Many people answer this question, “good health is when I’m feeling well”. This is the most common answer, but in reality it has very little to do with having good health. There is a greater dimension to health than just feeling well.
What is health? There is so much more to being healthy than how you feel! The World Health Organization defines health as “a state of optimal physical, mental, and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease of infirmity”. Webster’s Dictionary defines health as “a state of wholeness in which all organs are functioning 100%, 100% of the time”. Health is not just how you feel; it is how you are functioning. Thousands of Americans die of heart attacks each and every year, and the heart attack is the first sign of disease. You can’t wait until symptoms show up before you decide to act.
Symptoms are a poor barometer of health and usually show up late in the disease process. Would you rather choose a lifestyle of wellness so your body functions at an optimal level or live the typical American lifestyle and unknowingly allow various diseases progress to a level of crisis before you seek action?
Where does health come from? Heath comes from within.
Your body has the inborn ability to heal itself naturally. You were born to be healthy. The catch is, in order for your body to be able to heal itself it must be free from interference in the nervous system. The nervous system controls the function of every cell, tissue, organ, and system in your body. The number one cause of interference to the nerve system in science today is the vertebral subluxation.
Creating wellness is the process of attaining health, happiness, and vitality. Allowing you to live your life to its fullest potential! My wish to you is to live your life to its fullest and improve the quality of your life by creating wellness naturally.
Which can you change: health history or health future?
When you enter our office we ask you to complete a health history form. The fact is that the health decisions you made last year, or five years ago contributed to your health or lack of it today. We can’t go back and change your decisions of years gone by.
Honestly ask yourself, are you healthy today as you were five years ago? Will you be healthier five years from now that your are today? Creating health is not an event, it is a process. The lifestyle changes you make today will contribute to your health in the future. Even though we can’t change the health decisions you made five years ago, with your commitment we can assist you in being healthier years from now. The continual process of lifestyle behavior change that leads to optimal health is known as wellness. it is possible for you to create better health consistently year after year; it is your choice!
How Important Is Your Health To You?
When asked, most people respond that their health is very important to them. When pressed for a number, the answer is almost always a 7 or higher. How about you? How would you rate the importance you have placed on your health up until now?
Now remember, most people come to our office for the first time with a health problem or concern that is, unfortunately, chronic. This means that their health has had to have been deteriorating for a while before consulting us. Well, here are the attributes of the different levels of health priority:
- Addicted: continually lost for and adds self-destructive choices
- Binges: makes occasional destructive lifestyle decisions and is in denial
- Unconscious: doesn’t know a healthy choice from an unhealthy one
- Tolerating: “maybe it will go away…”
- Seeks treatment only when there is a problem
- Open to prevention of future health problems
- Makes effort to maintain a healthy lifestyle
- Consciously works at being healthy and makes healthy choices
- Occasionally looking for an adding constructive healthy lifestyle changes
- Continuously looking for and adding constructive healthy lifestyle changes
It’s easy to see that for a health problem to becomes chronic, the importance placed on personal health could not have been higher than a 4 prior to consulting us. Starting care requires bringing your priority level to at least a 5. Unfortunately, what causes most people to raise the priority on their health is a serious health problem that doesn’t go away with their own approaches to correct the condition.
It should also be obvious that in order for ones health to actually improve, the priority placed upon it must also be higher. So, the question for today is, “if I started living like a 7 instead of a 4 and the problems caused by me living like a 4 were not permanent… are they likely to go away?”. The answer… of course! If you raise the level of priority that you place on your health, as long as the health problems associated with having lived at the lower priority level are not permanent, they should improve. If you continue to live at that higher level, even after the symptoms associated with the former health condition go away, you are likely to prevent the prior health problem from returning.
If you made the higher level of priority your lifestyle, you could expect that your health would improve to that of the higher priority and you would be able to easily maintain that higher level of health. If your goal was to have your health improve over your lifetime, you would have to continue to raise the priority you place on your health and adopt that healthier lifestyle.
The question of the day then is, “on a scale of 1 to 10, how important is your family’s health?”. The answer is always a 10. As a 10, you and your family would be continuously looking for and adding constructive healthy lifestyle changes, which minimally, would include making sure your family has their nervous system checked to ensure their best possible health!
She’s a Mom, has Doctorate in Chiropractic and loves helping people move from pain back to a healthy and active lifestyle.