This article was first published for www.foodpharmacy.se in January 2020.
When I started learning about holistic health and how our lifestyle choices affect it I, myself, was in a situation where I could no longer turn away from how everything is interconnected. As I learned more about what affects our health and how much we can do ourselves I got more and more interested in prevention. My mission is to wake people up long before the diagnosis, that more people will learn about and learn to love a lifestyle that prevents disease.
Early on in my own healing journey I found the inspiring Kris Carr. She’s lived with her incurable cancer diagnosis for 16 years and her doctors first recommended multiple organ transplants and gave her a maximum of 10 years to live. She found lifestyle medicine and have been a strong voice of prevention in the US ever since.
“Change your plate. Change your fate.”
– Kris Carr
In his book The Biology of Belief, Bruce Lipton claims that only 5% of us are born with gene mutations that will absolutely make us sick. In the rest of us 95% disease is in various degrees lifestyle related. Whether epigenetics will confirm Bruce’s claim or not is yet to be seen but we do know that our lifestyle affects us a lot. We don’t get sick by coincidence.
“Our genes load the gun. Our lifestyle pulls the trigger.”
– Mehmet Oz
This doesn’t give us a permission slip to blame ourselves for being sick. A lot of the factors that make us sick are still largely out of our control; pollution, toxins in our food, early childhood, life crisis and so on. It’s not your fault if you are sick, but it is your responsibility and you can affect what happens from now on.
I’m healthy today but still make active choices every day to prevent disease in my future. The healthy choices I make today are both because it gives me a great life now and because I want to have a nice round on the golf court at 97 picking up my own golf balls. And I know how much my choices today will affect whether or not I’ll get to experience that or not.
Sure, life happens, and we don’t know what tomorrow will bring, there’s lots of things out of our control, but there’s also so much we can affect and that’s where I choose to put my focus and energy.
Regardless of if you’re sick today or not, choose yourself and your health. Self-care is not a luxury, it’s something we should take very seriously. But it doesn’t have to be boring. I’ve found so much pleasure and joy in the small healthy choices every day and look at it as an enormous privilege to be able to prioritize my health. And I believe most of us reading this can, because what could be more important?
The ones who think they don’t have time to take of their health will sooner or later have to make time for disease.
Prioritizing health comes with a price but it’s so worth it. I definitely spend most of my money on healthy foods. I leave early because I prioritize sleep. I might say no to that event to make time for working out. I sometimes need to call ahead to the restaurant and bring my own food to the party. I may disappoint people to make room for recuperation. I invest a lot of time and resources into always learning more about health, meet functional medicine practioners, release tension, see a coach or go to therapy.
There’s nothing more important in your life than you and your health. You only have this one body to live in during this lifetime. And there’s nothing selfish about it, it’s responsible. Because what automatically happens as you prioritize yourself first is that you have so much more to offer to others, to be a cool human being and to inspire others to also take responsibility for their lives.
What choices can you make today for your health?