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Building and
maintaining your health, wellbeing and vitality is a skill
and it requires knowledge and action.
Like any practice in life, the results you get and
health you have, depend on how well you learn and
apply skills.
Most people who are
healthy and vital have trained themselves to focus on
wellness. Typically,
they have learned to listen to their bodies.
Sooner or later they get to a point where they
instinctively understand what their bodies need and how hard
they can push themselves.
Fundamentally your body is an
immensely powerful, self regulating, wellness system.
It will stay well and heal itself most of the
time, if you give it a reasonable chance.
However, we often take our bodies for granted and end
up treating them far worse than we would our cars, fridges
or lawnmowers!
We often abuse our bodies for long periods with the wrong
foods, too much food, smoking, stress, alcohol, drugs and no
exercise. Almost
everybody knows at least a few practices for wellness, but
we often ignore them.
Instead, we run our bodies down,
ignore the signals, or if we do notice the symptoms of our
neglect, we don’t do anything about them.
We may spend years and years living a damaging lifestyle.
We may even have a lifestyle that we think is good,
but we eat predominantly processed foods, or food rich in
sugar or heavy in fat.
We don’t think much about this apart from noticing
“we can’t do what we used to”.
The result of this behaviour is that we encounter a steady
decline in our physical capabilities and quality of life.
Then when we get sick or suffer mechanical failures
in our bodies we say that we are ‘surprised’ or that is
‘unlucky’.
Of course, it’s neither a surprise
nor bad luck, it’s just the inevitable outcome of
neglecting our health. Generally, the people who let this
happen are less likely to be aware of wellness practices,
proper nutrition and the mind-body relationship, or perhaps
just ‘too busy doing life’ to notice.
“Your
job is t
o stay healthy so that you
have the absolute minimum of sickness that needs to be
cured.”
So then the next
likely step is that we go to the doctor to get treated and
probably address our ‘sickness’ with drugs, rather than
address the root causes in our lifestyle.
These drugs can mask or lead us to ignore the real
causes of our ill-health, plus the side effects of the drugs
can generate further problems.
Educate yourself
about your own health and wellbeing. When you visit your
health practitioner, ask exactly what the benefits and risks
are of varying treatments.
Don’t take it for granted that the newest high tech
treatment, or drug is necessarily the best for you.
Investigate what low impact treatments are available.
"Take
personal responsibility for your own health, because the
effort and cost needed to keep yourself well is a fraction
of the effort and cost to get better once you are sick."
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