The Root of Health

Any guesses?  Maca?  Ginger?

Nope!

The roots of a tree are the foundation for everything the tree is, yet are the least visible.  Everything above ground, the trunk, branches, leaves, are all dependent on a strong attachment to the earth and a source of water.  The roots are critical.
  
So what is the root of personal health?  If you said "diet and exercise" you're way ahead of things.  Those are branches, they're not even the trunk.

The root of health is a commitment to be personally responsible for your health.  It's that simple.  Without that commitment, without that decision to be personally at cause for your health as opposed to a hapless passenger in your own body, you have nothing to drive everything else in regards to your health.

Most of you reading this have already made that commitment, perhaps without doing so explicitly.  But that commitment drives you to make choices and take actions that naturally flow from taking personal responsibility for your health.

It's also why people who haven't made that commitment become quite perplexing to those who have.  The friend who doesn't care about what they eat makes no sense to us.  The co-worker who scoffs when you mention you don't eat somethng because it has hydrogenated soybean oil is perplexing to us because from a position of personal commitment that attitude make no sense.

I spoke with a friend recently who told me his doctor had put him on a statin.  First, if you're responsible for your health how can a doctor "put you" on anything?  Without going down that path, I instead asked him if he had researched statins to see if that was really the best thing for him.  His response was incredible:  "Dude, I just do whatever my doctor tells me."

I challenged him briefly by asking if he would do it if his doctor told him he needed to eat rat poison.  Of course he wouldn't because he knows that's bad for him.  He just happens to have that knowledge, yet he won't pursue new and additional knowledge to make an informed choice in regards to his doctor's recommendations.  The reason is simple:  He's not personally responsible for his health.  Heck, he just does whatever his doctor tells him. 

Easy. 

Stupid, but easy.

Some people will go a lifetime without ever making that decision.  Others either made it at an early age or slowly grew into it as they matured.  Even fewer will have a life altering event, such as a heart attack, that will cause them to become the captain of their ship as opposed to a passenger.

And in that light it's easy to see why people will eat what they eat while we wouldn't touch it:  It's not their problem.  Maybe it's just in my nature to want to be in control.

When I fly my own airplane, I perform a through preflight.  I check every control surface, make sure all the bolts and screws I can see are tight.  I check the fuel quantity and drain a bit to check for water.  When I am a passenger on a commercial flight I can't exercise that responsibility.  Instead I have to trust the pilots in command of that airplane, which is actually very difficult for me to do.  Commercial flights annoy me because I'm not controlling the factors that may spell doom, I'm just along for the ride with my fingers crossed.  I can't imagine taking the same attitude with my body.

So, diet and exercise are way down the list.  The root of it all is a commitment to being personally responsible for your health.  Next time I'll talk about the steps that come after that.  It's all a pretty natural progression and eventually I'll get to the branches of diet and exercise but there are a few more pieces first.