3 Steps to A Healthy, Blessed Life

Many of us recognize that we would like to be thinner, have more energy, and live happier, healthier lives.

Although we realize this, it often feels like the distance between where we are and where we want to be is a chasm wider than the Grand Canyon! Lord knows we’ve tried to eat healthier, started ambitious exercise programs, signed up for weight-loss plans, and bought volumes of new cookbooks. Time and again, we lose momentum and then quit within a matter of weeks, if not days. The arduous endeavor of getting from point A—where we are now—to where we would like to be at a very distant point Z—the trim, healthy, flexible, energetic, happy person we believe we should be—is just too great and too difficult to navigate.

If that even remotely describes you, I have good news for you: Change is not as hard as you think.

As Dr. Mark Hyman wrote in his bestselling book, The Blood Sugar Solution 10-Day Detox Diet,

When it comes to weight loss, studies show that social threads have a bigger impact than genetics. When people join together to lose weight and get healthy, not only is it more effective, it’s also more fun! Losing weight is a team sport.

And how does he know? Dr. Hyman was one of the advising-physicians for The Daniel Plan conducted at Pastor Rick Warren’s Saddleback Church in Orange County, California. During the first week, 15,000 participants signed up for the program, and in the first year, those people lost an estimated 250,000 pounds! But that wasn’t the most startling discovery. What was? According to Dr. Hyman, “The research indicated that those who did the plan together lost twice as much weight as those who did it alone.” It’s best to team up if you want to get healthy and stay healthy.

Wake-Up Call

Over the past 20 years, there has been a dramatic increase in obesity of North Americans. More than one-third of U.S. adults (35.7 percent or 78.6 million) and approximately 17 percent (or 12.5 million) of children and adolescents aged 2–19 years are obese.

#1) Identify the Enemy

No matter your reason for picking up this book, I have good news for you. Regardless of your health goals or challenges, the foundation for alleviating, healing, or in many cases preventing health challenges begins with facilitating your body’s natural inborn ability to adapt to and recover from stress.

We all have stress—it’s inescapable. In fact, stress is really what makes life challenging and fulfilling. It is often in overcoming stressful challenges that we find life’s deeper meaning. At the same time, however, stress must be properly managed. or it will become destructive. Giving our bodies what they need to cope with and recover from stress begins with changing our lifestyle choices. These are choices like the way we eat, how much we exercise, how much time we allow for recovery, and how we manage our reactions to life’s adversities. It has to do with adding the right foods and activities first, then slowly eliminating the foods and practices that are detrimental to your overall health.

Myth Vs. Fact

Myth: “I feel healthy, so I am healthy.”

Fact: Imagine, if you will, a battlefield. Both sides have been fighting for weeks with heavy casualties. On the one side, an army serving a totalitarian dictator who seeks world domination. On the other side, a group of freedom fighters—locals who don’t want to see their land taken over by a madman. The commanding officer of the freedom fighters is burdened with the battle. No matter what approach he takes with his men, he is met with resistance at every turn. It’s as if the enemy knows his every move. But how can they? Some days he doesn’t plan his move until the last minute before he engages the enemy. He trusts a few good men, career men who would give their lives for him at a moment’s notice. What he doesn’t know is that one of those men is a traitor. He spies on the freedom fighters and reports to the enemy on a regular basis. As long as the commander doesn’t recognize this fact, and identify him as the enemy, the freedom fighters will continue to lose men until they have to retreat or surrender. The end is already spelled out. The war is already lost. No matter how well they plan, how prepared they are, how hard they fight, or how ferociously they stick to their war plan, until that spy is identified and neutralized, they will continue to lose.

Every day people are diagnosed with dental disease (cavities), heart disease (high blood pressure/cholesterol), and all types of cancer (breast, colon, prostate) and don’t even feel a single pain, lump, sensitivity or symptom. Many suffer heart attacks, cancer, strokes, and other “sudden” illnesses when they feel perfectly healthy— some even immediately after seemingly good checkups with their doctors.

How you feel doesn’t matter as much as what is really happening inside your body. Not only that, but most of us don’t really feel as healthy as we think we do— we have just gotten used to masking fatigue with caffeine, aches with medications, and chalking up symptoms to our age rather than what is really causing them. Until we identify that stress is the enemy in our own camp, then it won’t matter how much we try to eat right, or exercise, or take vitamins. Ultimately we will lose the battle to get healthy and stay healthy because we aren’t fighting the right enemy. We are just shadow boxing.

You want to feel really healthy? Then realize and act on the fact that stress is your biggest enemy in the fight for health! You will be surprised how fit, strong, and healthy you can be even into your 80s and 90s if you just identify and neutralize the stressors on your body, and give it what it needs to begin once again to adapt to and recover from those stressors.

