – among other things – the great equalizer between rich and not so. We are all the same in our ability to create excellent health, and in the penalties for failing to do so. No exceptions.
The focus of this blog is a big and important subject, but that doesn’t mean that it has to be shrouded in mystery and sciency language. As I’ve often said, we would have never survived as a species if humans had to understand or even care about science to be healthy. But you’d never know that to listen to the current crop of health advisors – even the ones speaking the truth.
Merry Christmas
In my last post I talked about our new rescue dog Otis, and the lessons he was teaching me about a non-scientific approach to health – the approach a dog takes when left to his own devices in a natural environment. I was looking forward to years of examples from the animal world about staying healthy simply by staying touch with our natural instincts. Now, the really human part of the story:
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I have recently come to share my home and life with a dog. Specifically, Otis – a 4-year-old Rottweiller/Hound mix that is as lovable as the day is long.
I love dogs, but I have resisted being responsible for one because I know what a big job that is – if you do it right. And perhaps I resisted because I knew that a dog would have things to teach me – things that might be hard for me to hear.
Santa's lesser-known emergency stand-by reindeer Otis
After 2 weeks, I can say without any doubt that the lessons have begun. I will try to lay them out for your benefit also, in a simple way of which Otis would approve.
Here is lesson #1:
Spending time with Otis reminds me how inactive I am. He constantly sits next to my chair as if to say as loud and clear as any human voice, “when are we gonna go outside and play.” Is this a sign to me, or is it my guilty conscious. Either way, message received.
From Otis and me: Happy Holidays.
Just about every current health club will invite you to come and “try out” their facility. Implicit in the concept of “trying out” a health club is that, if you don’t like it, there is always another alternative. That only works because the fitness industry has convinced you that there are many ways to achieve this thing called “fitness”. There isn’t. There is only one. Unless you don’t know what fitness is. When you don’t know what fitness is, you can be sold just about anything that calls itself fitness. Even when it does more harm than good.
So, I have people who come to my gym and say things like, “I’d just like to try it out and see if I like it.” I want everyone to know how ridiculous that request sounds to me. When you know what fitness is, you know there is only one path to it. Therefore, trying out functional conditioning is like saying, “I’d like to try out getting off of the couch. You know, just to see if I like it.” Or, “I’d like to try not killing myself. Just to see if I like it.”
What's Wrong With This Picture
So, before you ask, I’ll let you know right up front that you will not like coming to my gym. If you did, I wouldn’t be doing my job. But my job is to make sure you create the very highest level of physical conditioning possible. The prize is exceptional quality-of-life and maximum longevity. And no facility or program that you like will do that for you.
As my passion is understanding health issues as completely as possible, I often find myself in discussion with people who are having some physical complaint or another. It is nearly universal that people with chronic complaints have come to some conclusion about the source of their problem, and what can or cannot be done about it.
I always ask if they’ve received an official medical diagnosis and prognosis, but I’m nearly always disappointed by the passive approach taken by most doctors to issues that are so clearly treatable and reversible. The predominant medical advice seems to be based loosely on the old joke that goes something like this: “Doctor, can you help me? It hurts when I do this.” To which the doctor replies, “Sure I can; don’t do that.”
Not The Point
That brings me to the subject of this post: specifically, it is about the conclusion drawn by some that many of our ailments are unavoidable and their treatment futile due to the fact that the ailment-in-question “runs in the family.”
Because reversing an ailment often means correcting some lifestyle habit (namely the one that promoted the ailment in the first place), and given our natural aversion to changing behavioral habits of any kind, we are far too eager to play the victim by accepting the notion that “runs in the family” means there’s nothing we could have done or that we can do now. That is actually true in so few cases that it isn’t even worth mentioning, yet I continue to hear this refrain of resignation far too often to be a statement of fact. I have even recently heard this as an explanation for both obesity and arthritis; both of which are immediately treatable with an environmental modification. Sad.
It is true that hereditary and congenital weaknesses and sensitivities makes some of us more susceptible to certain conditions than others, but the fact is that “weaknesses” and “sensitivities” aren’t an automatic sentence of sickness; they aren’t even the primary cause in most cases. We can inevitably engage in both the prevention and the treatment in spite of our predisposition. Are you willing to believe that even if the “family condition” is heart disease, breast cancer, and Alzheimers? All true.
This all gets back to the mindset with which we approach our health. If you will practice a healthy skepticism for any concept that accepts decline and renders you a victim you will have come far from the mindset that results in the worst of our physical decline. A mind that refuses to accept functional limitation and victimization is a mind that better understands how to be accidentally healthy.
