Why is becoming a healthier person such a demanding thing to do? Being healthy came naturally to us when we were children. We could eat anything, we could get up off the ground and immediately run, skip, or jump. We never seemed to need rest and we had boundless energy. What happened to us that being healthy became a full-time job?
The topic for this month across all our platforms is how to become healthier. We have changed our format a bit to help get the health news you can use to as many people as possible. To facilitate that effort, we are sharing our monthly themed content on several different platforms. Please be sure to check out the short bullet point videos on Healthier by the Minute on our Facebook page. We have longer and more detailed monthly topic videos on our You Tube channel and coming very soon you will be able to find our Healthier by the Minute podcasts. Our goal is to get you great health content news that you can use in the format that is best suited to your lifestyle.
Let us dive into this month’s topic of finding a simpler and easier way to get healthy. In today’s society we are overwhelmed with health information from so many sources, and thus determining what is valuable information becomes difficult. It is a full-time job just absorbing all that content, let alone deciding what to do with the conflicting information that you may see or hear. There seems to be an overwhelming amount to think about to even initiate the process of improving our health. We need to know what needs to be done and when is the best time to do it? Do we start an exercise program first or start a diet first? Should we start them together? Should we join a gym? When we get to the gym, what equipment is best for our purpose?
There must be a simpler and easier way to be healthy. Just making the determination to be healthier seems like a huge decision in and of itself. When you decide to become healthier, you likely have decided that you want to avoid or prevent expensive medications or painful surgeries. The question becomes one of how do we accomplish this feat? I want you to just start by thinking of the basics. A wonderful place to start is by defining what we mean by being healthier.
Being healthier means, in its most basic definition, being more alive. It means having more vibrancy with your life. With that in mind, we need to be able to define being alive. An amazingly simple definition of being alive would be to be able to breathe, consume nutrients, move, and grow. We could say in this case that being healthier would be just an enhancement of those four things. We can assess that definition by imagining what would happen if we were not able to do just one of those four things. When one of those four elements stopped, compromised, or interrupted we experience discomfort, deterioration, disease, degeneration, and death. The five big D’s!
When we put this all together, the way to be healthier comes into a much clearer focus. We need to do things that enhance our ability to breathe, consume nutrients, move, and grow. I know that you are thinking that you already do these things, and if you are you are correct. But are you doing them correctly? If you are married, you will understand this analogy immediately. There is a correct way and a not-so-correct way to do things. On our path to becoming healthier, many of us fall into the trap of thinking we are doing all four of the things we need to do to be alive well. We are not!
Take a moment and think of the four elements of being healthier and picture them as four gears that are intermeshed. On the far side of those gears is great health. If one of those gears is not turning, the entire process comes to a stop and eventually breaks down. Let us look at how a real-life situation comes into play here.
Picture yourself having twisted an ankle. Because your movement is not working properly, the gears do not mesh quite so well. The body will respond to this by first sounding an alarm that you recognize as pain. Then the body sends in the first responders. Your first responders are repair materials and energy stores that are sent to the damaged area immediately. The first responders are moved by inflammation, which is nothing more than a transport system that is comprised of fluid. The inflammation brings repair and energy goods to the damaged site and is there to remove the debris that occurs from the damage and repair.
This is where the other elements of being healthy step in (breathing and nutrient consumption). We need to be able to have good oxygen intake and efficient removal of the CO2 that accumulates quickly with the repair process. We need to have water and good nutrition to have the ability to send the energy stores to the repair site. Finally, inflammation moves into and out of the tissues by muscle contraction. In other words, if you do not move or exercise, the gears, or four elements, get stuck and the five big D’s (discomfort, deterioration, disease, degeneration, and death) start up again.
Please be sure to check out our blogs for the month of June as we talk more about simple straightforward ways to get healthier. If you are a first-time visitor to this blog, be sure to sign up to get our blog each week. Also, if you have any questions or comments, be sure to send those to me via our “contact us” email form on our web page. I read all the comments and answer all the questions personally.
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