Chapter I Total Health
I can’t figure out America. So many people in this country don’t respect and appreciate the most precious gift they have—their life! It’s too bad we all didn’t come with an instruction manual—maybe then we wouldn’t be in this big mess. Most of us put a lot of effort into excelling in the workplace and advancing in our chosen careers. Yet we hardly put any effort into taking care of our bodies. How can we, as a country, be so foolish? Most people are ignorant of the many bad habits and the lack of good habits that put their health and their lives in serious danger. It seems that the only thing people are concerned about is making a buck. A lot of them tend to make it at the expense of others or their own expense! It is good to be successful and to earn a good living, but not at the cost of your health. People tend to forget they must be around to enjoy their success. You can’t enjoy anything in this world when you’re six feet under. I’m sure we’ve all heard or read about the guy in his mid-forties, married with three kids, a happy family life and a great job, who appeared to be in good health and yet suddenly keeled over and died on the spot of a massive heart attack. This is typical of someone who paid the highest price for lifelong bad eating habits, the inability to deal with stress, and a sedentary lifestyle. Too many people die before their time. Many believe that heart problems develop after age thirty-five years. Nothing could be further
from the truth! Heart disease develops gradually and usually starts at an early age. It is the nation’s leading cause of death for both men and women. You don’t know what you’ve got until it’s gone. So many of us take our health for granted. People can’t abuse their bodies without eventually paying a price in some way. We usually don’t value our health until we lose it. In some cases, such as cancer or heart problems, it’s too late to turn your health around. You’ve got only one life. How can we be so intelligent about things like technology but so ignorant in terms of our own mortality? You’ve got two choices—ignoring your health and becoming a statistic or virtually eliminating the probability of heart disease and cutting the odds of getting cancer in half so you can live a long healthy life. Thousands of people are slowly killing themselves in America each year because they lack knowledge and motivation. Most of your life centers around the relationships you have with your loved ones, family, friends, and associates. If you plan on being around to enjoy these relationships, you need a good relationship with yourself, your mind, heart and body.
“Happiness depends on ourselves.” ... Aristotle
When you get down to basics, you realize that life is about happiness. Is there one person you know who doesn’t want to be happy? The most important thing in my life besides my children is my health—after that, a close second is happiness.
Guess what? Money can’t buy either. The desire to be happy is a common denominator in all of us. Your health and happiness are tied together. It’s hard to be happy, even if a lot of good things are happening to you, if you are sick most of the time, have a chronic ailment, have heart problems, are overweight, have diabetes, can never get a good night’s sleep, have no energy or vitality, or suffer from low self-confidence, lack self-esteem, or have a negative self image.
“Time waits for no one, and he won’t wait for me.” ... Mick Jagger (Rolling Stones)
You only go around once in this lifetime, people. You get only one shot. There are no second chances. You can’t go back in time, at least not yet. Do you want to look back at your life and say, “I should have,” or “I wish I would have,” or “Why didn’t I?” It’s a bitter life regretting the things you wanted to do or dreamed about doing, but never did. Wouldn’t it be better to look back at your life with no regrets and say, “I’m so glad that I” or “It’s a good thing that I” or “I gave it my best shot.” You do have a second chance to turn your health around. It’s not too late, but you’ve got to start now. Don’t let your life pass you by. You owe it to yourself and to your loved ones. The most important thing I’ve discovered is that people can change just about anything in their lives if they want to—if they really want to that is. I am going to show you how! In order to change something, you have to do something. Wishing and hoping isn’t going to bring about results. On the other hand, taking action will.
The human body has an amazing ability to heal itself from abuses of the past. It’s never too early or too late to begin making changes that can prolong and improve your life. The minute you start living healthy, your body instantly responds.
What is Total Health?
This book might be the most important one you’ll ever read. Why? Because it is about total health and how achieving it can enable you to enjoy an optimum quality of life. To live life to its fullest, you must strive toward total health. Pretend you’re in school. Your assignment is to read this book and to learn it because you will be tested on it. I’m not kidding. You’ll be tested on it—the test is your life. I want you all to pass with flying colors. Unlike most of the irrelevant courses we took in school and never used afterwards like trigonometry, you can’t study for this one, pass the test, and then forget about it. Consider this a manual for life that will be updated periodically by science but you’ve got to want this to change your life. This is where our journey begins. Total health starts, first and foremost, with a healthy mind—a mind that exercises on a daily basis, and uses these exercises to help you achieve your body’s optimum health. Total health is about synergy of mind and body. Synergy is when the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. You can’t separate the two. You think, and then you do. Total health is when every part of your body works together optimally—when the mind and the body are one and through your lifestyle and mindset, you provide your body with everything it needs to live as much of a fulfilling, stress-free, disease-free, happy, and long life as possible.
It’s not just about being fit. Being physically fit, which is having the ability to perform athletic activities, is just one component of total health. You can look good and be physically fit but still be in bad health. It’s not just about how much you weigh. Body weight, which we seem to obsess over, is another one of the components. Losing weight if you are heavy, or gaining weight if you are thin, does not necessarily mean that you are becoming healthy. It’s the way you do it that determines your health. Being healthy is a total concept. You can be overweight, underweight, or of average weight and still die from cancer, a heart attack, diabetes, or other health problems.
What is Your Level of Health?
If you are reading this, it is my guess that you fall into three categories:
A) You have never had being healthy as a priority. You tend not to think about its consequences at all. An event may have occurred in your life that made you sit up and take notice of your health and your mortality.