#2) Identify Your Vision

I use the word vision rather than goals because a vision is much more holistic than a list of individual objectives. As far as goals go, we tend to look for numerical changes such as lowering our blood pressure, LDL cholesterol counts, or losing X number of pounds. A vision, however, includes the motives behind why you set those goals, as well as how they work into your lifestyle. It includes the strategies and character with which you want to achieve those goals, as well as a practical understanding of the challenges you will face along the way and the realistic recognition of the amount of work necessary to see your vision become a reality.

There is a Jewish proverb that says: “Where there is no vision, the people perish.” However, when you look at the original Hebrew for this phrase, it doesn’t really say, “the people perish,” but rather “the people are unrestrained” or “cast off restraint.” Why are people undisciplined in the pursuit of their goals? It’s not because there’s anything wrong with them, and it’s not because there’s anything wrong with their goals. It’s because they don’t have a compelling vision that motivates them to stick to their plan. If we don’t have self-control, the problem isn’t that we are weak-willed—the problem is we lack vision.

People can go to the other extreme as well. They focus in so tightly on their goals that they forget why they are trying to achieve them in the first place. They make unnecessary trade-offs and compromises to achieve the numbers, but they lose on other fronts like relationships or quality of life. So, for instance, people will radically change their lifestyles or starve themselves to get to their ideal weight, but they forget that the real point was to live a healthier and happier lifestyle that they can maintain. Not only do they compromise their health getting to their goals, but after they reach them, they find they can’t maintain the lower weight without continuing to starve and work out at a feverish pace. They got what they wanted, but they lost the “Why?” behind it.

We don’t attain what we casually set out to accomplish—we’re just not designed that way. We obtain what we envision passionately. When we spend time adding to and developing a vision for the life we want, that vision becomes a powerful force, pulling us toward its fulfillment. What we visualize in our mind’s eye changes us. Our habits change. Our thinking changes. Our willpower aligns with our vision, and our expectations become more magnetic. This is why professional athletes use visualization techniques as well as disciplined practice to hone their skills. Our minds don’t differentiate between what we have done in our imaginations and what we practice in reality. When we see ourselves doing things the right way over and over and over again, it affects how we perform.

Myth Vs. Fact

Myth: Having fast-food French fries now and again never hurt anyone.

Truth: High-temperature frying, especially of potatoes, creates the chemical acrylamide. The fats used to fry fast food also stay in the body for many days causing a decrease in nerve transmission, increased hyperactivity, decreased immunity, and an increased risk for diabetes, cancer, and heart disease.

The point of having a vision is to focus on the results rather than on the pain of achieving those results. When we focus on the pain, we tend to give up; when we focus on the rewards, we keep working until we achieve them. It can be as simple as focusing on what you will feel like after you work out rather than how much you don’t want to get out of bed. Realizing how much better you will feel sitting down to a healthy, home-cooked meal with your family rather than driving out to get fast food and eating it in the car. The key is to pull future rewards into your present state of mind and focus on the benefits rather than on the obstacles.

The more we develop and contemplate our vision, the more it becomes part of who we are. It doesn’t take long for what we reflect on in our minds to become the reflection we see in the mirror! An unclear or ambivalent picture of how you want to look won’t be enough to propel you toward achieving your ultimate goals. You need a detailed vision that you nurture, develop, and meditate on every day.

#3) Identify Your Plan

Another crucial component of creating a healthier, happier life is proper planning. Most of us fall into eating at fast-food restaurants and buying convenience foods in the supermarket not because we are weak or don’t have time to do better. Most of the time we drop the ball because we fail to have a better plan. When you make decisions while you are tired or stressed, the default setting is to do what you’ve always done. However, if you have a written plan, the easiest thing to do becomes to follow your plan!

Planning today is easier than it has ever been. There are apps for your smart phone that allow you to synchronize shopping lists between family members. You can set alarm reminders for preparing food ahead of time so you are ready to cook dinner at the same time every night. There are websites galore with health tips, recipes, downloadable meal plans and shopping lists, as well as video exercise programs. There are even YouTube videos that show you everything from how to set up your kitchen to walking you step by step through meal preparation. It has never been easier to learn about how to create a healthier, happier life and then planning and incorporating that plan into your weekly routine.

It’s Not Entirely Your Fault

In the last 40 years, the world has become increasingly more industrialized, and stress is at an all-time high. Our society looks nothing like it did just a generation ago. Over the last two decades, the number of unhealthy, diseased, overweight, and obese North Americans has skyrocketed. People have more chronic health issues than ever before, and are on more medications than ever before. This isn’t because you have bad genes or are just getting older. This isn’t an epidemic that has happened because of a change in climate or because our generation is lazier than any before. If I were going to identify one factor, it wouldn’t be that we watch more TV, play more video games, or surf the Internet more than we ever have before. The real issue is that our bodies are stressed. We have more stress than we have ever had in recorded human history. When we refer to stress at this point, I mean that stress is anything that puts an undue burden on the body. Some stress is good, but chronic stress with no relief is devastating to your health.

