The Most Crucial Step Towards Optimal Health
The fact that a sizable portion of the population would wait to develop a life-threatening chronic illness that they’d then comfortably and conveniently attribute to their genes and let spiral out of control, while enjoying the attention and sympathy from their friends and loved ones and willingly handing their hard-earned money to a fast-growing pharmaceutical empire in the country with the “most advanced medicine in the world,” rather than adopting an attitude of strict nutritional discipline as a pivotal factor in disease prevention and disease reversal, will never cease to astound me. No matter how well I’ve come to understand the chronic-disease mindset with its complacency and magnified sense of helplessness that settle deeply into the mental framework of the chronically sick individual, first through the years of my own relatives’ incessant pharmacological disease management with the inevitable hospital stays and procedures, and now through my thirteen years of experience as a healthcare professional, I still catch myself in disbelief, wondering how such an attitude towards oneself is at all possible, let alone sustainable!
Lack of thorough knowledge about a disease’s pathophysiology can be a valid point, with some doctors being too vague about the disease, others — too technical for their patients to grasp even the basic concepts, much less the important details, and yet others displaying obvious signs of an unhealthy lifestyle themselves, such as being overweight or obese, smoking, consuming unhealthy foods and drinks, and not exercising — all clear signals to the patients that their care provider has no control over his or her own health management, raising a well-familiar plethora of credibility issues we, the healthcare professionals, get confronted with day in and day out.
The statement that your health is one hundred percent your responsibility can be the most encouraging or most overwhelming piece of information you’ve heard or read, depending to some extent on your upbringing, but most crucially on your chosen mindset. While our upbringing does create a certain mindset, our adult choices and decisions, on the other hand, can influence that mindset and greatly contribute to drastic health changes in either direction.
Many people prefer to lean onto excuses when it comes to their health choices by often bringing into the picture of their decision-making the opinions of their closest friends, colleagues, or relatives. If your friends, co-workers, or relatives are not the epitome of health themselves, perhaps it's time to suspend your inclinations to listen to their health advice, comforting as it might be?
If you have a tendency to routinely succumb to your friends’ or family members’ suggestions to make “an occasional exception” with your diet, exercise routine, or both “here and there,” you would do yourself a favor by finally acknowledging that they are not being good friends or caring relatives but, rather, poor influences whom you’ve been using as deceitfully valid justifications for your own poor health behaviors. It really boils down to integrity, specifically the type of integrity you demand from yourself towards yourself.
How seriously do you take yourself in the context of your own health and well-being? Ask yourself this question every time a good ol’ friend suggests that you “relax and treat yourself” with food you know you shouldn’t be eating, when all they are really suggesting is that you compromise your commitment to your health, possibly to help them feel not-so-badly about themselves.
Without a doubt, the educational and healthcare systems have failed miserably to teach us as students and patients about healthy nutrition (not the one that has been perpetuated on us for the last nearly eight decades by the animal and genetic engineering industries), and rarely have the players operating these systems been properly held accountable for the personal and professional examples they set in front of the eyes of the general public while guiding and advising it from a position of authority. As a result, the criteria and so-called guidelines for optimal health are often vague enough to perplex even otherwise highly educated people who have the best intentions with regards to their health and their children’s health, but who end up stuck in outdated viewpoints and rightly frustrated when faced with a chronic disease situation they thought they were well on their way to avoiding altogether.
Despite the undeniable educational and healthcare systems’ inadequacies, however, plentiful information and education resources that can fill important knowledge gaps exist everywhere we turn. If only we would stop letting the sense of overwhelm from information overload dictate our attitudes towards the most precious asset we have — our health — and develop intense curiosity and motivation to understand the very best we can the way our bodies work instead! Health problems won’t go away by our capitulating in the face of too many resources that contradict each other and make us feel helpless or vulnerable every day of the week. Yet, a strong sense of personal responsibility would never allow you to become complacent and surrender to the feeling of helplessness or overwhelm. But you must first and foremost develop this type of responsible attitude that would spike your determination to keep researching and asking questions, and persevere for decades to come with nutritional habits unlinked to the chronic sicknesses that can make you and your family physically unwell, poor, and depressed while filling up the pockets and bank accounts of the system bureaucrats (from the government and private sector alike) with your hard-earned money and emboldening them to keep concocting ever more outrageous and confusing “health guidelines”!