Is It Easy to Be Healthy?

Health IS Simple

“Health is simple, it’s just not easy”

Patients are reminded daily by the signs hanging in our office  that although it’s not easy, health truly is simple. Let’s take a closer look at this short, but stimulating statement.

Using a tree as an analogy, ask yourself, “What does it take to not only keep a tree alive, but to more importantly, allow it to thrive”?

Simple question, right? Everyone knows that a tree needs healthy soil, adequate sunlight, clean water and plenty of carbon dioxide.  It’s a simple recipe for a healthy tree.

Although different elements are required for our health as humans, the complexity of the recipe, or better yet, the lack thereof, remains the same. Our health depends on FIVE things:

1. Proper Exercise
2. Proper Nutrition
3. Proper Rest/Recovery
4. Positive Mental Attitude
5. Proper NERVE SUPPLY

When you add these five facets together the summation or end result is inevitably HEALTH!!

The “it’s just not easy” portion stems from the unnatural lifestyles that an overwhelming majority of us are currently living on a day-to-day basis.  Allow me to explain.

Lets briefly refer back to that analogy of the tree. If we were to alter that tree’s environment and place it in a desert terrain, the SIMPLE requirements for the tree’s health do not change, however, its ability to express and experience health has been challenged in its new unnatural environment (poor soil, too much sun, not enough water, etc.)

The same is true for us as humans. Our simple requirements for health have not changed in the 50,000 years we have existed as a species. What has changed and made experiencing health more difficult is our environment. We no longer live a natural lifestyle that is congruent with our original design. Although these habits are common, it is not natural to sit eight hours a day, drink soda by the gallons, exercise only during the month of January, and turn on the television to be blasted with negative news reports.

When we get rid of the garbage and revert back to the natural lifestyle we were designed to live, the statement, “Health is simple, it’s just not easy,”  merely becomes, “Health is simple.”