One of the many reasons that we are stressed is that our food supply has changed so dramatically. We put certain things into our bodies that should never have been called food. Just because something gives energy (calories) doesn’t mean that it is food. If man created it, or it is filled with preservatives or sits on the shelf forever, it has more than likely been altered in harmful ways. Look at margarine; it’s not a real food. It is a combination of artificial chemicals that give a certain taste. We put it in our mouths, but it is not a naturally occurring substance. Now we can taste strawberries in a syrup that has no strawberries in it. It is just a fabricated chemical designed to taste like a strawberry. Even at times when we think we are making a healthy food choice like vegetables, we learn that the process of industrial farming has stripped those foods of value and they now create more harm than good. America’s topsoil is depleted, and the very DNA of food has been altered for reasons of economic efficiency and convenience. These factors of modern life all put complicated chemical stress on our bodies.

In order for topsoil to stay fertile, it must be cared for with good conservation practices. Unfortunately that is not happening today. In order for plants to thrive, the soil in which they are grown must contain vast amounts of naturally occurring potassium, nitrogen, and phosphorous, as well as hundreds of trace minerals. Soil conservation is a set of strategies that prevent erosion or chemical alteration from overuse, acidification, salinization, or contamination. Strategies like crop rotation and planting cover crops and windbreaks are necessary steps to protect our topsoil and help it to retain its integrity. The current use of glycophosphate (also known as “Roundup”) in standard farming practices has poisoned our food supply. Even those who choose fruits and vegetables over junk food find their bodies assaulted by toxins that cause chronic stress, genetic mutations, and cell death. The company Monsanto, with their push for acceptance of these chemicals and acceptance of genetically modified foods, will someday be responsible for more human deaths than any totalitarian dictator in history!

The standard American diet today is higher in sugars, bad fats, bad carbohydrates, sodium, and other nutritionally bankrupt and downright harmful ingredients than ever before. We are paying the price for not getting enough of the right things in our food and getting too much of the wrong things. We are eating more than ever before, while our bodies think they are starving. Simply put, our food supply lacks the proper nutrition. As a result, we are constantly storing fat because our bodies are tricked into thinking that because nutrients are scarce, food must be scarce. We are coming to a time when being overweight is going to be a greater world issue than poverty and hunger. We are very close to seeing more people on earth dying from the associated diseases and conditions of obesity than from being underweight or starving.

The processed foods that line grocery store shelves today have been carefully engineered to be as addictive as cigarettes or drugs. This is especially true of those that have added sugar, salt, fats, carbohydrates, or some diabolical combination of the four. Many of these processed foods—even ones that advertise themselves as “healthy,” “whole,” “gluten-free,” and “organic”—don’t have nearly the nutritional value that foods grown or raised in the right environment do. We need to recognize that much of what we eat out of habit is not because we lack willpower or self-control, but because those foods have been deliberately designed to be addictive. At the same time, they have so little nutrition in them that they leave us hungrier than we were before we ate them. Then, to feel satisfied we binge—reaching for foods that please the palate, but stress our internal systems because they have so little of what our bodies really need.

Wake-Up Call

Obesity-related conditions like heart disease, stroke, type 2 diabetes, and certain types of cancer are some of the leading causes of preventable death in our country today.

Despite such complications, the answer is relatively simple: As individual families and as a culture, we need to get back to eating real foods. When you eat real foods in the right combinations, something amazing happens—you feel full much sooner, and your appetite remains satisfied much longer. Your body is getting the fiber and nutrients that it needs. Your hunger hormones balance, and your appetite switches off. If your systems have been out of whack for a long time, this balance will take time to correct.

I want to warn you up front that you will be in for a bit of a fight, especially in the first few days. Food addiction is a real thing. When you eat gluten (wheat protein), casein (milk protein), and sugar, your brain is flooded with chemicals that make you feel calm and content. As you begin to remove those substances from your diet, you may feel some anxiety or other physical effects. Hang in there. With each passing day, your body will adjust, and your cravings will diminish. You will find that it takes about seven to ten days to do most of the work of recalibrating your appetite. This will vary depending on what your eating habits were like before beginning.

At the same time, when you begin to take small steps toward a happier and healthier life, you will be surprised at how much your eating habits and appetites will have improved. You’ll know something is different when you look forward to a hardy spinach salad with avocado, roasted pine nuts, wild-caught salmon, and a little feta cheese rather than a super-sized burger, fries, and a shake! And, oh boy, when that starts to happen, things start to get exciting!