There’s something you should know.  The health you’ve lost, the health you’ve been looking for, is still there.  You just have to reach out and get it.  Just about anyone has the potential to live a long healthy life as long as they invest a little bit of time in themselves and do the work required to stay healthy.  But therein lies the conundrum.  Are you willing to work for it?  Are you willing to do what’s necessary to recover your health?  Are you even interested?  Or is it too much of a bother?

I once heard the great speaker Les Brown say, “The hardest part is getting the person to be an active participant in their own recovery.”  It’s so true and one of the most succinct observations about the state of America’s health, especially nowadays. People want health handed to them.  They want the benefits of good health, the energy, sleep, strength, and ability to enjoy life, but don’t want to do the work to get it.  So, they suffer through life with symptoms, making excuses for their bad health and habits, all the while passing up opportunity after opportunity to improve their lives and enjoy life.  Instead, they rely on pills to take the pain away, give them the energy they’ve lost, and even keep them alive.  I’ve even had patients in my office outright refuse to exercise, even when they know how much better they’ll feel.  So, I guess they prefer to suffer through the pain and disease potential, unwilling to make the simple changes required to get their health back and keep it.

Nothing in life is easy.  If you want a big house, you have to work for it.  If you want a happy marriage, it takes commitment.  If you want to live the dream, you have to invest in yourself.  So, why should health be any different?  I’m not sure why, but many people seem to have a separate set of rules for their well-being, a complete contradiction leading to their own destruction.

One of the things experience teaches is that anything worth having requires hard work.  Well, health is probably your greatest asset.  Your health is your wealth, as they say.  After all, if you had to put a dollar amount on the human body, if you actually had to pay to buy a new one, how much would it cost?  Millions?  Maybe more?  The problem is, you only get a single shot at this life and even a billionaire can’t buy new one.  Just ask Steve Jobs.

Sadly, we’re sold the lie during our lives that illness is inevitable and we’ve swallowed it, hook, line, and sinker.   We’ve been told that sickness is just an inevitable form of aging and there’s nothing you can do, that disease is just part of life.  “It’s just normal for your age,” is what they say.  Well, sickness is never normal.  Isn’t that the definition of disease, anyways?

Look at high blood pressure for example.  You can go 40 or more years without blood pressure issues then Boom! – hypertension.  So, you make the excuses that, “It runs in my family.  It’s genetic.”  The problem is, your genes are the same at 39 as they are at 40, so how do genetics explain that?  Is there a specific gene that codes for hypertension at 40?  Is it magic?  The answer is no.  You did this to yourself.

I encourage you to start taking responsibility for your health, before it’s too late.  Stop expecting it to come easily.  Stop waiting for some magic pill to improve your health or some chemical to ease your burdens.  Stop waiting for health to be handed to you on a gilded platter.  Stop waiting for external solution to an internal problem.  Worse, stop just waiting for the “inevitable.”  Get off your butt. Make the time.  Change your lifestyle. Do the work and collect your reward.  A small investment of effort now is much less costly than a lifetime of regret.

Remember, your health potential is still out there.  You just have to reach out and grab it.  I’ll say again, YOU have to reach out and grab it.  Being healthy isn’t a matter of luck or fate.  It’s a choice.  But you have to decide to become an active participant in your health.  You have to choose to be healthy, invest in yourself, and do the work.  It won’t be easy, but it will be worth it.

Be well.