B) You are trying to get healthy, but due to the vast amount of myths, fads, and misinformation about diets, exercise and supplementation, you don’t know which way to turn. C) You think you are healthy or partially healthy and you want to learn more about the missing components of your program to achieve total health. The “A” people probably have no preconceived ideas about being healthy and what it takes. This is good in a sense, because you are starting with a “blank slate.” I will show
you what to do, how to do it, when to do it, and why you must do it. It should be a great education, and a great start. You “B” people can find out where you have been going wrong in your attempts, and make adjustments and corrections. “C” people can find out about a few new ideas, techniques and tips that you never knew, and some aspects of optimum health you never thought about in your efforts to better yourself. You may even have degrees in one or more of the fields in this book but will still gain new knowledge. Nobody knows it all. Let me ask some questions: * Are you unhappy about the way you look and the way you feel? * Do you look better, the same, or worse than you did ten years ago? * Do you enjoy good, restful sleep most of the time? * Do you find yourself lacking energy a lot of the time? * Do you feel your age? * Are you sick more than once or twice a year? * Do you wonder why all your attempts at dieting have failed? * Have you started an exercise program and stopped within a few months or are you on an exercise program and not seeing any results? * Do you experience feelings of frustration and depression? * Are you aware that some of your daily habits may be leading to long-term, degenerative diseases? * Do you have any short-term and long-term goals in your business and personal life? * Are you happy with your life the way it is right now or do you wish that you could change certain things about it?
If you are looking for positive answers to all of the above questions, then read on!
How Can You Get There?
I’m going to show you all the various components involved in attaining total health, and how you can achieve it as quickly and safely as possible. I’ll cut through the maze of misinformation and myths about dieting, exercise, strength training, and supplementation and teach you how to make your mind work for you, how to make correct food choices, how to get the most out of your exercise program—the human body wasn’t made to be sedentary—and the resources you can use to help counter the negative effects of your environment in this new century. I’ll touch on aspects of health that many health gurus leave out of their programs, many of which are sound but focus only on one or a few of the parts. When you learn to combine all of these components into one program, you’ll accelerate your timetable to achieve total health, and it will stay with you for life. Why do many people start a health program and fail? They fail because they do not train the most powerful muscle in their body—their mind. It’s their mind that fails, not their body. That is why Anthony Robbins, probably the most successful motivational speaker in the world, is so successful. He focuses on the mind. It all begins there. He believes that 80 % of success in life is psychology—the mind—and 20 % is mechanics— the body. I agree with him. Developing the mind-body connection is essential in achieving success in your total health program and in anything else in your life. We all have a mind-body connection, but many of us have no control over it and, subconsciously or unknowingly, use it in mostly negative ways.
What we actually do and what we can do are two different things. What we actually do is usually far less than what we can do. For reasons I’ll show you, we choose not to live up to our potential. The only difference between people who are very good at what they do, and you, is that they have mastered the mind-body connection. They’ve made a conscious decision, a commitment, and a plan to achieve it. They have clear, well-defined goals. If you make no decisions and have no goals, then you will wander aimlessly through life and you’ll take whatever life throws at you. After tapping into your mind-body connection and making a commitment toward total health, you still must have the knowledge to make this positive change in your life.
“Knowledge is power!” … Sir Francis Bacon
You don’t need the exercise machine you saw in an infomercial or a magic pill. You need the knowledge this book will provide and it is based on science, not fads. It is honest, to the point, and is written in layman’s terms. It gives you the knowledge, the motivation, and the inspiration you need to become healthy in mind and body and to have the quality of life you deserve. This is a four-sided program focusing first on the mind-body connection (self help); next, on the science of nutrition and diet; then on exercise (aerobic and anaerobic); and finally on supplementation (vitamins and minerals). It is information most doctors, dietitians and government agencies have been preaching for years but focusing on just
certain parts of it. The key is tying it all together in one total program, one of common sense that will become a way of life and change it mentally and physically. It is not a two-week, twenty-one-day, or a two-month program. If you don’t make it a lifestyle, then about 95 % of you will put back the lost weight and lose any health benefits gained within a few years or less. Here is something else you may not want to hear. Once you stop healthy eating and exercise habits, you lose all the positive results that you received from practicing them. The program works only as long as you continue to use it. The great part about good health, and one of the main misconceptions, is that it doesn’t take twenty to thirty hours a week to achieve. Eating an apple isn’t any more time consuming than eating a piece of cheesecake. It’s just making a different choice. You don’t think of it in terms of hours per week. It is just a way of life. Being consistent develops into a daily routine that you don’t have to think about. Once on autopilot, you will become fitter and healthier each week, each month, and each year. It becomes enjoyable, especially when you see positive results in the mirror. Your diet won’t be counting calories or keeping records of what you eat. You won’t be dieting because, as most informed people know by now, dieting doesn’t work. It will be more what to eat, what not to eat, when to eat, and how much to eat --- the science of nutrition. It leaves a wide variety of foods to choose from.
What Are Its Benefits?
This program will help teens develop good nutritional habits and mental focus that will shape their lives, and middle-aged men and women gain or lose the weight they need,
improve their strength, muscularity, and energy, and actually reverse the aging process. It’ll help women fight the negative effects of menopause, and both men and women to overcome their bodies’ natural desire to shed lean body mass starting in their thirties. It can also help the elderly increase bone density and build stronger bones, fight lower back pain, restore strength, vitality and mobility, and take years off their lives. Following this program will lessen the risk of a host of ills, such as diabetes, osteoporosis, some types of cancer, and cardiovascular problems. It will also lower bad cholesterol, raise good cholesterol, and boost your metabolism. Along with these physical benefits, an improvement in self-image, self-esteem, and confidence will accrue. This book takes all of my years of effort and puts them into a workable program that anyone, young or old, male or female, underweight or overweight, can adapt in order to make significant changes in their lives.